The shooting on Dam Square

On Monday 7 May 1945 Dam Square – the central square of Amsterdam, in front of the Royal Palace – filled with thousands of people. The German forces in the Netherlands had surrendered two days earlier, the newspapers were announcing that the Canadians would enter the city at any moment, and the inhabitants, worn down by the Hunger Winter, had come out into the streets with flags and orange ribbons. A barrel organ was playing and people were dancing. At around 3 p.m. German sailors opened fire on the crowd with machine guns from the windows, balcony and roof of the Groote Club building on the corner of the square and Kalverstraat. The shooting went on for about two hours. According to the newspapers of the time between 19 and 40 people were killed; according to findings made in 2013–2017, at least 32. Between 100 and 120 were wounded.

Some war chronologies list the event under 6 May. In fact the shots on Dam Square were fired on 7 May 1945, the day before the Canadians entered Amsterdam. Accounts agree that the shooting was done by Kriegsmarine sailors quartered in the Groote Club. The number of victims remains disputed: for decades the figure given was 22 dead and some 120 wounded, but in the press of May 1945 the numbers ranged from 19 to 40 dead, and only research by a foundation commemorating the victims made it possible to establish 32 names.

A country between surrender and liberation

The Netherlands had been occupied since May 1940. It was ruled by Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart, while Queen Wilhelmina and the government were in London. After the Allied defeat at Arnhem in the autumn of 1944 the front came to a halt on the great rivers, and the western, most densely populated part of the country – with Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht – remained in German hands until the end of the war. After the railway strike, called at the government-in-exile’s request in September 1944, the Germans stopped food supplies. There followed the Hunger Winter, which cost some 20,000 lives. Only at the end of April 1945, after talks with Seyss-Inquart, were the Allies able to drop food over the western Netherlands in Operations Manna and Chowhound.

On 4 May 1945, on the heath near Lüneburg, envoys of Admiral Karl Dönitz signed before Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery the surrender of the German forces in north-west Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, effective from the morning of 5 May. The next day, 5 May, at Wageningen, the commander of the German forces in the Netherlands, General Johannes Blaskowitz, received the surrender terms from the Canadian General Charles Foulkes in the presence of Prince Bernhard. The war in the Netherlands was formally over, but more than 100,000 armed Germans were still in the west of the country, and the troops of the First Canadian Army needed several days to reach every town and disarm the garrisons.

In this interim period a key role was played by the Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten (BS, Forces of the Interior) – an armed organisation formed in the autumn of 1944 under the authority of Prince Bernhard, which brought together the existing resistance groups. Its members, wearing armbands, took over public buildings and kept order. The Allies, however, instructed them not to disarm the Germans and not to appear in the streets with weapons – disarmament was to be the business of the Allied forces alone. In practice two armed camps lived side by side in Amsterdam, and the tension grew by the hour.

The afternoon of 7 May

On 6 May the Amsterdam newspapers reported that Allied troops would enter the city the next day. On the morning of 7 May crowds began to gather on Dam Square. At around noon several British armoured cars from the reconnaissance regiment of the 49th Infantry Division, operating as part of I Canadian Corps, appeared from the direction of the Rokin. Near the square they passed a German column and then – judging the situation too uncertain – withdrew from the city. Meanwhile the BS occupied the Royal Palace, the main post office and other important buildings.

The Groote Club building – a gentlemen’s club on the corner of Dam Square and Kalverstraat, next to the palace – was occupied by German sailors. From its windows and roof they watched the celebrating crowd. What exactly triggered the shooting has never been established. According to the most frequently repeated version, BS members detained two German soldiers in nearby Paleisstraat; one of them refused to hand over his weapon and fired (according to another account, it was he who was shot). After these shots the Germans in the Groote Club opened fire on the square with machine guns. Other explanations – drunkenness, a desire for revenge, fear of being lynched – appeared in accounts, but none was confirmed; in 2014 Dutch researchers dismissed the story of drunken soldiers as a myth.

