Debt of honour

80 years on, a dedicated team continues painstaking search for fallen war heroes

- BY GILES SHELDRICK

Dutch Army's recovery unit digs for remains. Above, in the lab for identification.

THE Netherlands continues to repay a debt of gratitude more than 80 years after it was liberated.

In the final stages of the Second World War it became clear that tens of thousands of Dutch, Allied, and German soldiers had been killed in the country.

There had also been a huge number of civilian casualties, including concentration camp victims, deaths from bomb raids and executed resistance workers slaughtered trying to reach Allied lines.

Many soldiers reported missing lay dead on the battlefields in unmarked graves, temporary cemeteries and even charred vehicles, tanks, crashed aircraft or shipwrecks.

The task of identifying and laying to rest the heroes who fought for freedom fell to the recovery and identification unit of the Royal Netherlands Army.

Set up in 1945, it was tasked with locating and exhuming the fallen and carrying out dignified burials to bring closure to families.

Today its painstaking work continues, fulfilling a promise to “leave no-one behind”.