A Lifetime of News: Tales of a Foreign Correspondent

By Robert L. Kroon

A Lifetime Of News chronicles Robert L. Kroons wartime years in Holland under German occupation and his life as a foreign correspondent, radio and TV journalist that took him from Europe to East Timor and Easter Island and dozens of other countries in between. It looks back on some of the peoplesome famous, some eccentric, some admirable and others less sothat he interviewed in the course of his career, including the Shah of Iran, Peter Ustinov and Frank Sinatra.
In his introduction, Bob Kroon explains that this book is the offshoot of ten years of current affairs lectures aboard international cruise ships, where he discovered that specific anecdotes illuminating the people and places he covered in his 50 years as a roving correspondent would keep the audience awake, while analytical ponderings about the state of the world had many passengers nodding off.
After these lectures, people often asked him where his book was. So Bob Kroon decided to share some of the more memorable episodes with a larger audience, focusing on the humanity of people who crossed his path.
A Lifetime Of News is a selective, personal chronicle of events and people that shaped his life and career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 27, 2008
• ISBN: 9781465322029

Robert L. Kroon

ROBERT L. KROON was a foreign correspondent for almost 60 years. Born in The Hague, Netherlands in 1924 and a Swiss resident since 1953, his career began in pre-Independence Indonesia as a correspondent with Associated Press. After returning to Europe, he worked mostly for Time–Life, but also for the International Herald Tribune and Dutch and Canadian radio. His linguistic talents (he is fluent in five languages) and convenient Dutch passport got him assigned to hotspots where American correspondents had no access. He worked with the Netherlands Press Association and as a lecturer in current affairs on cruise ships well into his eighties. As he said himself, “I’m too old to quit and too young to stop.”

Book preview

CHAPTER I

Under The Hobnailed Boot

World War II had engulfed the Netherlands and the Nazis were upon us. The Dutch were bewildered and incredulous. Our neutrality had been beyond reproach and it had been taken for granted that the Reich would respect the country’s integrity, as in World War I. The Dutch government and people had shown no overt antagonism toward Adolf Hitler’s regime—perhaps because of historic ties and some measure of Teutonic kinship. More than a few Dutchmen even harbored grudging admiration for Germany’s spectacular rebound from the humiliation of Versailles. Hadn’t the Führer restored national dignity, stamped out unemployment, and like his Italian junior partner Mussolini, made the trains run on time—all in barely six years? Initially, the posturing populist with the bumblebee moustache was seen as a hands-on mover and shaker, a loud-mouthed autocrat, perhaps, but certainly not a megalomaniac scheming to take over all of Europe. But in 1940, we woke up to raw reality. With Hitler’s blitzkrieg rolling over Denmark and Norway, the Dutch still hoped the looming onslaught against France would surge through Belgium and leave Holland alone, as had happened in 1914.

It was not to be. Hitler had his eyes on Rotterdam, Europe’s biggest port and the Rhine’s strategic gateway to the North Sea. In a Nazi-style European Union ruled from Berlin, there was no place for neutrality.

At the crack of dawn on May 10, 1940, I was jolted out of bed by the roar of Messerschmitts and other intrusive hardware of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Climbing onto the flat roof of our apartment building, I saw neighbors gathering to watch a dramatic air show. Oh, it’s just another exercise, my mom shrugged, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

I wasn’t so sure, even though at age fifteen my political insights were still in the formative stage. In the cloudless morning sky, paratroopers were floating down from a dozen Junkers 52 transports. It didn’t take long to realize the exercise was all German, unfriendly, and for real.

Initially the Luftwaffe had its nose bloodied, because the lumbering Junkers were easy prey for the four-barreled anti-aircraft guns positioned throughout The Hague. Several troop transports were pirouetting to earth and trailing black smoke, ejecting doomed soldiers with streaming parachutes.

It was a mesmerizing spectacle. Look at that! We got ’em! I shouted, jumping up and down. We got the bastards! Don’t worry, the English Spitfires will be here any minute!

But the Royal Air Force ignored such wishful thinking. Instead, Stuka dive bombers and more fighters were joining the troop carriers, taking on Dutch air defenses and the Alexander military barracks to the north of the city.

