Operation Silbertanne

Operation Silbertanne (Silver Fir) was the codename of a series of murders taking place between September 1943 and September 1944 during the German occupation of the Netherlands. The assassinations were carried out by a death squad composed of Dutch members of the SS and Dutch veterans of the Eastern Front.

Activity

Operation Silbertanne was intended as reprisal for the attacks made on predominantly Dutch collaborators and German occupational forces by the Dutch resistance. In this they had the support of various German officers. As a result of the attacks the SS and Police Leader for the Netherlands, Hanns Albin Rauter, gave order to retaliate by assassinating civilians presumed to be in some way connected to the resistance or to be orange-minded, meaning Dutch patriots, or anti-German.^[1] The task of perpetrating the killings was first assigned to especially formed death squads, though killings were later carried out exclusively by Sonderkommando Feldmeijer, a special unit consisting of 15 SS-members. The first killings took place in autumn 1943 in Meppel and Staphorst.

Within a year more than 54 Dutchmen had been murdered or severely wounded.

One of the most prominent victims of Operation Silbertanne was Dutch writer A. M. de Jong, who was killed in October 1943.^[2]

The leader of the Dutch Nazis, Anton Mussert was opposed to Operation Silbertanne, and when in autumn 1944 SS Brigadeführer Karl Eberhard Schöngarth, head of SiPo and SD, was informed of these retaliatory killings he had them terminated in September 1944.

Some of the most notorious Dutch war criminals participated in Operation Silbertanne: Heinrich Boere, Maarten Kuiper, Sander Borgers, Klaas Carel Faber, his brother Pieter Johan Faber, Daniel Bernard and Lambertus van Gog.

Prosecution

After the war some of the members of the death squad and those responsible for giving the orders were put on trial. Henk Feldmeijer was killed in February 1945. Maarten Kuiper and Pieter Johan Faber were executed in 1948. Hanns Albin Rauter was sentenced to death and executed in 1949. Others, however, managed to flee the country and went into hiding outside the Netherlands. Sander Borgers died in 1985 at the age of 67 in Haren, Germany. Klaas Carel Faber still lives in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt. In July 2009 it was reported that the German government wanted to prosecute Faber after all.^[3] Daniel Bernhard died in 1962. Lambertus van Gog fled to Spain but was extradited to the Netherlands in 1978. Heinrich Boere, who has been living for decades in Germany, was found fit to stand trial for the murders committed between 1943 and 1944, by the Provincial Court of Appeal in Cologne on 7 July 2009,^[4] and subsequently was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in March 2010.^[5]

See also

• Dutch resistance
• Dutch collaboration

Notes

1. ^ Crossland, David (2008-04-14). "86-Year-Old SS Killer Faces Murder Charges". Der Spiegel. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,547216,00.html. Retrieved 2007-07-08. 
2. ^ Etty, Elsbeth (2001-04-20). "Een begaafd arbeiderskind" (in Dutch). NRC Handelsblad. http://www.nrcboeken.nl/recensie/een-begaafd-arbeiderskind. Retrieved 2007-01-10. 
3. ^ "Duitsers willen vervolging Nederlandse nazi" (in Dutch). De Telegraaf. 2009-07-09. http://www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland/4368172/__Duitsers_willen_NL-nazi_vervolgen__.html?p=1,1. Retrieved 2007-07-10. 
4. ^ "Nazi hitman Heinrich Boere, 88, IS fit to stand trial for 1944 triple execution, court rules". Mail Online. 2009-07-07. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1198100/Nazi-hitman-Heinrich-Boere-88-IS-fit-stand-trial-1944-triple-execution-court-rules.html. Retrieved 2007-07-07. 
5. ^ "Former Nazi SS member convicted of Dutch murders". BBC. 23 March 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8582449.stm. Retrieved 23 March 2010.