- 9 hours ago
The war had ended, but in the Dutch dunes German soldiers were still crawling through minefields under Canadian orders. This military history story follows the surrender at Wageningen, where Lieutenant-General Charles Foulkes read the terms to Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz and used a single chain of command to make the defeated German army clear its own mines.
From the flooded polders and Atlantic Wall beaches to Delifzyl, Scheveningen, and Hoek van Holland, the narration shows how Canadian engineers, Dutch guides, and German pioneer units dealt with beaches, canals, dykes, and thousands of hidden explosives. It also traces the 22-year-old Canadian captain who translated the orders, the mined roads and canals that blocked food relief, and the grim human cost of mine clearance in postwar Holland.
This is a documentary-style war story about Canadian war stories, World War 2 history, mine clearance, and the uneasy end of occupation in the Netherlands. It is ideal for listeners who enjoy military history narration, WWII stories, and detailed historical analysis of the Canadian Army, German surrender, and the aftermath of war.
SEO: For more WW2 stories, Canadian military history, and postwar Europe history, this narrated history piece explores minefields, surrender terms, Dutch liberation, and the dangerous work of clearing explosive ordnance. If you search for World War 2 documentary narration, Canadian Army history, or stories about mine clearance and the liberation of Holland, this is the kind of historical war story that fits.
From the flooded polders and Atlantic Wall beaches to Delifzyl, Scheveningen, and Hoek van Holland, the narration shows how Canadian engineers, Dutch guides, and German pioneer units dealt with beaches, canals, dykes, and thousands of hidden explosives. It also traces the 22-year-old Canadian captain who translated the orders, the mined roads and canals that blocked food relief, and the grim human cost of mine clearance in postwar Holland.
This is a documentary-style war story about Canadian war stories, World War 2 history, mine clearance, and the uneasy end of occupation in the Netherlands. It is ideal for listeners who enjoy military history narration, WWII stories, and detailed historical analysis of the Canadian Army, German surrender, and the aftermath of war.
SEO: For more WW2 stories, Canadian military history, and postwar Europe history, this narrated history piece explores minefields, surrender terms, Dutch liberation, and the dangerous work of clearing explosive ordnance. If you search for World War 2 documentary narration, Canadian Army history, or stories about mine clearance and the liberation of Holland, this is the kind of historical war story that fits.
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LearningTranscript
00:00July 4th, 1945. The dunes near Blumendal on the Dutch coast. A German corporal named Joachim Kuhn,
00:0923 years old, is working a strip of sand with the rest of his platoon. The war in Europe has
00:16been
00:16over for two months. Kuhn is still in uniform, still under his own German officers, and he is
00:23looking for mines. He is not an engineer. He came to Holland in March as a driver and had never
00:30handled a mine in his life. A few steps from him, one of his comrades puts his foot down. That
00:37single
00:37explosion kills three men. Kuhn is wounded. Sixty years later, he would say he still carried a piece
00:44of Holland with him. There was, he said, still Dutch sand inside his scar. Hold that picture,
00:51because it raises the question this whole story is built to answer. The war was over. Kuhn's army
00:58had surrendered. So why was a German corporal crawling through a German minefield on the Dutch coast in
01:05July, in formation, under German officers, as if his army still existed? The answer starts 60 days
01:13earlier, in a hotel, with a Canadian general reading aloud. May 5th, 1945, 4.30 in the afternoon. The Hotel
01:24de
01:24Weireld in Wageningen, a shell-scarred hotel in a battered Dutch town. On one side of the table sits Lieutenant
01:32General Charles Foulkes, commander of the 1st Canadian Corps. Beside him is Brigadier George Kitching.
01:39Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands is in the room, too. Next to them sits Captain George Molnar, 22,
01:47born in Hungary, raised by a mother who taught him French, German, and English, one language a year.
01:54He joined the army as a private in 1942, and at 20 he was the youngest captain in the Canadian
02:01army.
02:02This afternoon, every word the Canadians say to the Germans will pass through him. Across the table,
02:08General Oberst Johannes Blazkowicz, commander of the German 25th Army, and his chief of staff.
02:16Foulkes does not negotiate. He reads. He pauses, Molnar puts it into German, and Blazkowicz answers with a
02:24nod, or a single word. Jawohl. Understood. Now, listen closely to the second condition,
02:31because everything that happened to Joachim Kuhn is folded inside it. Blazkowicz is to hand over the
02:37order of battle of his command, his supply states, his signal codes, and then this line,
02:44a plan of all minefields. All of them. Every belt his engineers had sewn behind the beaches,
02:51every field along the dikes, every mined road, on paper, in the hands of the Canadians.
02:57If what the Canadians did in Holland in the spring of 1945 matters to you, a subscribe helps these
03:05stories reach more people. Think about what Foulkes was actually holding that afternoon.
03:10It was not a beaten army in a cage. On the 1st of May, the German forces in the western
03:16Netherlands
03:16reported a strength of 117,629 men. Most of them had not been beaten in the field. They still had
03:25their
03:26rifles, their officers, their barracks. The coast behind them was part of the Atlantic wall.
03:32Concrete, wire, and sand that nobody but the men who laid it could read. And the Canadians knew exactly
03:40what German mines cost. From the Rhine crossing in late March to the day of this meeting, 1st Canadian
03:47army had lost 1,482 men killed. Behind that number were sappers who had gone forward with a detector
03:57and a prodder and had not come back. Now look at it from the Canadian side of the table.
04:04An army of volunteers, from a country of 11 million people, fighting with British doctrine
04:10and a good deal of British equipment, had been handed the western Netherlands to finish.