Muffled explosions punctuated the raids, which we later heard also hit the Bethlehem clinic in the center of town. On that fateful morning in May 1940, the Dutch got their first taste of the Nazi war machine’s overwhelming clout. And it was just a foretaste of what lay ahead, as Hitler’s panzer divisions overran the country.

Outgunned and outnumbered, Dutch Army and Marine units desperately tried to stem the invasion, hoping for French and British troops to come to the rescue. Black-uniformed Dutch Marines, known as the Black Devils, fought heroic battles for the strategic bridges in the Rhine-Meuse estuary. But the Allies had other fish to fry—in fact, they were about to get fried themselves.

Still, in the first days of the war, more than 100 German warplanes were shot down over the Netherlands, seriously angering the Führer and his generals. On May 14, the OKW, the German High Command, ordered Dutch resistance to be crushed once and for all. Ninety Heinkel bombers staged a terror raid on Rotterdam, flattening the historic city center in half an hour. Some 900 civilians died, 25,000 homes and 24 churches were destroyed, and 80,000 people were left homeless. The assault was followed by a Nazi ultimatum demanding instant surrender, or Utrecht, The Hague, and other cities would be destroyed as well.

General Henri Winkelman, the Dutch Armed Forces commander, had no options and the Netherlands capitulated within hours. The Royal Family and the government fled to England in a destroyer, leaving the country in a state of gloom and despondency. Five miserable years of occupation had begun.

All things considered, the first months were still bearable. The Germans had their hands full blitzing the French and British forces. In the Netherlands, Hitler’s proconsul Artur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian Nazi who walked with a limp, initially left the administrative structure in place, including a Jewish state secretary for economic affairs, H. Max Hirschfeld, classified as a "wirtschaftlich wertvoller Jude," or economically valuable Jew. He managed to keep his job until the end of the war and testified at the Nuremberg trial.

I was born and bred in The Hague, and that’s where I remained stuck during the occupation. As the Germans consolidated their grip on the country, out-of-town travel became more hazardous by the day.

In 1940, The Hague was a low-skyline conglomeration, often described as a big, sprawling village. There were no skyscrapers and the main landmarks were church steeples, a cluster of government buildings in the center, and a fringe of sand dunes marking the North Sea coastline to the west. Ventilated by a bracing sea wind and devoid of slums or industrial smokestacks, Holland’s administrative capital was a pleasant place to live.

Emerging from tidy row houses like streams of purposeful ants, thousands of civil servants mounted their bicycles and pedaled to work through the tree-lined streets. Bicycles outnumbered cars a hundred to one and air pollution had never been heard of. Well-manicured parks with statues and ponds embellished the city—that is, until 1944 when Haguanians started chopping down the trees for firewood and the uniforms of the German police were the only greenery left.

My parents had divorced the year before the war. With my mother and younger sister Ida, I lived in a southwestern suburb, less than a mile from the sand dunes and the North Sea coast. Perennially short of money, we’d sublet a room to a dignified elderly gentleman, Pieter Smink, whom we called Uncle Pete. Smink was our in-house guru and my intellectual mentor as well. With his professorial moustache and goatee, Uncle Pete looked a bit like Sigmund Freud. In fact, before the war he had corresponded with Professor Freud in Vienna about Dutch translations of some of his writings. An apolitical pacifist but a Germanist by vocation, Uncle Pete taught German history and literature to private students. His Germanophile instincts were bruised by the Nazi invasion and I liked to taunt him with questions, like So you’re anti-Nazi, but pro-German, Uncle Pete?

If you had half a brain, you wouldn’t come up with such dumb remarks, he would shoot back. Nazism is a betrayal of Germany’s great cultural heritage and I still prefer Goethe to Shakespeare.

Well, I prefer Churchill to Hitler and that’s what matters these days, I would reply.

The nearby beaches were our favorite playground until 1943 when the Nazis turned the entire coastline into a bunker-studded defense wall against Allied invaders. Life gradually turned into a daily struggle for survival and the city lost much of its charm. Concert halls and cinemas featured culturally correct fare, drawing many Germans and discouraging most Dutch theatergoers. Home entertainment and private parties became popular substitutes. In our neighborhood, a group of accomplished amateur musicians formed a jazz band called the Swing Papas. Since the Nazi occupiers frowned on degenerate Negro music, they performed mainly in private homes or basements.

