Evacuation of Camp Vught commemorated, 80 years after fatal Mad Tuesday

On Sunday, the National Monument Camp Vught memorial commemorates the hasty evacuation of the concentration camp in September 1944. The evacuation of the SS camp in Noord-Brabant occurred after rumors that the Allies could liberate the Netherlands at any moment. The reports, which turned out to be untrue, reached their peak on September 5, 1944. On this so-called Dolle Dinsdag (Mad Tuesday), the Netherlands went into a liberation frenzy, and the Nazis were forced to hastily deport the more than 3,500 prisoners from the Vught camp to camps in Germany, on the orders of SS leader Himmler.

The commemoration at the memorial will begin on Sunday afternoon with a silent march to the former execution site of the concentration camp, where there is a memorial with the names of 329 resistance fighters who were shot there from June to September 1944. In his recently published book Wraak op het verzet (Revenge on the Resistance), historian Ad van Liempt concludes that even more people were executed in the camp during these last hectic months than previously thought, namely around 400.

After the silent march, Jeroen van den Eijnde, director of the National Memorial Camp Vught, will give a welcoming speech. Then, the Commissioner of the Queen of Brabant, Ina Adema, and Jetske van den Burger, whose mother was imprisoned in the concentration camp from July 1943 to September 1944 because she refused to betray those in hiding, will give a speech as well. After the evacuation of the Vught camp, her mother was sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women about 80 kilometers north of Berlin. She survived the war and died in 2014.

In addition to the speeches, there will also be music and poetry recitals on Sunday. After the program, a wreath will be laid at the memorial.

Camp Vught's evacuation, officially called “Konzentrationslager Herzogenbusch” during World War II, has been commemorated every five years in the memorial center since 2004. The camp, the only SS concentration camp outside Nazi Germany, was in use from January 13, 1943 to September 16, 1944. During that period, more than 32,000 men, women, and children were imprisoned there. More than 12,000 Jews were transported from Camp Vught to Camp Westerbork and from there to the extermination camps in Poland.

According to Omroep Brabant, when the first liberators arrived in this region of the Netherlands at the end of October 1944, they found an empty camp.