04:16Now it had to make more than 100,000 armed Germans do as they were told, without another shot,
04:24and without spending one more Canadian life on German mines.
04:29So here is the problem in its simplest form. Holland was a country full of mines. Somebody was going to
04:36have to lift them. Canadian sappers who had survived this far and were counting the days until the boat's home.
04:45Dutch volunteers, many of them teenagers who had just come through a winter of hunger.
04:51Or someone else. Canada's official history describes the Germans at Wageningen as men who seemed
04:58dazed, stupefied, and unable to realize that for them their world was utterly finished.
05:06The Canadian record of that afternoon is blunter still. The terms were read over by General Foulkes,
05:13and Blazkowicz hardly answered a word. That was true of their world. It was not yet true of their army.
05:23Blazkowicz still commanded more than 100,000 men who took orders from him and from no one else.
05:30That is the knot Foulkes had to cut. How do you make a surrendered army do the most dangerous job
05:38in
05:38the country? And why on earth would it obey? I'll tell you now that part of the answer is on
05:45the same
05:45sheet of paper Foulkes was reading from. Directly beneath that list of minefields there is one short
05:51sentence. When Molnar put it into German, it probably sounded like office language. Nobody in the room
05:59seems to have argued with it. Remember that there is a sentence there. We are going to come back for
06:05it,
06:06and by the time we do, you will understand why it mattered more than anything else Foulkes said that day.
06:12Keep two Canadians in mind from here on. The general who read those words out, and the 22-year-old
06:20who
06:21turned them into German. Both of them will still be in this story at the end. But Blazkowicz's nod is
06:28the end of a story, not the beginning. Only days before, the German side had offered Foulkes one road
06:36into western Holland, open for a few hours a day. And one of Blazkowicz's first orders in Holland
06:43had been to breach the dikes and put Dutch farmland underwater. So what did Charles Foulkes do in those
06:51last days that turned a general who was drowning Holland into a man who said jawohl to every line,
07:00including the one that would send his own engineers into their own minefields. April 17, 1945.
07:10The Vieringermier, a polder at the top of North Holland, not far from Den Helder, German engineers
07:17pack explosives into the dike that holds back the Eiselmier and blow it open in two places.
07:24The Vieringermier was a showpiece, farmland the Dutch had pulled out of the sea
07:29only 15 years earlier. About 7,000 people lived on it. They got out in time, carrying what they could,
07:37to the villages on the old dikes around the edge. Behind them, fresh water poured across the fields.
07:45Within two days, roughly 200 square kilometers were underwater. To this day, nobody has fully
07:52explained the military reason. And that is exactly what made it frightening. If the Germans in Holland
07:59would drown a polder for no clear reason, what would they do when they had one? Now put yourself
08:05where Charles Foulkes stood that April. He is 42, raised in London, Ontario, and he has just brought
08:12the 1st Canadian Corps up from Italy to finish the war in the Netherlands. In front of him is what
08:19the
08:19Germans call Fortress Holland, the western provinces behind the Grebe line, with Amsterdam, Rotterdam,
08:27and the Hague inside. Behind that line, the Dutch are coming out of a winter of hunger that has already
08:33killed thousands. And the Germans holding it have made two things very clear. They can flood the country,
08:41and every approach is mined. Here is the arithmetic every Canadian officer understood. Attack and the
08:50Germans open more dikes. The mines do their work, and the people you came to free starve while you
08:57fight for every polder. Wait, and they starve anyway. Think about what that meant for a Canadian rifleman
09:04in April 45. The war was plainly ending. An assault on Fortress Holland would have been fought across
09:12flooded fields, along dyke roads that were the only dry ground left, the very roads the Germans had mined.
09:21It was a death in the last week of the war, and nobody wanted to die it. So the Allies
09:28tried something
09:29else. They talked. April 28th. A schoolhouse in the village of Achterwelt, right on the front line.
09:38On the Allied side sits Major General Francis de Guengonde, Montgomery's Chief of Staff. Beside him
09:46are Foulkes and Brigadier Churchill Mann of 1st Canadian Army. Across from them sit two officials
09:54sent by the Reichskommissar, Arthur Seiss Inquart. The subject is food. The Allies want to feed the Dutch,
10:03by road, by barge, from the air, and they want the Germans to hold their fire while they do it.
10:10The next day, the first Lancasters come in low over the German lines and drop not bombs, but food.
10:19On the 30th, the talks go up a level. Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, Walter Bedell Smith, sits down with
10:27Seiss Inquart himself, and the Reichskommissar accepts the Allied proposals in outline. But
10:34notice what is still missing. Seiss Inquart is a civilian. The rifles, the mines, and the dikes
10:41belong to Blazkowicz, and Blazkowicz has not come to the table. Instead, Foulkes keeps getting sent
10:48officers who cannot decide anything. This is where you meet the Foulkes who will sit in that hotel on
10:54May 5th. A German officer speaking for Blazkowicz makes an offer. The Canadians can have one road
11:01into Western Holland, open only a few hours each day. Foulkes calls it ludicrous. He wants a proper
11:09area, with boundaries that, in his words, could not possibly be mistaken by the stupidest man.
11:16When the German objects, Foulkes snaps. I've had enough.
11:21Canada's official history spells out what he wanted instead. A military commander with the
11:27authority to deal with him on his terms. Not merely a divisional commander.
11:33Stop on that for a moment, because it is the first real clue to how this story ends. Foulkes is
11:40not
11:40asking for a gesture. He is asking for one German who owns the whole front. One man who can be
11:47held
11:48responsible for everything his army does. May 1st. The German side gives way. A corridor is agreed,
11:56running south from the Arnhem-Utrecht railway down to the Waal at Ochten, so that food can move in.
