Personal items of Nazi victims returned to relatives sixty years on

Relatives of loved ones put to death by the Nazis over sixty years ago have received their last possessions this week. Watches, photos, parcels, wallets and jewellery belonging to the resisters were discovered in a Red Cross archive in Germany.

"It is as if the ghosts of the past have walked into my life," said Gerrit Jan Evers, who learned only a few weeks ago that the effects had been found. "So many died. And now, 63 years later, I'm here holding my father's identity card in my hand," he added with tears in his eyes.

His father was rounded up in a wave of Gestapo arrests in 1944 after an attack on a German troop column that left four Nazis dead. Six hundred Dutch men and women were rounded up and sent to concentration camps where the majority of them died through maltreatment or were executed. Other items belonging to his father include an old pocket watch with cracked, yellow glass and its case, a scratched-up lock and key and a photograph with writing on the back. The Nazis had kept all the items packed in boxes, which were then confiscated by the Allies at the end of the war.

The artefacts were found by accident. The Red Cross Tracing Centre at Bad Arolsen, Germany, is the largest repository in the world of Nazi files and they have sorting through them since 1945.

Evert de Graaf, a Dutch historian working with Red Cross officials to identify the relatives of the dead, said: "We found files on 80 of them, and an envelope containing personal effects was attached to eight of them. There could be more artefacts in other files that we have to cross-reference."

This week several families went on a chartered bus from Holland to Bad Arolsen to collect the remnants of lives cut short by tyranny. "When the trip began, everyone was cheerful," De Graaf said. "But the closer we got to Bad Arolsen, the quieter everyone became."

Evers's hands shook as he opened a package to find the brittle, yellowing ID card marked "Personsbewijs" - ID card - in Dutch inside to glimpse the photograph of a gaunt, serious-looking man.

"That's my father," he says softly.

Evers is named after his father but has no recollection of him other than his mother's anecdotes. Gerrit Evers Senior died in December 1944 at Neuengamme concentration camp, near Hamburg. Three weeks later, his son was born in the Netherlands. Evers' stepson, Gerjo Mulder, said: "It's beyond belief for him that people could be so cruel to one another here, in the middle of Europe. I can't grasp it myself. I'm trying to put myself in his shoes. But I'm just 35."

Viewing his dead brother's concentration-camp registration card, Willem Dorgelo, said, "I keep trying to tell myself that it wasn't 'the Germans,' it was Adolf Hitler. Well, I try anyway. They worked him to death, starved him, for painting slogans on walls, gave him no winter clothes. He didn't survive," he said, turning over a wallet in his hand that used to belong to a man who has been dead for 63 years.

Standing next to him, Johan Dorgelo, Willem's son, said: "I hardly have anything to remember my father by. I was a baby when he was rounded up and taken away."

Daily Mail