Although it is unlikely they would have been successful in starting the engine without the advice of a local fisherman, there were chaotic scenes on the quayside as whole families, mostly Jewish, some Dutch and other refugees from Germany, all desperate to escape imprisonment in the Nazi concentration camps, surged on board, A soldier fired a warning shot over the heads of those trying to board the overcrowded lifeboat and one man fell into the water making a desperate leap to join his family. Later the same evening, in desperation to get away from the harbour, four university students hi-jacked the Zeemanshoop by breaking open the padlock on the hatch to the engine room. Now aged 98, with publisher Bill Forster, in 2015 Last surviving hijacker, Karel Dahmen (left),
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In the early hours of Tuesday 14 May the British Naval Attaché at the The Hague arrived in Scheveningen (the Hook of Holland was now in German hands) and M J Bruin, skipper of the Zeemanshoop, took him and his staff out to another waiting Royal Navy destroyer which they boarded under fire from German aircraft before returning safely to harbour. By Monday 13 May it was clear the the military situation was hopeless and that morning, the Queen of the Netherlands, Queen Wilhelmina, left for England from the Hook of Holland aboard the destroyer HMS Hereward. The seat of government, The Hague, was twenty miles to the north west and Scheveningen, The Hague’s main seaside resort, had a large fishing harbour where a lifeboat, the Zeemanshoop – the Seaman’s Hope – was berthed. German troops were soon entering the southern outskirts of Rotterdam, the commercial heart of Holland. The German invasion of the Netherlands had begun at 4am on Friday 10 May with the the bombing of an airfield south of Rotterdam followed by the dropping of paratroopers. A month prior to this, on Tuesday 14 th and Wednesday 15 th May 1940, another heroic escape took place. The award-winning film “Dunkirk” graphically depicts boats full of retreating British and French soldiers who had arrived on the beaches of northern France waiting to be evacuated in what Winston Churchill described as a “miracle of deliverance”. By May 1940 the situation was deteriorating by the day. Only the English Channel separated these desperate people from reaching the sanctuary of Great Britain.
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The people of the countries of Holland, Belgium and France were on the front line. Thousands of refugees were then fleeing the jackboots of Adolf Hitler’s army as it marched across Europe. Seventy eight years ago the situation was little different. Reports from the Mediterranean and elsewhere continue to highlight the cruel plight of refugees taking to the sea in boats to escape despotic regimes in their own countries. Such occurrences, even if not always off our own coasts, have now become commonplace. 29 th March 2018 by Aspect County In 2018 this headline may not raise too many eyebrows.