Bruggertstraat 321

Long before the outbreak of the Second World War, Johan ter Morsche was active in the Twente-German border region in the reception of Jews who had fled from Germany to the Netherlands for the increasingly brutal Nazi regime. He cared deeply about the fate of these displaced people and ensured that they were given shelter in Enschede or the immediate vicinity of this factory city. He also made efforts to help the victims of the Franco regime in Spain. Fighting National Socialism and Fascism were of paramount importance to him.

Ter Morsche, who after primary education had to learn in practice to support himself as a merchant, married in 1928 the girl Margarete Marie Lucie Böttcher, born in Berlin on 7 May 1907. He had met her in the Havenstraat in Enschede when she asked him for the address of Hotel Tubantia. Margarethe had applied for a job in this hotel. Johan offered her a cup of coffee in the hotel and one thing led to another. Two children were born from this marriage. In 1930 daughter Maria Hermina and a few years later son Arnold.

In 1941, Johan and his family moved to Zinnowitz, Germany, at the urging of his in-laws. Initially, he worked with his wife in his in-laws' hotel, where the family also lived. Many foreigners stayed in this hotel. Among them engineers who had been put to work by the Germans in nearby Peenemünde. They were, under the direction of the German engineer Werner von Braun, preparing for the so-called flying bombs. This Von Braun lived in the street where the Ter Morsche family had also settled.

He thoroughly understood the regime of the country to which he left. That brought him into the underground resistance, along with Poland, other foreigners and also Germans. At a certain moment a resistance group was formed in which Johan ter Morsche, together with a Polish interpreter and the German cleric Dr. Karl Lampert, played a key role. Johan managed to get a job as a mechanic at the very secret missile base of Peenemünde. This enabled him to take home important information. The resistance group to which he belonged always met in the kitchen of Johan's home. They listened clandestinely to English radio. All important messages were translated from English into German and distributed to the population. These were all activities punishable by death.

In early 1943, a traitor who had gained the confidence of the Polish interpreter managed to penetrate. That man also found out that Ter Morsche had been able to pass on important information about the Peenemünde project to the Allied army command in England. The provocateur learned a great deal from the Polish interpreter, which he then passed on to the Sicherheitsdienst. This traitor must also have known that Lampert had the translated data transferred to a church in Stettin. The intruder's betrayal had disastrous consequences. On the night of 2 to 3 February 1943, when the whole group was together in the kitchen, there was a knock on the door. "A telegram from Holland for Ter Morsche," someone called out. When Ter Morsche opened the door, it turned out not to be a telegram at all. It was members of the Secret State Police (Gestapo) who entered the house with a drawn pistol and turned the whole house upside down. For the rest, the intruders pretended to be easy-going guys. "Your husband will be back in three days," they said to his wife. The entire resistance group was arrested together with Johan ter Morsche.

Three days after her husband's arrest, Ms. Ter Morsche is informed that she must report to the Zinnowitz town hall to complete some formalities. Unsuspectingly she responds to this. She still says to her almost thirteen-year-old daughter Maria: "I'll be right back." But mother is not coming back at all. She, like her husband, is also being held. Shortly afterwards strangers appear in the parental home. Maria and her brother Arnold are taken to a 'foster home'. The reason given for this is that they are transferred from the 'criminal environment of the parents' to a family where the educational environment is much better. An old acquaintance of the Ter Morsche family adds the children: "Your father had to quarter them." Both children are soon separated and are placed in SS families for 're-education'. Maria ends up on the island of Usedom, which lies off the Baltic Sea coast, where she is harassed, regularly abused and humiliated in every possible way. She also has to do dirty jobs. Arnold also finds himself in a similar situation. Both children are, as it were, daily hammered that they are descended from criminal parents. Nobody is allowed to play with them, so that they end up completely isolated. Maria now knows that her father is likely to be sentenced to death for espionage and that her mother has been transferred to a 'disciplinary house'.

About a year and a half after her 're-education', Maria returned to Zinnowitz. Not because her 're-education' was complete, but because she had to work. According to the regime, she had to become a nurse as a fourteen-year-old girl. In Zinnowitz she only really heard what had happened to her father. Together with the twenty-one arrested fellow members of the resistance, he had stood trial before the Volksgericht in Berlin. All who had attended the regular discussions in Ter Morsche's kitchen were sentenced to death. Johan's mother-in-law was to testify at the trial, which had been dubbed 'Der Fall Stettin'. During the session she did not recognize her son-in-law, so severely he had been tortured and bruised by his executioners. Only after he was escorted out of the courtroom did she recognize him by his gait. 'Yes indeed. It must be him, ”she let slip.

Someone who had been imprisoned with Johan ter Morsche and survived the war, said that despite the terrible torture, he had not released anything that could endanger others. Mrs. Ter Morsche was released just before the end of the war.

On January 24, 1944, the sentence against Johan ter Morsche and his fellow sufferers is executed by beheading. "His killers have tried to silence the voice of his heart. They did not succeed. His voice continues to speak to those who are still alive, ”says his daughter Maria. The street in Zinnowitz where the Ter Morsche family lived during the war is named after Johannes ter Morsche. The urn with its ashes was initially preserved in Brandenburg. For years, this urn has been in the home of his widow, who left for Enschede. Finally, the urn was placed on the field of honor in Loenen, section E no. 287.

Source: Book of Honor Loenen, Final resting place of Dutch war victims.

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