12:03The official history calls it a temporary truce until such time as the feeding arrangements had been
12:10concluded. And the Germans agree to stop flooding the country. Here is a detail almost nobody notices,
12:17and I want you to take it with you. When Foulkes reads out his orders at Wageningen four days later,
12:23one of them says the Germans will continue, as already arranged, to clear the canals of obstructions,
12:30mines, etc. so that normal barge traffic can move again. Continue. As already arranged. Read that again,
12:39because it means something remarkable. In Holland, the canals were the country's roads,
12:44and a canal full of wreckage and mines meant no barges and no food. Before Blazkowicz ever said
12:52Jawohl. Before any surrender was signed, German engineers were already pulling their own obstacles
12:59and mines out of Dutch canals, so that barges could carry food to the people their army had been
13:06starving. The Canadians had not captured those men. They had given them a reason. It is the first time
13:15in this story that German engineers lift German mines for a Canadian purpose. It will not be the
13:22last. And it will not stay this easy. That is the first layer of the answer, and it is a
13:29real one.
13:30Foulkes had learned that you did not need a cage to move the German army in Holland.
13:36You needed its own chain of command. One man at the top who could not dodge the blame, and a
13:43job with a
13:44clock on it. But clearing a canal so a barge can pass is one thing. Crawling across the Atlantic wall
13:52on your knees, one prod at a time, is another. And the man who had to agree to that was
13:59still not in the
14:00room. Because while Foulkes sat at a schoolhouse table, another Canadian division, nearly 200
14:08kilometers to the north, was learning what German mines cost the hard way, on the dikes outside the
14:15port of Delftsheil. And on the 2nd of May, the German commander there would do something with his
14:21minefields that no Canadian in that fight expected. What was it, and what did it reveal about the men
14:29Foulkes was about to face at Wageningen, April 28th, 1945. Outside Delftsheil, a port on the Eames
14:38estuary, in the far northeast corner of the Netherlands, facing Germany across the water.
14:45The Cape Breton Highlanders of the 5th Canadian Armored Division are moving up to relieve another
14:51Canadian battalion, the Perth Regiment. Their war diary records the news they got that morning from
14:58brigade in one flat sentence. The Perths did not do so well last night on account of mines.
15:06The next day is cold and wet. The diary says the battalion's pioneers spend it working with the
15:13sappers, clearing mines off the road to A Company. And along that road, a German prisoner passing by on
15:21the verge steps onto a German mine. Remember that image. A German, in Canadian hands, stepping onto his
15:30own army's mine. Before this story is over, you will see it again, on a far larger scale.
15:38Delftsheil was the last German pocket on Dutch soil, and for the 5th Canadian Armored Division,
15:45it would be the last battle of the war. The garrison was mostly naval troops and scraped together battle
15:51groups, dug in behind wire and a continuous trench system along the dikes. The coastal batteries sat in
15:59concrete bunkers that the Canadian record describes as the size of a bungalow, with walls of reinforced
16:06concrete four feet thick. And in front of all of it, on the only dry approaches, were the mines.
16:14April 30th, 10 o'clock at night. C Company of the Cape Bretons goes in. In one section, led by
16:21Corporal
16:22Elmer Connell from Prince Edward Island, the men do something strange before they leave. They chant. A
16:29nonsense routine borrowed from a Jimmy Durante comedy act over and over while they stuffed their webbing
16:36with ammunition. Private Bill Metcalf remembered it decades later. It was terribly noisy, he said,
16:43and was total nonsense. It was also, he said, remarkable how quickly the ammunition went into the
16:50pouches. That night, Norman Nixon is killed by shell splinters, encouraging his men through a German
16:56counterattack. The next day, Gus McLean, Gopher Gus to the battalion, is killed in Delfzale itself.
17:05B Company, with Sherman tanks of the 8th New Brunswick Hussars and a smokescreen, takes the railway
17:11station and hundreds of prisoners. And then, something shifts. Metcalf's patrol runs into Germans who want
17:19to quit. He disarms them and leaves them waiting by the road, one of them holding an unloaded rifle with
17:26a
17:26white flag on it. Within a short time, more than a hundred Germans have come in. A little later,
17:33near the harbor, a German in a foxhole shoots Metcalf in the leg. By the end, his patrol is taking
17:40more
17:40than 200 prisoners back, with a Dutch civilian showing them the way. That is Delfzale in miniature.
17:47Half the garrison wants the war to end, the other half is still firing. And everywhere under the grass
17:55are mines that do not care which half you belong to. Across the canal, the Irish Regiment of Canada
18:01closes the other side of the trap. On the night of May 1st, Major James Paul La Prairie leads his
18:09men
18:09into the village of Wyward, seizes a bridge intact, and holds it against two German counterattacks.
18:17With their escape route cut, the Germans begin to surrender in hundreds. In the early hours of
18:24May 2nd, the garrison commander, Corvetten Capitan Volter, who has been holding out in the church at
18:31Farm Sum with around 400 men, gives up to the Irish. At a quarter to nine that morning, the Cape
18:38Breton
18:39Highlander's diary records it. The commander of the Delfzale pocket has surrendered. Now here is the
18:46moment I promised you. The lock gates and harbor installations at Delfzale had been wired for
18:53demolition. They were handed over intact. And Canada's official history adds one more sentence,
19:00almost in passing. The German commander and his staff, it says, cooperated in locating and dealing
19:07with numerous indiscriminately strewn minefields. Think about who those men were. A day earlier,
19:16they had been firing on the Cape Bretons from those same dykes. Around 20 men of that one Nova Scotia
19:23battalion were dead. And now the officers who had laid the mines were helping Canadian sappers find
19:30them. That is what Delfzale revealed. A German headquarters that surrendered in one piece,
19:37with its staff still standing and its commander still giving orders, could be turned around in
19:43a morning and pointed at its own minefields. But keep hold of two words from that sentence.