As for public spectacles, we had to make do with German military bands parading through town, followed by soldiers stamping their hobnailed boots on the cobblestone streets and sounding off with imperious war chants. One of their favorites was the so-called Das Englandlied—the England Song. In a very approximate translation it went something like this:

High from the mast our banner is flying,

Proclaiming our Reich’s might and power,

And soon we’ll see the Englishman cower,

No longer will we tolerate his arrogance and scorn.

Because we are on the move,

We’re marching against England. Ahoy!

More often than not, this martial paean would be interrupted by an officer leading the column yelling Halt! The singers stopped in mid-chorus as if someone had pulled a plug.

This isn’t singing, this is whimpering! the officer would bellow. "When German soldiers sing, windowpanes shatter and rain down on us! Once more, Das Englandlied! One, two, three, four!"

If windowpanes shattered it was more likely because of Allied bombing. Operation Sea Lion, Hitler’s grand move against England, fizzled like a wet firecracker after the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain in 1941.

At war’s outbreak, I was a student at The Hague’s Vrijzinnig Christelijk Lyceum. VCL was a private liberal Protestant grammar school, an upscale hall of learning with a six-year curriculum of Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, and Latin. Linguistically impaired students were summarily weeded out.

I loved languages so I had no problem with the syllabus, but as VCL’s first scholarship student, sponsored by my mother’s Mennonite Church, coping with the social barriers in this environment of privilege was something else.

But the Nazi occupation had at least one beneficial effect: it was a great equalizer, instantly rubbing out all social dividing lines. Gone were the private cars, the holier-than-thou attitudes, and annual school excursions abroad, which my folks couldn’t afford anyway. I no longer found myself the odd boy out. My grades improved along with my self-confidence and I graduated number two in a class of twelve.

The daily eight-mile commute to VCL kept me in shape until my bicycle tires wore out and the frequently punctured inner tubes defied further patching. Rubber tires had vanished from the stores and the usurious black-market prices were beyond our reach.

Graduation came in June 1943. The timing was fortuitous because that summer the Nazis converted the new VCL building into a military hospital and classes had to be sandwiched into other schools in town.

When I left VCL at eighteen, the postgraduate ladder to the prestigious University of Leiden beckoned. But I could never scale it for a number of compelling reasons. Enrollment at universities was subject to a mandatory Declaration of Loyalty to the German overlords, an act of submission most students refused to sign. Those who did comply were not necessarily pro-Nazi, but they would come to rue their decision in later years. After Liberation, most Dutch employers withheld their welcome mats for wartime college graduates and many frustrated job-seekers opted for emigration to the United States, Canada, South Africa, or Australia, where employers had shorter memories. With or without the Declaration of Loyalty, staying alive and out of trouble had become more compelling priorities, so in the end my university ambitions remained academic.

In 1942 the national mood was turning grimmer by the day. Germany’s unstoppable blitzkrieg convinced many citizens that Holland would wind up as a satrapy of the Reich—like most of Europe, for that matter. This mindset was not simply abject defeatism. Postwar chronicles would reveal that after the rout of the British Army at Dunkirk in 1940, even the intrepid Winston Churchill had strong doubts that The Island could survive Operation Sea Lion.

Truth is the first casualty in war, and no one proved this more convincingly than Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief spin doctor. In his radio orations, the propaganda minister boasted that Germany’s U-boats would give the cigar of that drunkard Churchill a very unpleasant aftertaste. Damn the torpedoes, we said wistfully, though it was hard to deny Hitler’s submarines were lethally effective in the early war years.

Informing the public has always been a tough challenge for dictatorial regimes, especially in wartime, because news happens unexpectedly, leaving ideologues little time for credible explanations. Even when the tide finally turned against Germany at Stalingrad and El Alamein, Nazi-controlled radio kept beating the drums about Hitler’s victorious crusade against communism, plutocracy, and the Jewish world conspiracy.

