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The Dutch-German border was eventually blocked by the German-built Wire of Death. As well as Belgian civilians, there were political refugees from Germany, such as the German-American socialist Carl Minster; Germans escaping conscription into the army; and prisoners-of-war who had escaped from German camps, mostly Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles.
The end of the wire near the Scheldt. The wire near a Belgian farm, including a German patrol. Construction began in the spring of 1915 and consisted of over 200 km (125 mi) of 2,000-volt wire with a height ranging from 1.5 to about 3 m (5 to about 10 ft) spanning the length of the Dutch-Belgian border from Aix-la-Chapelle to the River Scheldt.
The Dutch Marechaussee border guards searched for them and returned any found to Germany, despite the horrors of Kristallnacht being well known. [3] In 1939 Nicholas Winton succeeded with his Kindertransport, thanks to the guarantees he had obtained from Britain. After the first train, the process of crossing the Netherlands went smoothly. [4]
The German occupation of Belgium (French: Occupation allemande, Dutch: Duitse bezetting) of World War I was a military occupation of Belgium by the forces of the German Empire between 1914 and 1918. Beginning in August 1914 with the invasion of neutral Belgium , the country was almost completely overrun by German troops before the winter of the ...
The Batavi (Batavians) were a Germanic tribe, originally part of the Chatti, reported by Tacitus to have lived around the Rhine delta, in the area which is currently the Netherlands, "an uninhabited district on the extremity of the coast of Gaul, and also of a neighbouring island, surrounded by the ocean in front, and by the river Rhine in the rear and on either side" (Tacitus, Histories iv).
The city of Antwerp (military governor general, Victor Deguise) was defended by numerous forts and other defensive positions and was considered to be impregnable.Since the 1880s, Belgian defence planning had been based on holding barrier forts on the Meuse (Maas) at Liège and at the confluence of the Meuse and the Sambre rivers at Namur, to prevent French or German armies from crossing the ...
Border Jägers, jägers trained in the Finnish Border Guard; Coastal Jaegers, marine commando unit of the Finnish Navy; Häme Mounted Jäger Battalion, previously Häme Cavalry Regiment, dismounted in 1944, disbanded in 2014.
In 1915 the German army built a 332 kilometre long electric fence along the border between Belgium and the Netherlands. The high voltage electric fence was kept electrified until the end of the war. It is estimated that between 2,000 and 3,000 people, including Belgian refugees, died attempting to cross the fence.