Arnhem

In Oosterbeek, in the eastern part of the Netherlands, the German presence was minimal compared with the occupied cities in the west of the country. A few soldiers were billeted in requisitioned homes; a heavy hand hardly seemed necessary with the border of the Reich just a dozen or so miles away. Here you could still, to some extent, get on with your life and try to ignore the ugliness of the bigger picture. Anje and her friends from school were free to play in the streets and woods near her home – ‘hide and seek, that sort of thing, football, tennis and hockey, of course, normal children’s games, amidst the war’. Yet the occupation was still an unforgivable affront. Older people might be more accommodating, playing a longer, subtler game, but young people like her were deeply resentful of the Germans. ‘We’d hear the soldiers singing in the streets – our streets – and that made me very angry. I thought they were monsters. We couldn’t go to the cinema, to the theatre or to concerts because that’s where the Germans were. The films, everything, were in German. I hated it.’

There were more Moffen encamped just a mile or so along the road to the east in neighbouring Arnhem – of which affluent Oosterbeek and its handful of streets and comfortable hotels was increasingly an overspill, a suburb. Centuries-old Arnhem, with its pretty squares, parks and large houses, was a solid place, rooted in the past but with a purpose in the present as the provincial capital and administrative centre of Gelderland.⁴ It had thrived in the Middle Ages as a trading city, been fought over by dukes and emperors and was, by the twentieth century, established as a quiet, genteel place among whose magnificent greenery Dutch merchants liked to retire to live out their old age in comfortable, bourgeois splendour. It possessed the refined atmosphere of Richmond or Bath, but with the strategic importance of its position on the Rhine.

The Rhine was many things: a vital line of communication, a border, a barrier, a battleground. But, more than anything, this ancient waterway was a potent German symbol. It fed myths and legends of gods and maidens and Teutonic knights as it rose in the Swiss Alps some 750 miles away, passed through wooded gorges, beneath cliff-top castles and by medieval trading towns, then poured through industrial cities such as Cologne and Düsseldorf. Berlin was Germany’s capital, Bavaria its spiritual home, but the Rhineland was its heart and its powerhouse. Along the way the river picked up tributaries – the Neckar, the Main, the Mosel, the Ruhr – before, wide and fast flowing, it crossed out of Germany and into the Netherlands.

There, it divided for the last leg to the North Sea. The main river took a southerly route and, renamed the Waal, rushed towards Nijmegen and on towards the coast. The lesser stream meandered to the north, into Arnhem, under the town’s massive road bridge – the only one for miles – and then past Oosterbeek’s wide, grassy banks, where locals came to swim in its muddy waters, before rolling down to the estuary at Rotterdam. This was the Neder Rijn, the Lower Rhine, and to Anje and her friends it was their adolescent playground. ‘We would bathe in the Rhine or paddle around in canoes. I swam all the way across’ – it was a quarter of a mile there and back at this point – ‘a couple of times because there was an orchard on the other side where we could pick cherries.’ In the autumn of 1944, though, it would be the scene of an epic battle that would add a new chapter of courage and self-sacrifice to the rolling Rhine’s never-ending story.