Dutch media refusing to toe the line were soon shut down by the Kulturkammer, Goebbels’ cultural Gestapo. With the national media reduced to Nazi mouthpieces, news-starved citizens tuned in to Radio Oranje in London, the voice of their exiled government, or the BBC, which was strictly verboten. Determined to cure the Dutch of what they called the English disease, the Nazis confiscated all private radios in 1942 and started jamming BBC frequencies around the clock.

But quarantining English disease patients didn’t always work. In coastal regions, including The Hague, the BBC’s infectious fare still got through, thanks to makeshift antennas and hidden radios.

Frans Vink, the lanky pianist of our Swing Papas jazz band, was not only a first-class musician but a resourceful tinkerer as well. On his balcony Frans jury-rigged a directional antenna, so we could keep up with the latest Anglo-American hit parades as well as the BBC evening news.

After nightfall I joined a group of neighborhood friends in furtive radio sessions at Frans’ place. In time, we became certified Glenn Miller fans and dreamed along with Vera Lynn, the Sweetheart of the Forces, warbling about the White Cliffs of Dover. And there was an American newcomer named Frankie Sinatra, whose buttery ballads would bring our girlfriends close to a romantic meltdown.

The BBC sustained our morale with pep talks from Winston Churchill and our own exiled Queen Wilhelmina. Compared with Nazi propaganda, BBC newscasts ranked as the gospel truth, about Allied progress as well as setbacks. Those evenings at Frans’ place planted the seeds of my lifelong affinity with BBC news in war and peace.

This is the BBC Home and Forces Programme with the nine o’clock news, and this is Joseph Macleod reading it, came the voice of our favorite presenter through the crackling static. Royal Air Force bombers today struck a railway marshaling yard near Hamburg in strength. Seventy-two of our bombers are missing.

Such disclosures reduced us to silence and we exchanged worried looks.

My God, said Frans. That means hundreds of airmen dead or captured. How long can you sustain losses like that?

At least they’re telling it like it is, I said. "Ever hear the Moffen admit they couldn’t win the Battle of Britain?"

"Moffen was the Dutch sobriquet for Germans; the American equivalent was Krauts, the Brits preferred Huns or the less contemptuous Jerries, and the French label was Boches."

We decided to jot down the nightly BBC headlines and start a kind of samizdat newsletter for distribution around our quarter. Translated news summaries were pecked out on an old Remington typewriter, and with a borrowed mimeograph machine, we eventually managed a pretty nice press run. Delving into these proto-journalistic operations with patriotic gusto, we airily ignored the Kulturkammer snoops or their Dutch collaborators trying to catch English disease patients.

In the fall of 1943, we received a warning that the Korevaars, a pro-German couple living two blocks down the street, seemed to be aware of our publishing venture. It was worrisome news because the Korevaars were known to welcome Nazi trackers with triangulation equipment, trawling for suspect radio signals.

We always vetted our distribution list, but such a random operation could never be foolproof. Spreading the English disease in our neighborhood was getting too tricky, and after two months we regretfully decided to kill the publishing venture and restrict our news service to friends and trusted acquaintances. But in major Dutch cities, clandestine publishing continued in defiance of all the hazards. After the war, some of the underground newsletters morphed into regular newspapers, and some are still in print, like Amsterdam’s Trouw and Het Parool.

While short-lived, our wartime samizdat operation served as an incubator for journalistic wannabes like myself and the memory remains indelible—not least because my English disease would eventually lead to a very drastic cure in 1944, in the final months of the occupation.

As the war went on, the Nazis not only seized our radios. They also carried off to Germany food supplies, gold, jewelry, bicycles, trucks, church bells, and everything else classified as war booty.

The occupiers also ordered thousands of young men into the Arbeitseinsatz, a euphemistic Germanism for forced labor in the war industry. Despite promises of good food and correct wages, volunteers were few and far between so the occupation authorities resorted to more forceful methods, like rounding up able-bodied men.