19:51Indiscriminately strewn. Not laid in neat rows. Not drawn on a clean map. Strewn.
20:00That detail is going to matter more than anyone at Delfzale could know.
20:05May 3rd. Folks is still waiting for Blazkowicz. Instead, he gets the German Chief of Staff,
20:13General Paul Reichelt, and a new problem. Blazkowicz, Reichelt says, is afraid that if the 25th Army
20:20surrenders, his men will be sent to Russia as slave labor. It is a stall. It is also a real
20:28fear,
20:28and Folks treats it as one. There is, he tells Reichelt, no intention of putting the German army
20:35into Russia. And then he adds the other half. If the Germans flood any more of Holland, he warns,
20:43they would be war criminals, and punished accordingly. Look at what Folks has just done.
20:48He never threatened to shoot anyone. He took the one thing the Germans feared most off the table,
20:55and put a new fear in its place. A fear with their own names attached. Obedience now protects them.
21:04Defiance makes them criminals. May 4th. On Lüneburg Heath in northern Germany, Field Marshal Montgomery
21:12accepts the surrender of all German forces in northwest Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands,
21:18to take effect the next morning. Which is how, on the afternoon of May 5th, Johannes Blazkowicz finally
21:26comes to Wageningen, and finds a Canadian general with a list. Somewhere on that list is a plan of
21:33every minefield in western Holland. Hundreds of thousands of mines, laid over years, by units that
21:41had come and gone. The Canadians at Delfsalle had just watched a German staff help find its own mines,
21:48on the ground, not on paper. So what would Blazkowicz's engineers actually put on that paper? And what
21:56would happen to the men who had to walk it? Back to the Hotel de Werehold. May 5th, 1945, late
22:04afternoon.
22:05George Molnar is sitting across from General Reichelt, the German Chief of Staff, the same man who two days
22:13earlier had told Volks that his army was afraid of Russia. Volks reads, Molnar translates, Blazkowicz listens,
22:23and now and then asks a question. Listen to what Volks actually asks for, because it is not what most
22:31people picture when they hear the word surrender. The first order says the German troops will stay
22:39where they are. And then, you will be held personally responsible for their discipline. Not the Canadians,
22:48Blazkowicz. Every German soldier in western Holland is still his. The second order is the list we heard
22:57in the opening. The order of battle. The supply states. The codes. The plan of all minefields.
23:04Further down, another. You will disarm all your personnel when ordered by me. Notice the grammar.
23:14You will disarm your personnel. The Canadians are not going to walk into a hundred thousand barracks
23:21and take the rifles. The German army is going to take its own rifles away from itself, on a Canadian
23:28order. At one point, Volks puts the plain question, will the Germans surrender on these terms?
23:37Blazkowicz answers with one word, jawohl. The Germans ask for 24 hours to gather the information.
23:45They get it. And the next afternoon, May 6th, the orders are signed. Not in the hotel,
23:53but in the auditorium of the agricultural college next door. The reason is almost comic.
24:00On the 5th, nobody had been able to find a typewriter. So the document that put a German army to
24:07work for the
24:07Canadians carries the date and time of the reading. 4.30 in the afternoon, May 5th. And a signature from
24:16the
24:16following day. The pen is still kept in a museum in Wageningen. Now watch what happens next, because
24:24this is where the first layer of the answer gets tested. May 6th. In the sector of the 3rd Canadian
24:31Infantry Division, a Canadian report notes that the German troops are being disarmed by their own
24:38authorities. German officers are collecting German weapons and stacking them where the Canadians tell
24:44them to. The 2nd Canadian Division issues an order of its own. The Nazi salute is forbidden.
24:52May 7th. Canadian columns roll into Western Holland, into cities that have been behind German lines for
24:59five years, through crowds that do not stop cheering for days. And all around them, still in their barracks,
25:07still in uniform, under their own officers, sit the men of the 25th Army. Canada's official history is
25:15precise about their status. They were treated as capitulated troops, not as prisoners of war. And
25:23Blazkowicz, instead of going into a cage, went on reporting to Foulkes' corps headquarters day after day
25:29as the man responsible for everything his army did. Here is why that matters, and it is the part of
25:36this
25:36story that is rarely told honestly. A prisoner of war was protected by the Geneva Convention of 1929,
25:45and that convention did not allow prisoners to be put to dangerous work. In March, Eisenhower had asked
25:53for a different category for Germans who surrendered at the end, and at the end of April the Allied chiefs
26:00approved it. The British called them surrendered enemy personnel. The Americans called them disarmed enemy
26:08forces. A change of label. And with that label, the rule about dangerous work no longer applied. I'm not going
26:18to pretend that was anything other than a deliberate choice. It was. The Allies made it with their eyes
26:25open, and the Canadians in Holland were part of it. Hold on to that, because the men who paid for
26:31that
26:31choice are about to walk into this story. By May 20th, under Canadian and British authority, a new
26:40German formation exists, on paper and on the ground. Its commander is Oberstleutnant Rudolf Dreger,
26:48an experienced German engineer officer, and the unit takes his name, the Dreger Brigade. Its
26:55headquarters is in Delft, between Rotterdam and The Hague. Its strength? 105 officers and 3,244 men,
27:06drawn from seven pioneer battalions and a battalion of fortress troops already stationed in Holland.
