Gelkinkweg, De Heurne
In the summer of 1944, De Bark, an uninhabited farm between Aalten and Dinxperlo, became a hiding place for a growing number of mostly young people in hiding, who wanted to avoid the Arbeitseinsatz, as well as a few Allied pilots who had been shot down.
On Sunday morning, February 25, 1945, the guard sounded the alarm when three German soldiers from a surveying unit made an unexpected visit to the front house, where they had found no fighters but possibly suspicious objects.
After leaving the house, the Germans were arrested, disarmed and imprisoned by the ‘Lange Henk’ and comrades, armed with a sten gun. The same happened to their colleague who was waiting for them in an army truck. The command was then faced with a complex problem: how to keep it out of the knowledge of the German occupier and what to do with the four prisoners?
Death penalty
An improvised court-martial of De Bark pronounced the death penalty. Shooting them and then burying them was too cumbersome and risky. The final conclusion was: hang up. And so it happened.
The four corpses were driven into a tree by Jan Ket in a car, undermined with two explosive charges, in a recent bomb crater near Varsseveld. They were placed in the vehicle in the best possible position, after which the explosives were ignited. Only one went off, but the explosion was heavy. Ket and his men, who had to get away, were sure of their case.
That same evening, a German patrol found the partially burned-out car with the corpses of two Wehrmacht soldiers next to it with cords around their legs and welts around their necks. The two other bodies were unrecognizable. Later research showed that the rear explosive charge did not go off due to the force of the front one.
Reprisal
The reprisal measure of the German occupying forces was merciless. Forty-six political prisoners were taken from the camp De Kruisberg (Doetinchem) and executed on the border of Aalten and Wisch, near the Aalten toll.
In the meantime, the resistance group had left De Bark according to plan and moved to an old agricultural shed on the Dinxperlosestraatweg between Aalten and Dinxperlo. The news that the ruse with the staged ‘car accident’ had failed and the German reprisal by liquidating 46 Dutch political prisoners did not reach them until many days later. It first aroused disbelief in them and then a deep impression.
They were not given much time for reflection and processing, because in the meantime four Allied divisions had crossed the Rhine and were approaching the Achterhoek. On March 30, they made contact for the first time with two Canadian combat vehicles, which turned up at the ‘Somsenhuus‘. The liberation was a fact.
