Camp Amersfoort

The interviews were made for the three-hour documentary film History of a Place, which Hans Verhagen made together with Armando in 1978 for VPRO television about the concentration camp Amersfoort (municipality of Leusden). They approach their subject as the history of the (‘guilty’) site. Discussed are: the origins of the camp in 1939 as an army site for mobilised Dutch soldiers, its function as the German occupier’s concentration camp during World War II, its use as a repatriation camp the first months after liberation and as an internment camp for Dutch SS and NSB members immediately afterwards, its demolition in the late 1960s in favour of the new building for the De Boskamp Police Training Centre. The focus, however, is on the period when the camp served as a concentration camp for the German occupiers.

The film was broadcast as the final episode of the series Het gat van Nederland, on 14 May 1978. Many of the interviews are partly conducted walking, including a film camera, through the area around the camp.

As ex-prisoners, Van Dam, Kleinveld, Molenaar, Zoetmulder, Wolders, Van den Burg, Van den Berg, Robeer, chaplain Slots and Schols recount their experiences in the camp. They had mostly ended up there because of resistance activities. They talk about the camp executioners Berg and Kotälla, among others. Also
The following are also interviewed: the contractor who built the barracks in 1939 (Herzinger); the caretaker of the cemetery near the camp, who buried the dead from the camp but also smuggled the living from the site (Jansen); a municipal worker from Leusden who helped prisoners escape whenever possible,
sending letters etcetera (Schut); the son of the owner of Hotel Oud-Leusden, which had been requisitioned by the Germans during the occupation period and was located right next to the camp (Jets); the house painter who painted the barracks both in 1939 and in 1945, shortly after liberation (Van Hoven); the camp’s Amersfoort vegetable supplier (Van Zomeren); the demolisher of the last barracks in the late 1960s (Van Essen); the German Engbrocks, who had been living in the Netherlands for some time before the war, and who was trained as a punishment to become an SS camp guard in Amersfoort in 1941, and was called the “good German” by many prisoners because he tried to help them the employee of the Dutch Red Cross Van Overheem, who, especially in the last year of the war, tried to get as many food parcels into the camp as possible and who was called the ‘white angel of Amersfoort’ by the prisoners (she also played an important role in the camp in the few months it served as a repatriation centre for Dutch people returning from Germany); the camp commander after the liberation (Van Zwol); the director of the Police Training School De Boskamp, whose institute was established on the site in the late 1960s (Steenlaar); some unnamed students and a sports teacher from the police training school on the past of the site in short interviews.

Interviewees: Frans van de Berg, Jan van den Burg, N. van Dam, Willy Engbrocks, R. van Essen, H. Hertzinger, A. van Hoven, Evert Jansen, Martin Jets, Gerrit Kleinveld, Rev. O. Molenaar, mrs. van Overheem, Henk Robeer, Joep Schols, Arie Schut, Jean Slots, M. van Steenlaar, Hans Wolders, S.H.A.M. Zoetmulder, A. van Zomeren, C. van Zwol, some anonymous persons.