27:12One German engineer officer, a few thousand men, and a coastline that the Germans themselves had spent
27:20years turning into a minefield. Now let me give you one of those men. Manfred Sobiella was 17. He came
27:29from Wolfenbüttel in Lower Saxony, and had been sent to the Netherlands early in 1945 as a Luftwaffe
27:36pioneer. He was stationed near Scheveningen, the seaside resort outside The Hague, where the beach had been
27:43turned into part of the Atlantic wall. When the surrender came, he was overjoyed. Decades later,
27:49he still remembered the feeling. The war was finally over, he said. Finally, peace. Everything was over
27:58at last, and we would be allowed to go home. And then he added two words. So we thought. Instead,
28:07he was told he would be clearing mines. This is how he described his training.
28:14Tin cans were buried in the sand on the beach at Scheveningen. The boys were handed mine detectors,
28:21Canadian mine detectors, as he remembered them, and told to find the cans.
28:27That was our training, Sobiella said. We really knew nothing about mines. Stop and take that in.
28:35A 17-year-old from Lower Saxony, holding a detector he had never seen before, sweeping for tin cans on
28:43a
28:44beach laced with real mines. The men who had laid those mines had come and gone over years. The boy
28:52holding the detector had not laid a single one. And the map he was supposed to trust was the one
28:59Blazkowicz's staff had just handed to the Canadians. Folks had built exactly what he wanted. One German
29:06commander, one German chain of command, one German formation doing the most dangerous job in Holland,
29:13on a Canadian order. On paper, it was flawless. But paper was about to meet sand. And the first thing
29:22that happened when it did was the moment Manfred Sobiella said changed everything for him. The
29:28moment, he said, when they finally understood how serious it was. What did the boys from the beach
29:35at Scheveningen find out the hard way in their first weeks? And what did it say about the maps?
29:41The Draeger brigade went to work on the 20th of May, 1945. On the beach near Scheveningen,
29:48Manfred Sobiella's unit moved off the tin cans and onto the real thing. The method is simple,
29:56and he remembered every step of it. You sweep with the detector. Where it sings, you go in with a
30:03prodder, a thin steel rod, pushed into the sand at a shallow angle, again and again. When the prodder
30:11touches metal, you stop. When we hit steel with the prodder, Sobiella said, we had to lie down on the
30:18ground and dig the mine out with our fingers. Then we had to try to get the fuse out. That
30:24was the most
30:25dangerous part. Fingers. Not tools. A 17-year-old lying flat in the sand, working his hands around a
30:34German mine, trying to unscrew the thing that makes it go off. And then it happens. Somewhere along their
30:43stretch of coast, one of the lifting parties sets one off. Two dead and several wounded, Sobiella said.
30:51Only then did we realize how serious it was. From that day on, he said, every man in his unit
30:59was
30:59carrying the same question around with him, looking at the others. Will we all get home? Or will you die?
31:07Or you? Or you? Or you? Now I want you to hear the same story from the other side of
31:15the tape,
31:16because the Canadians were watching this happen. The history of one Canadian engineer unit,
31:23the 12th Field Company, which spent that spring working in the Netherlands, puts the whole problem
31:30into three sentences. Every word of them is worth hearing. German sappers helped the Allied sappers
31:38on this job, though perhaps somewhat reluctantly. Both sides lost some men doing this work,
31:46as it turned out that the German minefield maps, which were beautifully drawn, weren't really all that
31:53accurate. Beautifully drawn. Not really all that accurate. Remember Delph-Seil and the two words from
32:02the official history, indiscriminately strewn. This is what they meant. The Atlantic wall had been mined
32:11over years, by one unit after another. Fields were laid and added to in a hurry when the invasion was
32:18expected, and in the last weeks of the war, mines were scattered along roads where nobody had time
32:24to draw anything. The maps Blazkowicz's staff handed over were real. They were neat. And the ground did
32:32not match them. So here is the counter move. Folks had made the German army responsible for its own
32:39minefields. The German army's paper had just let its own men down. And the German sappers made a
32:47counter move of their own. According to the same Canadian history, they did not like the Allied
32:53method at all. They wanted flail tanks, machines with chains beating the ground in front of them
33:00so that the mine went off under steel instead of under a man. What they mostly got was the knife,
33:07the prodder, and their knees. Think about how that looked from the dunes. On one side of the white tape,
33:15German boys crawling on their stomachs, working by hand. On the other, Canadian soldiers who had spent
33:22eleven months or more going through German minefields the same way, and who now stood,
33:27for once, on the safe side of the line. By early June, a Dutch newspaper reported that around Schaveningen
33:36alone, 26,000 mines had already come out of the ground. The Germans, it said, were lifting some
33:44six thousand mines a day along the coast, under strict Canadian supervision. Six thousand a day.
33:54Take that number down to one man. Every one of those six thousand was a moment when somebody's fingers
34:02were inside the sand, around a fuse. Not all mines were equal either, and this is a detail almost nobody
34:11outside the engineer world knows. The worst of them was the German S mine, the one Allied soldiers
34:19called the Bouncing Betty. Step on it, and it jumped to waist height before it burst. In Holland alone,
34:28the Dregger Brigade would lift more than 127,000 of them. And then there was the small wooden box mine,
34:36the shoe mine, with so little metal that a detector could barely hear it. The only reliable way to find
34:43a shoe mine was the prodder. Meanwhile, the paperwork was catching up. A British engineer intelligence section
34:50began going through every German minefield record, giving each one a serial number and tracing it by hand
34:57onto linen maps. Allied fields in green, German in blue. By October, 4,522 minefields would be registered
35:08in the Netherlands. Every one of those lines on the linen was a place where somebody would have to kneel.