These operations were conducted with Teutonic thoroughness, combing quarter by quarter and street by street. Arbeitseinsatz candidates were summoned to stand in front of their house at a specified hour with a blanket, towel, and one-day food supply, waiting to be picked up by German army trucks. Since our Azalea Street had netted just one volunteer, soldiers soon arrived on a door-to-door sweep for draft dodgers.

When the doorbell rang, I was hiding with three friends under the floorboards at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Nuis, a brave, elderly couple across the street. Hiding in your own place was not advisable, for the Nazis had seized all the official residence registers. We knew Arbeitseinsatz recruiters would occasionally fire through floors, ceilings, or double-walled closets to discourage any subterfuge. As luck would have it, our particular search team consisted of two dispirited Wehrmacht veterans. After a perfunctory look-see, they pocketed a box of matches from the kitchen and left after five minutes with a curt "Auf Wiedersehen." We resurfaced from our shallow underground shelter with shattered nerves and bursting bladders.

In this deadly game of hide and seek, Holland’s large Jewish community was not so fortunate. The Dutch chapter of the Holocaust lists more than 100,000 victims of the Final Solution—mostly unknown Jews, save one towering exception named Anne Frank. After the Liberation, the Amsterdam teenager’s wartime diary became a planetary bestseller and her gripping chronicle of love and hate still haunts millions the world over. Like Anne Frank, thousands of other Jews were sheltered by Dutch families at their peril. These unsung heroes shared their meager rations and risked life and limb hiding "Untermenschen" marked by a yellow star for extermination in Himmler’s death factories.

In our own neighborhood I knew of about three families hiding Jewish fugitives in their homes. With the deportation in full swing in 1943, one Jewish couple escaped the Auschwitz death train by hiding in two caskets at a funeral parlor, not far from my place. It was a grisly but effective shelter. Somehow Nazi hunters and their henchmen seemed to have no appetite for coffins or morgues.

In 1943, Berlin ordered the total evacuation of The Hague’s seaside quarters to clear the way for the West Wall, a chain of coastal fortifications running from Norway to the Spanish border. In a matter of two weeks almost one fifth of the city population was evicted from the Sperrgebiet, the German term for a no-go area, and the mostly upper-class residential neighborhood changed into a desolate landscape of shadows. Anti-tank ditches as wide as canals were dug to separate the coastal strip from the rest of the town. For tens of thousands of Haguanians it was a bitter fate, but our Azalea Street, just a few hundred yards outside the restricted zone, was luckily left alone.

I managed to find a temp job at one of the food rationing centers near the evacuation zone, where displaced citizens had to turn in their Stamkaart—a kind of ID master card with coupons for food rations and other necessities. Each coupon entitled the holder to a weekly supply of ration stamps for bread, meat, margarine, potatoes, sugar, soap, and cigarettes. At the center we took in the evacuees’ documents against a voucher for a new Stamkaart after their relocation.

The collected cards were earmarked for destruction. But that struck us as overly draconian, so we decided to salvage some of the valuable documents from the shredder. For our own private collection, one of my senior colleagues clarified. Are you in?

I guess so, I said.

As a newcomer, I was a tad worried about this unlawful recycling procedure, but farmers, bakers, and butchers were still eating well, so why shouldn’t hard-working civil servants keep a few extra ration cards for their own families?

We’re not cheating anybody, only the shredder, noted one fellow worker, impeccable logic in those days of fast-dwindling food supplies.

When the evacuation was over, I had saved half a dozen ID cards, but it was a blessing in disguise, since the documents were in other people’s names. The only way to validate them for food coupons was to get on the inside track. Since I needed a job anyway, I managed to get a transfer to another distribution center, conveniently located in a converted school building nearer my home.

Now the system worked to perfection. Detaching coupons from my private Stamkaart collection, pasting them on control forms, and self-issuing a set of food stamps required no college degree. My extra rations would become the family’s lifeline for the remainder of the occupation.

While the job was a no-brainer, a good measure of caution was in order, because the new workplace was under much stricter supervision than the earlier temporary facility. And it didn’t help that my new boss, a glum bureaucrat named Jan Doelder, was rumored to be in cahoots with the Krauts. But by and large, the atmosphere was pleasant, the work remunerative, the colleagues easygoing, and the clients friendly and grateful, especially when I slipped them some cigarette stamps. A minor sacrifice, because I was still a nicotine virgin at the time.

