June 2023
THE 1946 RIOT AND SEIGE AT CAMP DUINDORP
A NEW PERSPECTIVE
New information on a 1946 riot and subsequent two-day siege at Camp Duindorp, near The Hague, where thousands of collaborators—many of whom had been members of the Dutch SS—were imprisoned after the Second World War, is provided by Jan Jürgen Petersen, one of the prisoners who lived through these events. The information is presented in a new book about Petersen, A Snake on the Heart – History, Mystery, and Truth: The Entangled Journeys of a Biographer and His Nazi Subject, by Patrick Wolfe.
Petersen described the camp as “a very bad world” due to extreme privation where prisoners ate weeds to supplement their diet. He said the prisoners eventually learned that they should have been receiving considerably more in the way of food, clothing, and other provisions, but these supplies were being “largely stolen by officials” before they got to the prison camps. As time passed, the atmosphere at Camp Duindorp steadily worsened and the prisoners became “more and more full of hatred,” which prompted the “riot situation,” according to Petersen.
For detailed BACKGROUNDER: “The 1946 riot and siege at Camp Duindorp: A New Perspective”