35:14And the Dutch were watching too. Joachim Kuhn, the corporal we met in the opening, remembered the walk
35:21out to a minefield. People by the road drew a finger across their throats as the Germans passed,
35:27and called out, Muffin, Muffin, the Dutch slur for Germans. After five years of occupation,
35:34and a winter of hunger, nobody on that road was going to feel sorry for them.
35:39Here is the uncomfortable truth, and I'll give it to you straight. The system Volks built worked.
35:46The German army obeyed. The mines were coming out by the thousand. And the men doing it were dying.
35:54Two here, three there. Because the maps were wrong. The training was a morning with tin cans.
36:00And the method was a man on his knees. A file in the Dutch National Archives records one of those
36:07accidents. A German pioneer named Arno Emmersleben was questioned afterwards about the explosion that
36:14killed his comrade, a man named Emmerling. All that was found of Emmerling, the record says,
36:21was his left leg and his right arm. So the question this story started with has changed.
36:27At the beginning it was, how do you make a beaten army lift its own mines? That part, Volks had
36:34answered.
36:34The new question is harder. Once they are doing it, once the orders are obeyed and the men are on
36:41their
36:41knees, who is responsible for how many of them die? The German answer was to keep going.
36:47The maps said what they said. The Canadian answer came from somewhere nobody had ordered it to come
36:53from. In June, two officers of the Royal Canadian Engineers started asking questions that were not on
37:01anybody's list. About where the men were dying, and why. What did they find in the dunes that the maps,
37:10the Germans, and the whole Allied command had missed? July 4th, 1945. The dunes near Blumendal.
37:20We are back where this story began. You know Joachim Kuhn now, 23, a driver who had never touched a
37:28mine
37:28before that summer. You know how he was trained, and what map he was working from. You know that the
37:34Dutch on the road drew their fingers across their throats at him. So when his comrade steps onto a
37:41mine a few paces away, and three men die, and Kuhn goes down with Dutch sand driven into his wound,
37:49you understand it differently than you did at the start. It was not simply bad luck. It was the system,
37:56working as it had been built, with the cost landing where it had been set up to land.
38:01The question is whether anybody on the Canadian side was going to look at that cost and do something
38:07about it. Somebody was. In June and July of 1945, two officers of the Royal Canadian Engineers carried
38:17out a review of the mine clearance going on across Holland. Nobody had ordered it. The record says
38:24plainly that they did it on their own initiative. Their names do not appear in any source I can put
38:30in
38:30front of you, and I'm not going to invent them. But I can tell you what came of it, because
38:36that is on paper.
38:38The war was over. The men dying were Germans. The official measure of success was mines lifted per day.
38:48Two Canadian engineers decided the clearance deserved a harder look than a daily count.
38:54Their review was good enough that the military authorities in Holland took it seriously.
39:00They handed it to a British operational research unit, the scientists the army used to study battles,
39:07with orders to carry out, in the report's words,
39:11a complete survey and analysis of all aspects of minefield clearance and casualties.
39:18The result ran to 57 pages, and it asked the question the daily count never asked.
39:25Not how many mines were coming out, but how many men were being hurt? Where? Doing what? In which units?
39:33Here is what that work found, and I want you to listen to it as a Canadian sapper would.
39:39In one German battalion, as many as 20 men could be prodding and lifting in the same row of mines
39:46at the same time. When one mine went, it did not take one man. That battalion had one of the
39:54worst
39:54casualty rates in the brigade. The worst of all was a battalion working the scattered shoe minefields
40:02around Arnhem. Small wooden mines, almost invisible to a detector, laid during the fighting around the city.
40:10Exactly the kind of ground where a beautifully drawn map was worth leased.
40:15And then there was Huck van Holland. At the mouth of the Rotterdam waterway, a German officer named
40:22Hauptmann Karl Groh, former commander of pioneer battalion 331, was running a clearance unit of 40 men and two
40:31officers. Many of his men came from the old fortress troops, soldiers who had garrisoned
40:38that coast and knew its ground. Groh never put more than four men in any one lifting party. Between
40:45May and November, Groh's little unit lifted close to 54,000 mines, German, French, and British, and it had
40:55fewer casualties than the far larger battalions around it. Hold those two pictures side by side.
41:03Twenty men in a row and a high casualty rate. Four men to a party, men who knew the ground,
41:10and one of the lowest. The difference was not courage. It was not luck. It was method. And it
41:19took two Canadian engineers, acting on their own initiative, to start the work that put that pattern
41:26on paper where the rest of the Allied command could see it. Now we can go back to the Hotel
41:32de Verelde,
41:33and to the sentence I asked you to remember in the very first minutes of this story.
41:39Directly under the list of everything Blazkowicz had to hand over, the order of battle, the codes,
41:47the plan of all minefields, Volks's orders say this,
41:58That is the sentence. When George Molnar put it into German on May 5th, it sounded like office
42:05language. It was not. Think about what it did. The maps were German. The accuracy of the maps was the
42:13German commander's responsibility, in writing, signed. So when the maps turned out to be beautifully drawn
42:20and wrong, the price of that error did not fall on a Canadian sapper from Nova Scotia, or a Dutch
42:26volunteer from Tilburg. It fell on the army that had drawn them. Volks had not only made the German
42:33army hand over its mines, he had made it answerable for the truth of its own paper. And the men
42:39who had
42:39to walk on that paper were its own. That is the full answer to the question this story opened with.
42:46The Germans lifted their own mines because a Canadian general kept their army whole,
42:51put one man at the top on the hook for everything it did, gave it a job and a deadline,
42:56and made it
42:57responsible for its own maps. And when that system started killing the men inside it, it was Canadian
43:03engineers who went looking for why. Was it fair to the Germans? The men in the dunes did not think
43:11so.
