Westerbork
In 1939 the Dutch government erected a refugeecamp in the province Drenthe. The camp is located in Hooghalen, ten kilometer North of the village Westerbork. In Kamp Westerbork Jews of mostly German, but also Austrian, Czechoslovak and Polish origin were housed that tried to escape the Nazi terror in their homestead. During World War II the Nazis used the available facilities and turned it into a deportation camp for Jews, about 400 Gypsies and in the very end of the War for some 400 women from the Resistance.Between 1942 and about mid-1943, almost every Tuesday a cargo train used to leave to go East to the concentration camps Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor. In the period from 1942 till 1945 a total of 107,000 people passed through the camp. Only 5,000 of them survived, most of them in Theresienstadt or Bergen-Belsen, or were liberated in Westerbork.
Anne Frank and her family were put on first of three last trains (the three lasts transports were most probably a reaction to the Allies offensive) on September 2, 1944 for Auschwitz. Three days later they arrived.
The Canadians liberated the camp April 12, 1945. Several hundreds of inhabitants were left. Subsequent to its use in the 2nd World War, the Westerbork camp was first used as a penalty camp for alleged and real collaborators, then to house a military unit, for Dutch nationals who fled the former Dutch Indies and between 1950-1970 it was used to house Indonesian refugees.
In 1969 the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) was installed on the same site, between the villages of Westerbork and Hooghalen. On the site there is now a museum and several memorials to those transported during the 2nd World War.
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