Qualla: Putten

Putten: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jgmhendriksen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Putten was first written down in the year 855, in a document recording who owed what to which monastery, and for the next thousand years it stayed more or less the same kind of place: a Reformed farming village on the western edge of the Veluwe, sheep on the heath, cows in the meadows, a single late-Gothic church at the center of everything. Then, on one autumn morning in 1944, almost every man in town was taken away. Putten has never quite separated itself from that morning. Walk down the Dorpsstraat today and you can still feel both Puttens at once - the practical, market-day Veluwe village, and the village that lost its men.

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Image: Jgmhendriksen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Putten: Older Than the Coastline

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patomena, CC BY-SA 3.0. There were small settlements here in Roman times, and by the 10th century a stone church anchored a cluster of hamlets that would eventually swallow neighboring villages whole. Parts of present-day Nijkerk and Voorthuizen were once Putten land, until they spun off as independent ...

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Image: Patomena | CC BY-SA 3.0

Putten: Paper, Pines and Patients

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Deb Collins, CC BY 2.0. Agriculture has always paid the bills in Putten, but it was never the only trade. From the 17th through the 19th century the village ran paper mills, taking advantage of the clean streams running off the Veluwe sand. When the railway arrived in 1863, Putten suddenly had a differe...

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Image: Deb Collins | CC BY 2.0

Putten: The Weight of October

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brbbl, CC BY-SA 3.0. One date dominates the village calendar. On 1 and 2 October 1944, in retaliation for a Dutch resistance ambush near Nijkerk, the Wehrmacht surrounded Putten and deported almost every man between 18 and 50 - 602 of them in the end - to concentration camps at Neuengamme and elsewhe...

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Image: Brbbl | CC BY-SA 3.0

Putten: Wednesdays at the Market

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MartinD, CC BY-SA 3.0. Daily life in modern Putten is, mercifully, less dramatic. Agriculture still matters, but the service sector dominates now, and tourism leans hard on what's around: the Veluwe, the largest national park in the Netherlands, rolling out to the east in heather and ancient woodland; ...

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Image: MartinD | CC BY-SA 3.0

Putten: Faces of the Village

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim Judges at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.5. Putten's home-grown roster is small but eclectic. Hendrik van Boeijen, born here in 1889, served as a national politician and Minister of the Interior during the years just before the war. The trance and electro producer Ummet Ozcan, born in 1982, grew up in Putten before turning...

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Image: Jim Judges at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 2.5