Dronrijp Reprisals

In the evening of 9 April 1945, only a few days before the town's liberation by the Canadians, the local department of the national resistance organisation Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten (BS) received the order to start "sabotaging road, rail and water" to prevent German troops from escaping to Germany.

BS member Broer Dijkstra and his sabotage group decided to prepare a disruption of the Leeuwarden-Franeker train line.

A secret BS group in Leeuwarden intercepted the order and immediately positioned men near the sabotaged rail line, as they expected the prisoners to arrive by train.

One of the men, Gerard de Jong from Leeuwarden, survived the execution by pretending to be dead until the Germans had disappeared.

De Jong’s luck was helped by the specific instruction from the Sicherheitsdienst for its men not to remove the bodies from the scene.