Schoonloo, Hooghalen, Grolloo

This route takes you through an important and difficult period in Dutch history: the Second World War. You cycle large parts of the route through the dense, silent forests and open meadows of the Drenthe heartland. In the vast nature reserve near Hooghalen, you course along winding roads past little fens, bits of sandy plains and beautiful, multifaceted rows of trees. Until nature ends in a place that literally and figuratively leaves you speechless: the grounds of former Camp Westerbork.

Tucked away in this nature reserve, Camp Westerbork is one of the most important relics of Dutch wartime history. From 1942 to 1945, ninety trains departed from here towards Germany and Poland, with a total of more than 100,000 people on board. These were mainly Jewish people. They were rounded up at Camp Westerbork and later taken ruthlessly to a destination, where death often awaited them in a concentration or extermination camp. The majority left for Auschwitz, in Poland.

With the above numbers, Westerbork is by far the largest Dutch transit camp of World War II. It took another two years from the occupation in May 1940 before the Nazis took over the camp from the Dutch government in July 1942. Until then, it had been a refugee camp for Jewish refugees from Germany. In January that year, the Nazi leadership had decided to launch the Final Solution: all European Jews were to be systematically exterminated. So also the Jews living in the Netherlands. Many of them stayed in Westerbork for only a short time, only to be deported by train. With an unknown but dreaded destination.

Around the camp, which was demolished in the 1970s for the construction of an observatory, you can still find all kinds of buildings and objects that bear witness to the black events of the German occupation. The memorial centre houses a small museum about the period when the site served as a transit camp. You will also find the war memorial, with its more than one hundred thousand memorial stones and the remaining rails of the train track. You can walk along a path where the camp's approach route used to be. There is also an original residence of the camp commander still standing on the grounds. These are places to reflect on this black period in history, in the already quiet, natural surroundings of the former camp.



Old photos: National Archives.

This Premium cycle route was compiled by our editor: Huub Mol.