43:12Sobiella called those months the worst of his life. But listen to someone who stood on the other side of
43:19the tape, a Dutchman. Franz Hersemus was 17 when the war reached Holland, and he said it took his youth
43:27from him. At 21, from Tilburg, he volunteered for the Dutch mine clearance service. He watched a colleague die
43:37when a demolition went wrong. Afterwards, he was handed a sack and a prodder, and told to pick up what
43:44was left.
43:46There was not much. Years later, Hersemus was asked about the Germans who had done the same work.
43:53More than 200 of them had died doing it. He simply did the arithmetic.
43:59If they hadn't done it, he said, those 210 would have fallen on our side. That is the verdict from
44:07the
44:07people whose country it was. But the arithmetic was not finished. There were still hundreds of
44:13thousands of mines in the ground, and within three months the whole arrangement would pass out of
44:19Canadian hands. So what became of the men of the Draeger Brigade when it did? And when a field was
44:25declared clear, who was made to prove it? May 25, 1945. The causeway across the top of the Eiselmere,
44:35the great dike that closes off the old Zaudersee from the North Sea, 30 odd kilometers of road with
44:43water on both sides. Down that road comes the German 25th Army. Not in trucks, for the most part on
44:52foot,
44:52in columns of some 10,000 men at a time, covering about 15 miles a day. At the northern end
45:00of the
45:01dike, the 5th Canadian Armored Division takes control of them, the same division whose Cape Breton
45:07Highlanders had fought through German mines at Delftsail less than a month before. The Canadians
45:14march them as far as the German border and hand them on toward a concentration area on the coast of
45:20Germany between Wilhelmshaven and Emden. Think about the scene. An army that had held Holland for five
45:28years, walking out of it along a single road under the eyes of the men it had been fighting. And
45:36somewhere in the machinery that moved them sat the young man we met at the start. After Wageningen,
45:42George Molnar, the 22-year-old captain from Alberta, was given a job that sounds almost impossible said
45:50out loud, overseeing the orderly removal of 120,000 German soldiers from the Netherlands. The same man
45:59who had put Volks's orders into German now helped carry them out, column by column. By the middle of
46:06June, the Canadian record says, the German evacuation of the Netherlands was practically complete.
46:13Practically. Because not everybody was on that road. The Draeger Brigade stayed. While their army
46:20walked home across the dike, its pioneers were still on their knees in the dunes. Here is where you
46:27meet the last German witness in this story, and he gives us the most unsettling detail of all.
46:33Bernhard Randerath came from Mönchengladbach. He had been called up in December 1944,
46:41and he turned 18 that summer as a pioneer of the Draeger Brigade, working the coast at Aymuden.
46:48He remembered how a cleared stretch of coast was proven clear. When part of the coast had been declared
46:55free of minds, he said, we got a so-called day off. On that day, we had to stay on
47:02the cleared ground.
47:04We could swim, walk around, lie in the sun, but not leave. And then he said the sentence that explains
47:12it.
47:13We had to test with our own lives whether the ground was really free of minds.
47:19Stop on that. Those days on the sand were not rest. The men who had cleared the ground were the
47:27proof
47:27that it was clear. If the map had been wrong, and the sweep had missed something, the first person to
47:34find out would be a German pioneer lying in the sun. Brutal? Yes. But now, hold it next to everything
47:43you
47:44know about this story. The German command had drawn the maps and signed for their accuracy. German hands
47:52had cleared the ground. And the last check on German work was German feet. Not a Dutch farmer going back
47:59to his field. Not a Dutch child running down to the sea for the first time in five years. Not
48:07a Canadian
48:07sapper who had survived the war and had a boat to catch. That was the logic of Foulkes' sentence,
48:15carried all the way to the water line. In September, Randeroth and the others thought their turn to go
48:22home had come. Nothing, he said later, was further from the truth. The brigade was moving south of the
48:30great rivers, into the mined fields of the southern Netherlands. And on October 1, 1945, the arrangement that
48:38began at a hotel table in Wageningen passed out of Canadian and British hands. The German mine clearers
48:46came under Dutch command. So what had it achieved? Here the numbers matter, and they are precise.
48:54Between the 20th of May and the 31st of December, the Draeger brigade lifted 1,079,857 mines.
49:04Of all the mines cleared in the Netherlands by late 1947, the great majority came out of the ground in
49:12that first year, by German hands. Put that number next to one man. Every one of those million mines
49:20was a place where, without this arrangement, a Dutch volunteer or a Canadian sapper might have had to
49:27kneel. The price was real, and I'm not going to hide it. More than 200 German clearers
49:34died in the Netherlands. Hundreds more were wounded. More than 50 Dutch mine clearers died, too.
49:42Men like the colleague, Franz Herrsmus, gathered up in a sack. And what about the study that two
49:48Canadian engineers had started on their own initiative in June? It became the Military Operational Research
49:55Units, Report No. 7, Minefield Clearance and Casualties, Holland, 1945.
50:03For decades it was largely unknown, even among the people who clear mines for a living.
50:08In 2019, Rolly Evans, a mine action specialist at the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian
50:16Demining, brought it back to light. People who clear mines today, in some of the most dangerous places
50:22on earth, still wrestle with exactly the questions that report asked. How fast can you clear ground?