Panic broke out on the square. Thousands of people ran for the Damrak, the Nieuwendijk and the Rokin; some fell to the bullets, others were trampled. Some took cover behind lamp posts, kiosks and the barrel organ ’t Snotneusje, which later became a symbol of that day. BS members returned fire from neighbouring streets, and a regular exchange of fire broke out on the square. Scouts, nurses and Red Cross orderlies ran in under fire to carry out the wounded. At the Binnengasthuis hospital some 90 people were treated, 44 of whom were admitted to the wards.

How the shooting ended is also told in different ways. According to the official version, the BS commander in Amsterdam, Major Carel Frederik Overhoff, arrived on a motorcycle with a sidecar accompanied by a German Feldgendarmerie officer, Captain Bergmann, went with him into the Groote Club and ordered a ceasefire; the motorcycle’s driver was killed right beside him. According to other accounts, the firing had stopped earlier – after the BS threatened to fire on the building with anti-tank grenade launchers, or after a telephone intervention by one of the city’s residents. By about 5 p.m. it was all over. That same afternoon there was a shoot-out by the Victoria Hotel and Amsterdam Centraal station, in which two Dutchmen and several Germans were killed.

In the evening the British of the 49th Division returned to the city centre. According to British accounts, the German commandant of the city, Lieutenant Colonel Hans Schröder, surrendered to the commander of the detachment in front of the Royal Palace, preparing the handover of Amsterdam to the Canadian troops. On 8 May the Canadians entered the city, and on 9 May tens of thousands of people gathered on Dam Square, where the dead had lain two days earlier, to hear a speech by the prime minister, Pieter Gerbrandy.

Victims and no reckoning

After the shooting the newspapers gave figures of 19 to 22 dead (once even 40). The figure of 22 dead and about 120 wounded became fixed for decades, although no official list of victims was ever drawn up. Only in 2013 did the foundation Stichting Memorial voor Damslachtoffers 7 mei 1945 establish from the archives the names of 31, and later 32, people who were killed on the spot or died of their wounds – the last of them in June 1945. The youngest was eight years old. The number of wounded remains unknown; the newspapers wrote of 100–120.

The sailors in the Groote Club stayed in the building until 9 May, when the Canadians detained them, and were then – like thousands of other German prisoners from the Netherlands – sent back to Germany. No investigation was ever opened and no one was tried. In 1947 Overhoff received the Military William Order for stopping the fighting, but it was taken from him in 1952 after he was convicted of embezzlement.

Memory

On 7 May 1947 a plaque commemorating the victims was unveiled on the façade of the Groote Club. For decades, however, the memory of the shooting gave way to recollections of the joy of liberation, and Dam Square itself became a place of national mourning for another reason: in 1956 the National Monument was erected there, where every year on 4 May, Remembrance Day, the king and thousands of people honour the victims of the war. Only on 7 May 2016, after a service in the Nieuwe Kerk, did the mayor, Eberhard van der Laan, unveil stones bearing the names of the 31 dead set into the square’s paving; the 32nd name was added in 2017. The stones were paid for by contributions from internet users, who in the “Lay a stone” campaign bought more than 15,000 virtual bricks.

The last victims of the occupation

The shooting on Dam Square was neither a military operation nor a planned crime, but an outburst of violence in the chaos of the first days after the surrender, when armed occupiers and an armed resistance faced each other with no authority to keep them apart. Those killed were people who had survived five years of occupation, the bombing of Rotterdam, the deportations and the Hunger Winter – and had come out onto the square in the belief that the war was already over. That is why, in Dutch memory, 7 May 1945 became a symbol of a tragic paradox: death on the day of liberation.

The event also showed how fragile order was in the period between the surrender and the Allies’ actual takeover of the country. That same day there was shooting outside the central station as well, and on the island of Texel, where a Georgian Wehrmacht battalion had mutinied in April, sporadic clashes continued until 20 May. Seyss-Inquart was arrested by the British on the same day that shots were fired on the Dam, and on 7 May at Reims the Germans signed the unconditional surrender of all their armed forces. For the Netherlands, which lost more than 200,000 citizens during the war – including more than 100,000 Jews deported and murdered – the occupation finally ended a few days later, when the last German garrisons laid down their arms.