Den Haag’s Dark Secret
If you cycle towards Scheveningen past the prison and the barracks, there is a building on the eastern side of the road, that looks like a station. We see old stations all over the UK that have been converted into houses and although it’s a different style, it has the same aura.
When I got back I looked it up and found that there used to be a railway that ran from the main line from Den Haag to Amsterdam, through Wassenaar to a station by the beach at Scheveningen. As I had thought, the railway had run where the road is now.
It was the site with the map that told me the dark secret, that few know about. Den Haag was the launching point for all of the V-2 rockets that the Nazis sent towards London. A lot were fired from a beautiful estate called Duindigt, near the racecourse. It ended up being totally destroyed by Allied bombing and V-2’s that exploded on takeoff.
Nearly three thousand died in 1944, in London due to these weapons. But not as many as about 20,000 concentration camp inmates, who died making the weapons. Even the Dutch suffered greatly, as the weapons misfired and hit local targets, the Nazis executed anybody for the most trivial of reasons and the Allies destroyed parts of Den Haag by mistake as they tried to stop the launching of the rockets.
War is never the simple business it is made out to be.
There is also a book, Spitfire Dive Bombers versus the V2, by Bill Simpson, which details the hunt for the rockets by RAF Fighter Command.
The Anonymous Widower 
[…] having read the stories about the Germans and V2 rockets from Den Haag, you do wonder whether a fixed installation would have been a complete liability, as it could have […]
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