50:30What does speed cost in lives? How many men should kneel in one row? His verdict on the report that
50:37grew
50:37out of that Canadian review is worth hearing in full. It remains, he wrote, one of the best analyses of
50:45minefield clearance, time, and resulting casualties ever conducted. And then, arguably, it has not been
50:53equaled or surpassed since. Arguably. He chose the word with care. But he wrote it three quarters of a
51:01century later, as someone whose own field is getting mines out of the ground. That is the admission from
51:07outside. Not a German general, not an American one, but a modern specialist, looking at what began with
51:15two Canadian engineers asking a question nobody had told them to ask. So the German army had lifted
51:23its mines. The Canadians had made it responsible for them, watched it pay, and then gone looking for
51:30how to make it pay less. But this story began with a general, a young interpreter, and a German corporal
51:38with sand in his scar. What became of each of them? And what did the last German mine clearers write
51:45on
51:45a bunker wall at Hoek von Holland on the day they finally left? April 1, 1947. Hoek von Holland,
51:54at the mouth of the Rotterdam waterway. The last German mine clearers on this stretch of coast are
52:01leaving. They have spent their final months in old wooden huts behind a heavy barbed wire fence near
52:08a former German battery called Vinetta. Before they go, somebody takes a brush into one of the bunkers
52:15and paints two words on the wall. Auf Wiedersehen. Goodbye. Or, more literally, until we see each other again.
52:25The words are still there. That bunker is now part of a Dutch national monument in the dunes. It is
52:33one
52:33of the very few places in the Netherlands where the men of the Draeger Brigade left anything of themselves
52:39behind. By October of that year, the last of them had been released. By 1948, the Netherlands was largely
52:48free of mines. Now let me close the circle on the people who carried this story. Joachim Kuhn left the
52:55Netherlands by the summer of 1946 and then had to do more prisoner labor in Belgium before he finally
53:02went home. For the rest of his life, he carried what he called a piece of Holland with him. Dutch
53:10sand,
53:10still in the scar. Bernhard Randeroth, the boy who had lain in the sun on cleared ground to prove it
53:19was
53:19safe, was released in February 1946. He was eighteen and a half. Manfred Sobiella went home too, eventually.
53:29When he was eighty, he said the months he had spent searching for mines in the Netherlands were the worst
53:36of
53:36his life. And he said something else that deserves to be heard. That no German institution had ever
53:44taken any interest in the men who did that work, or in what they had done. Johannes Blazkowicz, the general
53:52who said, jawohl, at Wageningen, was held for trial after the war. In February 1948, in Nuremberg, before his
54:02case could be heard, he took his own life. And remember the German prisoner outside Delfsall in
54:09April, who stepped off the road onto his own army's mine while in Canadian hands? By the time the work
54:16was done, more than two hundred Germans had died the same way, in Allied hands, on German mines, under
54:24their own officers. Those are the German endings, and they are not happy ones. But this was never a German
54:31story. So let's go back to where the orders were given. July 9, 1945. Prince Bernhard returns to the
54:40Hotel de Wereld in Wageningen and unveils a plaque on the building where the surrender was read out.
54:46The hotel has been an inn since the 1600s, and it is still standing. The pen used to sign the
54:54orders
54:54sits in a museum a short walk away. It all started with four words in a list,
55:00read in that building on a May afternoon. A plan of all minefields. And with the short sentence
55:08underneath them, about accuracy, that turned out to matter more than anything else on the page.
55:14Now the two Canadians I asked you to keep in mind from the very first minutes. Charles Foulkes,
55:20the general who read the orders aloud, went home to become chief of the general staff,
55:25the head of the Canadian Army, from 1945 to 1951. Then, as a full general, he spent most of the
55:351950s as
55:36the first chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, the senior officer in the Canadian forces. He died in
55:44Ottawa in September 1969, at 66. And George Molnar, the 22-year-old captain who had put every one of
55:53those
55:53orders into German, who had sat across from the German chief of staff and then helped move 120,000
56:01German soldiers out of Holland, was out of the army before the end of 1945. He went back to school.
56:09He
56:10earned his medical degree in 1951, trained at the Mayo Clinic, and married a woman named Gwen on Christmas
56:17Eve, 1947. They stayed married for more than 70 years. He became the chairman of medicine at the University of
56:27Alberta and helped build the Alberta Diabetes Institute. He died at home in Edmonton in June 2018, at 95.
56:37A colleague who knew him well said this about Wageningen. He only sparingly told people about
56:44the role he played. That is not the way he defined himself. Think about that. The man whose voice the
56:52German 25th Army heard when it was told to hand over its minefields and to answer for their accuracy spent
56:59the next 70 years healing people in Edmonton and hardly mentioned it. So here is the answer, as plainly
57:07as I can give it. The Germans cleared their own minds because a Canadian corps, part of an army of
57:14volunteers from a country of 11 million, took the surrender of an army that had not been beaten in the
57:21field and did not break it. It kept that army whole, put one German at the top on the hook
57:28for everything it
57:29did, and wrote into the orders that the Germans would answer for the truth of their own maps.
57:36Then, when the cost began to show in the dunes, Canadian engineers went and counted it, on their
57:43own initiative, and started a study that the people who clear mines today still call hard to better.
57:51More than a million mines came out of Dutch ground without Canadian sappers having to lift them one by one.
57:59The Dutch, who had every reason to hate the men doing it, did the arithmetic and said so,
58:05and the orders that made it happen were read out in a battered hotel by a general from London, Ontario,
58:12and put into German by a 22-year-old captain from Alberta, who went home, became a doctor,
58:19and never made much of it.
58:21Thank you for spending this time with me, and with the Canadians in this story.
58:27If you think what the Canadians did in Holland in 1945 deserves to be remembered,
58:34a like genuinely helps it find more people. And if you'd like to hear more, we're here every week.
58:42And if your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War,
58:48I'd be honoured to hear about him in the comments.
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