Stationsstraat 19
Assen
On the night of 6 to 7 March 1945, an accidental attack was carried out on Hanns Albin Rauter at the hamlet of Woeste Hoeve.
On March 6, the resistance in Apeldoorn received a tip that the Wehrmacht would collect three thousand kilos of meat the next morning from a slaughterhouse in Epe. Because of the food shortage of people in hiding and evacuees, that meat would come in very handy in Apeldoorn.
A group of resistance fighters were instructed to be ahead of the Wehrmacht and to collect the meat in Epe that same night. The group had German uniforms, but the cars the resistance group had were not suitable for such a large load. They decided to hijack a Wehrmacht truck. The deserted road near Woeste Hoeve seemed the most suitable for the implementation of their plan. Quite a few German trucks drove back and forth between Apeldoorn and Arnhem.
When the group heard a heavy car approaching near Woeste Hoeve, it was thought to be a truck. However, it turned out to be an open BMW with German officers. In the firefight that ensued, the driver of the car was fatally hit, as was the officer sitting in the back. The man sitting next to the driver was still alive and dead. Later it turned out that it was Rauter, the highest German police general and head of the SS in the Netherlands. It was clear that the Germans would not let it go. After such an incident, it was common practice to retaliate in the form of the execution of members of the resistance, well-known Dutchmen and politicians. Rauter himself had initiated these reprisal measures in the Netherlands. He even set clear quotas, such as 10 lives for a German dead and 3 for a Dutch dead in German service, etc.
In June 1944, Hitler ordered that the trial of resistance members be stopped. The German SD then got free rein to do what they wanted with people who picked them up, they became the so-called Todes candidates. In mid-September, Rauter orders the members of the resistance to shoot in reprisal on public roads and to leave their bodies for a long time. Passers-by were forced to watch the executions. In this way they hoped to break the resistance. Now that Rauter himself was the victim, it became a large-scale reprisal.
SS-Brigadeführer Karl Eberhard Schöngarth took over from Rauter. He was responsible for the execution of the retaliation. Yet Rauter himself was no less responsible. He was never unconscious and Schöngarth consulted him in the hospital.
In Amsterdam, Amersfoort, Fort De Bilt and on the Waalsdorpervlakte, a total of 146 men were shot because of the “attack” on Rauter. But the largest retaliatory action took place at Woeste Hoeve. A total of 117 men were taken from prisons in Assen, Zwolle, Almelo, Colmschate, Doetinchem and Apeldoorn. The youngest was 17, the oldest 75 years old. All these men were executed on the morning of March 8, 1945 on the site where the monument now stands.
The entire group was first brought to the SD-Service Stelle in Apeldoorn. Here they were met by the greatest sadists who knew the Veluwe at that time. They were so-called “rexists”, mainly Belgians who had been transferred from Apeldoorn to Apeldoorn just before the fall. The most notorious of the group were Emiel Thonon (nicknamed the rat), Hermann Veit, Eugène Dirckx and Verhulsdonk. Oskar Gerbig had been commander here for several months. He had been transferred from Almelo, he was known as a reasonable person and often had worse in Almelo. Unfortunately, he was no match for people like Thonon and Verhulsdonk. The prisoners were handcuffed by these people and placed in 7 buses, after which they left in a column at around half past six in the morning, preceded by Gerbig on his motorcycle, on the way to Woeste Hoeve.
The buses and trucks were parked two hundred meters away from the De Woeste Hoeve inn, on a lawn near the triple junction with the road to Hoenderloo. A firing squad of 50 Germans was ready just past the inn. The execution went quickly. A new group of twenty prisoners was collected every five minutes.
The victims were placed in a long line next to each other between the road and the cycle path. The cyclists who passed by had to get off and walk past the victims.
In the afternoon, all victims were buried in a mass grave at Heidehof cemetery near Apeldoorn. After the liberation of Apeldoorn, on April 25, 1945, all 117 victims were excavated and all but 2 identified. The victims were then temporarily reburied together elsewhere on Heidehof, most of whom were transferred by their families to other cemeteries in the Netherlands in the course of 1945 or later.
Source: Henk Berends
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