Sunday, May 1, 2016

The tale of the “Diepenveensche Tabak Centrale”


(Dutch Pipe Smoker) ... Germans were recruiting workers in the occupied areas who had to take the places of the men in the German industry who had to fight in the front lines. In the beginning the appearance of voluntariness was upheld. The tactic then was: make them unemployed and offer them work elsewhere (read: Germany). They could not reasonably refuse that and if they did that was a good excuse to arrest them. To escape that employment in Germany a cat and mouse game went on in the tobacco sector in which the Centraal Distributie Kantoor (Central Distribution Office) and the Rijksbureau voor Tabak en Tabaksproducten often secretly sided with the mouse. They must have known that the fields with meters high tobacco plants were ideal hiding places for a couple of months per year for people who had to hide. Continued

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