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The Dronrijp Reprisals were carried out by the German Sicherheitsdienst in the Dutch town of Dronrijp on 11 April 1945. 14 prisoners, including 11 members of the Dutch resistance, were shot in reprisal for the sabotage of a rail line.
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. In the night of 9 to 10 April, they removed the screws of 75 metres of railroad track, causing a Wehrmacht locomotive carrying 26 wagons to derail the night after. Within hours, the Sicherheitsdienst and the Sicherheitspolizei learned about the sabotage by a message from the town hall in Menaldum, intercepted and noted by the resistance as follows:
The Sicherheitsdienst was furious and demanded the execution of 20 prisoners in Dronrijp the following day. 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. However, 14 prisoners from Leeuwarden were transported to Dronrijp in the back of a truck. As soon as they arrived, several British fighters overflew the town, causing the Sicherheitsdienst members to panic. Then they discovered that the bridge across the Van Harinxmakanaal was opened by the resistance, which blocked the road leading to the rail line. Now the only option was to guide the prisoners down next to the bridge to have them shot right there. One of the men, Gerard de Jong from Leeuwarden, survived the execution by pretending to be dead until the Germans had disappeared. People from the town, including Ynse Postma, rushed to the site and rescued him. De Jong’s luck was helped by the specific instruction from the Sicherheitsdienst for its men not to remove the bodies from the scene.
Of the 13 prisoners who died that day, 11 were members of the resistance. Their names which are listed below are honoured at a memorial of 11 stone blocks that was built in 1949 at the location of the execution. A commemoration service is held every year on 4 May, the National Day of the Remembrance of the Dead.
The other two prisoners were Johannes Ducaneaux and Oudger van Dijk, whose activities during the war can be considered quite controversial. Ducaneaux was suspected of being a mole, and Van Dijk was a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS). Their names are therefore not honoured at the memorial.
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