Exactly 80 years ago the island of Schiermonnikoog became the last part of the Netherlands to be liberated from Nazi occupation.

A group of 120 Nazis and Dutch collaborators held out for nearly six weeks after the official surrender, hoping to flee to the neighbouring German island of Borkum.

They were led by Robert Lehnhoff, an SS officer who gained notoriety in Groningen for torturing and killing resistance members in the Scholtenhuis, the Nazis’ regional headquarters for the northern Netherlands.

When the city was on the brink of falling to the Allies in April 1945, Lehnhoff and his colleagues fled to Schiermonnikoog, but they were unable to find a way across the shallow Wadden Sea mudflats to Borkum.

The local German naval commander, Arnold Rehm, was unwilling to accommodate them, knowing that the war was lost and his compatriots would soon be tried as war criminals. He banished them to a farmhouse in the dunes, where some had to sleep in woods and duck cages.

On May 25 war crimes investigator Hermann Kloppenburg travelled to the island dressed in a Canadian uniform and ordered the Nazi officers to leave, promising to treat them as prisoners of war.

600 soldiers

Lehnhoff and his companions complied, but some 600 German troops who had been stationed on the island during the war held out in bunkers in the dunes until June 11, when they surrendered to the Canadian army and were transported to the mainland.

“Large parts of the island were fenced off during the war: they were forbidden territory,” Theun Thalsma, 88, who grew up on the farm that the SS officers occupied, told NOS recently. “And now we could go in the dunes again and go to the beach.”

“When I was young the island was always full of German soldiers. Now the bunkers were abandoned and empty,” said Thalsma, who still lives in the farmhouse.

Island confiscated

The SS officers were tried for war crimes and Lehnhoff was one of the last Nazis to be executed in the Netherlands, in 1950.

Most of the regular soldiers, who had sat out the war without fighting, went back to Germany as free men. Rehm, the former island commander, set up a travel agency in Bremen selling trips to Schiermonnikoog among other destinations.

The island itself was owned by a German aristocratic family until December 1945, when the Dutch government confiscated it under a law allowing it to seize enemy possessions. After a decades-long legal process the family were awarded 80,000 Deutschmarks (€41,000) in compensation by the German courts in 1985.

• NOS: “80 jaar Bevrijding: de Waddeneilanden” is broadcast on Monday June 11 at 8.30pm on NPO2
• The Dutch News podcast’s three-part special series on the liberation of the Netherlands is available to Patreon subscribers, or as a one-off purchase.