1940-1945. The resistance in the dutch province of Limburg

Herten

The village of Herten has been a quarter of the municipality of Roermond since January 1, 1991. [1]
In 1942 the center of the village was destroyed by a bomb explosion. In 1944 and 1945 the entire population of Herten was evacuated (by the Germans) to Drente, Groningen and Friesland. [2]
During the war, 27 inhabitants of Herten were killed by wartime violence: two soldiers, seven bombing victims, six dead in the shelling of evacuation trains, one person shot while fleeing after Russian hiders were found in his house (Jan Wolters), three executed resistance fighters (Jacques Frencken and the Jacques & Jan Moors brothers), and eight people killed by shrapnel, exploding shells, and booby traps. [3]
The act of resistance of the Moors brothers, Theo Boonen and others was that they did not want to go along with the forced evacuation, but preferred to wait for the arrival of the liberators. The part of Limburg that had not yet been liberated, including Roermond and the surrounding area, had been incorporated into Germany, and Major Ulrich Matthaeas and his paratroopers exercised a veritable reign of terror there. [4]
Matthaeas considered anyone who resisted to is orders in any way to be partisans.
During the general evacuation of Herten in January 1945, the three brothers Jacobus Hubertus, Joannes Hubertus and Joseph Hubertus Moors, as well as Theodorus Johannes Hubertus Boonen, Michael Franssen, Leonie Nieskens and Catharina Hansen decided to stay and go into hiding in the barn of the Moors family home. [5]
Cammaert writes about this:
At the end of January 1945, paratroopers arrested four residents of Herten who had gone into hiding, and at the beginning of February several more arrests followed. Two persons were kidnapped to German labor camps. Jan H. Moors, Jacob H. Moors and J. Boonen were shot on Matthaeas’ orders near Castle Hattem near Roermond. [6]
Other sources name his subordinate, first lieutenant Helmuth Behagel, as responsible for these murders. It was probably both of them. In any case, neither of them had to stand for it after the war. [7]

1. Herten Wikipedia • Nederlands • Deutsch • English • Français
2. • De gedwongen evacuatie naar Friesland, Groningen en Drente • Die gezwungene Evakuierung nach Friesland, Groningen und Drente • The forced evacuation to Friesland, Groningen and Drente • L’évacuation forcée à Friesland, Groningen et Drente • A evacuação forçada para Friesland, Groningen e Drente
3. 4en5mei.nl/
4. 1944-1945 Ulrich Matthaeas in Roermond
5. wo2slachtoffers.nl
6. Dr. F. Cammaert, Het Verborgen Front – Geschiedenis van de georganiseerde illegaliteit in de provincie Limburg tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Doctorale scriptie 1994, Groningen
   6. De Landelijke Organisatie voor hulp aan onderduikers • VIII-IX, p.629
7. Jan & Jacques Moors

Liberated: 1945-03-01