Archive to reveal new details on WWII Jews' arrests

By TOBY STERLING - The Associated Press

AMSTERDAM — The Netherlands' national archive said Tuesday it has gathered new information about the arrests and deportations of some 9,000 Dutch Jews during World War II.

The information, from a sealed archive on wartime collaborators, will reveal to some Dutch Jews the names of those who arrested their relatives and other precious facts about their final days as they were deported to Nazi concentration camps during the German occupation of the Netherlands from 1940 to 1945.

The project was carried out by journalist Ad van Liempt and a team of researchers who received special permission in Sept. 2010 to review dossiers of 250 collaborators who are no longer alive.

It primarily centers on the work of the "Henneicke Column" — a group of Dutch Nazi collaborators working in the investigative division of the government's Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration, which employed police and bounty hunters to find Jews who had escaped the net of the Nazis and their informers...

Read more at MSNBC

Film documents WWII soldiers' graveyard

Erik Ofgang, Contributing Writer


One morning two years ago, Jeff Wiggins was sitting in his New Fairfield home when his wife answered the phone. An everyday occurrence, but during the conversation that followed she said a word that made his blood run cold: "Margraten."

It was a word Wiggins, 86, had not heard nor spoken to anyone for almost 65 years -- not even Janice, his wife of 42 years. Sixty-five years of nightmares, haunted memories and trying unsuccessfully to forget.

Margraten is a small village in the Netherlands. It had a population of 1,300 people in 1944, when it became the site of a massive graveyard for Allied soldiers. By the war's end, 28,000 soldiers had been buried there.

Wiggins, who is originally from Alabama, is the only known survivor of a group of 280 black American servicemen who worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, digging those graves.

In harsh weather and muddy conditions, they buried the mutilated corpses of young soldier after young soldier.

The phone call Wiggins got two years ago was...

Read more at the CTPOST.com