Qualla: Kamp Amersfoort

Kamp Amersfoort: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P.J.L Laurens, CC BY 2.5. They came on foot from the railway sidings, walking through ordinary residential streets in Amersfoort to reach the camp gate. Witnesses inside the houses remembered the silhouettes behind the lace curtains: their own children, mostly motionless, sometimes lifting a hand in a small uncertain wave that an adult quickly pulled back down. Forty-seven thousand prisoners would make that walk between August 1941 and April 1945. They were Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, resistance fighters, Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, clergy, hostages, alleged smugglers, ordinary Dutchmen swept up for reasons large and small. Most survived the camp. Many did not survive what came after, when the trains continued east. Kamp Amersfoort was a transit camp, but the word transit is doing too much work. The prisoners were beaten, starved, frozen, infected, and worked into illness here. Some were killed in the woods nearby. Then the survivors were put on trains.

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Image: P.J.L Laurens | CC BY 2.5

Kamp Amersfoort: Polizeiliches Durchgangslager

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marja van Vulpen, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. Before the war, the site was a complex of barracks attached to artillery exercises on the Leusderheide, the heath just north of the municipality of Leusden. The Germans took it over and gave it an official name in two words of bureaucratic German: Polizeiliches Durchgangslager Am...

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Image: Marja van Vulpen | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

Kamp Amersfoort: The One Hundred and One

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit W. Bulach, CC BY-SA 4.0. After Operation Barbarossa, Soviet prisoners of war began to arrive. Among them, in late 1941, were 101 Uzbek soldiers, men from Central Asia conscripted into the Red Army, captured in the western frontier campaigns and shipped to the Netherlands for a reason that survives only a...

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Image: W. Bulach | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kamp Amersfoort: Names of the Cruelty

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sem Presser / Anefo, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. The camp leaders are named in the surviving documents and were tried in Dutch courts after the war. SS-Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer Karl Peter Berg, in command from January 1943, was described by witnesses as a predator who took pleasure in others' suffering, sneaking behind the rows of...

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Image: Sem Presser / Anefo | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

Kamp Amersfoort: Life in the Camp

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wikifrits, CC BY 3.0. Between 1941 and 1943, around 8,800 people were imprisoned at Amersfoort; 2,200 were deported to Germany. Between 1943 and 1945, 26,500 more passed through; 18,000 were sent east to Buchenwald, Natzweiler, and other camps. After the July 1942 deportations of Dutch Jews began, Ame...

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Image: Wikifrits | CC BY 3.0

Kamp Amersfoort: What Remains, and What Does Not

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Willem Nabuurs, CC BY-SA 4.0. The site today is the Nationaal Monument Kamp Amersfoort, a memorial and museum on the boundary between the municipalities of Amersfoort and Leusden. The single watchtower from 1943 still stands. So do the ruins of the mortuary, the rebuilt rose garden where bodies were once stac...

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Image: Willem Nabuurs | CC BY-SA 4.0