Razzia van Putten and the Hunt for Its German Perpetrators

In October 1944, the razzia van Putten tore through the Dutch village of Putten, when a Nazi raid led to the deportation of more than 600 men to German labor camps, where many would die under brutal conditions. Told from a first-person perspective, this documentary follows a five-year search to understand how the crime unfolded and who bore responsibility, as survivors and families live with the grief, silence, and unanswered questions left behind.

Moving in a non-linear rhythm between past and present, the film blends interviews, archival material, and personal recollections into a tense investigation shaped by memory and trauma. Villagers’ testimonies reveal how the raid ruptured community life and how the aftermath lingered for decades, with places such as the church holding painful associations of both belonging and betrayal. The recurring image of trains underscores the forced journey from home to suffering and loss, turning history into something felt rather than merely recounted.

As the narrator presses for clarity and accountability, the inquiry narrows toward one crucial figure: SS officer Albert Naumann, implicated in the operation yet denying his presence. Encounters with survivors, including Maarten Verheij, sharpen the emotional stakes and expose how denial and justification can prolong harm long after the violence ends. The central question—whether truth can still be uncovered and responsibility named—drives the film toward a confrontation with the moral ambiguities that surround wartime crimes.

The resolution remains bittersweet: full justice proves elusive, but remembrance and acknowledgment offer a fragile form of closure, insisting that the razzia van Putten must not fade into abstraction. Watch to follow this harrowing journey from loss to testimony, and from silence to the demand to be heard.

In the Nazi-occupied Netherlands of 1944, German forces tightened control as Allied armies advanced after D-Day, and resistance and reprisals escalated across the country. Communities lived under fear, shortages, censorship, and arbitrary violence, with arrests and forced labor used to break opposition and sustain the German war economy.

After the war, resentment towards Germany ran deep across Europe. In the West, the United States soon moved away from a punitive peace: through the Marshall Plan, launched in 1948, it helped rebuild West Germany alongside its former enemies, and by the end of the 1940s most German prisoners of war held by the Western Allies had returned home. This helped prevent a return to the politics of revenge that had followed the First World War and laid the ground for decades of reconciliation. In Eastern Europe the situation was very different. Millions of German soldiers ended up in Soviet labour camps, some of them in Siberia, and the last were not released until 1955–56. Around 12 million Germans fled or were expelled from Eastern and Central Europe, many suffering violence and rape along the way, and most of them settled in what became West Germany.

Although the Western approach helped Europe overcome much of its resentment and bring West Germany into European integration, traces of it lingered for decades. They surfaced, for example, in high-profile football matches between Germany and France, England or the Netherlands. This film shows that around the turn of the century, more than fifty years after the war, the relationship between the Netherlands and Germany was still sensitive in Putten, where some relatives of the deported men still refused to travel to Germany.