Issuing food stamps had humanitarian aspects as well, I soon discovered. After a few weeks at the job I got caught up in a clandestine relief operation with Peter Borgman, a neighborhood friend and classmate from my VCL days.

I was aware that Peter, a tall, dapper honcho, was into resistance work. One evening he dropped by to seek my help in channeling food rations to his friends in the underground.

Bob, this will be an absolute secret between you and me. My people are on the German blacklist and they’d risk arrest or worse if they turn up at a distribution office, he said. So that’s why I need your assistance, mate. If I bring their ID cards to your office, would it be possible for you to detach the coupons in exchange for ration stamps—no questions asked?

Jesus, Peter, you’re putting me straight in the firing line, I said nervously. "Maybe I could finagle a couple, but how many Stamkaarten are you talking about?"

Oh, let’s start with a dozen as a trial run. We do more later if it works out.

Works out, what do you mean? I protested. Rations are issued on a per-family basis and you’re talking about a family of a dozen? We’re subjected to random inspections with body searches and all that, and the boss is chummy with the Gestapo. If I get caught, are you going to collect my rations as well?

Aw, c’mon, it’s for a good cause, Peter insisted. These guys are taking incredible risks, like running escape lines for downed Allied pilots and stuff like that. If their identities get blown, they’re dead. But as long as they’re alive, they have to eat, no?

It made sense, and the next day I called Peter to say I would play ball. Let’s start with three or four cards and see how it works out, I said. If there’s a problem, I’ll have to flag you off.

For Queen, Country and the Allied victory, I had to do my modest bit.

In wartime Holland the resistance movement was active, but operating more covertly than in places like Yugoslavia or France. Free French fighters thought nothing of bottling up a German armored column on an Alpine hairpin road by dynamiting access and exit points, and moving in to the attack. But pancake-flat Holland was no place for such spectaculars. Besides, the Dutch resistance was riddled with double agents and spies. Many British-trained operatives were parachuted right into the arms of the waiting enemy and shot.

The Dutch resistance focused on sabotage, intel transmissions to London, and rescue operations for Allied airmen shot down over occupied territory. Escape lines to Britain ran via neutral Spain, Switzerland, or Portugal through occupied Belgium and France, using every available transport—train, tram, horse-drawn carriages, or bicycle. Locating safe houses and trusted intermediaries, and eluding the Gestapo and their collaborators, called for meticulous planning, maximum discretion, and networking with sometimes dubious foreign resistance cells.

The raw courage of escape-line escorts was mind-boggling. A good example was Jet Rosenburg, the athletic daughter of a Hague physician, whose exploits became widely known after the war. As a courier for Swiss-based Allied agents, Jet thought nothing of bicycling hundreds of miles through Belgium and France to reach Basel. One unlucky day, while escorting an injured British pilot, Rosenburg ran into a German roadblock and was arrested. By an unimaginable stroke of luck, she was spared the firing squad and spent the rest of the war in a jail in eastern Germany.

After the German surrender, the plucky lady walked home through the ruins of Germany and chronicled her adventures in a bestselling book, The Walls Came Tumbling Down. While on a promotional lecture circuit in New York, Rosenburg caught the eye of Time–Life supremo Henry Luce and was hired as a writer for Life magazine.

Many couriers who got caught were not as fortunate. My friend Willem Boebie Brugsma ran into a Gestapo trap while on a mission to Paris in the fall of 1944. Spending the night in the supposedly safe house of Amélie Reboul, the Dutch widow of a French general, Brugsma was awakened, not with the promised breakfast in bed, but by two Nazi agents in ankle-length raincoats and fedoras. After wishing him good morning they shackled him to the metal bed frame and returned an hour later with unsettling questions about fake identity papers they found in his backpack. Madame Reboul was no traitor, but the frequent comings and goings at her place had aroused the Gestapo’s suspicion. The widow was arrested, another safe house was lost, and Brugsma wound up in Dachau, just after his 23rd birthday.

Miraculously, he survived the 16-month ordeal in Germany’s oldest concentration camp, where his