Background

“The traffic along the road had been cordoned off and it was now waiting for the arrival of the last van. It pulled up to the execution site, after which the victims were unloaded two by two, handcuffed, and lined up. From my hiding place, which was not too far away, I could see the pale and dishevelled faces, I could see the feral hairs on their disembodied heads, I could see their frightened eyes in hell. (…) The firing squad was lined up and my tension and fear, to the point of bursting, held me captive. The commanding commander read them their verdict in German and ended the reading with “Führers Befehl”. After a brief silence, a command resounded and salvo fire followed, whereupon the first victims fell, and the comrade handcuffed to their fellow victims. This was soon followed by more rounds of machine gun and rifle fire. An icy silence set in as the gunpowder vapour slowly drifted away with the wind across the bleak land.”

This is how Frans Hendriks, director of the nearby Amstelveld tennis park, described a fusillade at the Rozenoord execution site on the Amsteldijk that he saw from his workplace. In 1945, the German occupiers shot 140 Dutch people at Rozenoord without any trial.

Fusilladeplaats Rozenoord got its name because there was a rose nursery with that name at that spot along the Amsteldijk around 1900. The municipality bought the site in 1941 for the expansion of Zorgvliet cemetery. The Germans then constructed a barricade there during the war as part of the defence line around Amsterdam. Surveillance fell into the hands of the German police (also known as Grüne Polizei). putting German policemen are in charge of the fusillades. Rozenoord therefore became a place of execution in late 1944. In the second half of the occupation, the increasingly harsh actions of the German occupiers resulted in the resistance becoming more extensive, more intense, but also more violent. Amsterdam was the centre of Dutch illegal actions. In late 1944, the Germans decide to deal ruthlessly with resistance fighters. The German trial of Terroristen und Saboteure was abolished. Arrested resistance fighters could henceforth be detained as ‘Toteskandidat’ – meaning they could be held until the opportunity arose to shoot them in reprisal – without trial.

On 30 January 1945, five Todeskandidaten were shot dead at Rozenoord. The youngest victim was the just-turned-18-year-old school pupil Jantjen van Nijendaal from Wijk bij Duurstede. He was transporting weapons from Veenendaal to his home town of Wijk van Duurstede. When Jantjen previously stole a German rifle, he was arrested but, given his young age, gets off with a serious warning from the local German commander. On 9 January 1945, Jantjen was arrested for the theft and taken to the Detention Centre on the Weteringschans in Amsterdam. On 30 January 1945, he is taken from his cell and shot dead with four other victims on Rozenoord. Jantjen is one of 140 Dutch people who die at Rozenoord.

It was not until May 1973 that a simple 175cm-high memorial stone with the words ‘Spring 1945’ was placed at Rozenoord. Until then, only a flagpole stood at the execution site, where the flag hung half-mast on 4th May. The names of the individual fallen resistance fighters are not listed. Despite this reminder, Rozenoord remained an inconspicuous, forgotten place. At the request of residents of stadsdeel Zuid, a new memorial, designed by Ram Katzir, was erected in 2015 in Amstelpark, not far from the Rozenoord execution site. The memorial consists of a lawn with empty chairs. They are placed on a concrete slab on which the name, date of birth and date of execution of the victims of Rozenoord can be read. The chairs are arranged in a disorganised manner, as if those who sat on them had just walked away. The annual commemoration of the dead takes place at this spot on 4 May, sometimes in combination with a short ceremony at the former execution site on Amsteldijk.