Why the Dutch are Different: A Journey into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the acclaimed guide to travel in Holland

by Ben Coates

Nevertheless, traces of the old enmity endured, and outright hostility was not uncommon. Close to the German border it was still possible to see old wartime bunkers adorned with graffiti aimed at visiting Germans: ‘Zimmer frei!’, ‘Room available!’ Sports events were common flashpoints. Commentating on a strong German performance at a winter Olympics biathlon event, a Dutch television commentator famously said: ‘Shooting and running through the forest – that’s a sport Germans are good at!’ Residents of Dutch seaside towns inundated with German tourists could sometimes be heard complaining that the Germans celebrated the wartime invasion of the Netherlands by doing it again every summer. On the very day I visited Westerbork, I flipped on the television to be greeted by a Dutch sitcom character discussing, against a backdrop of riotous canned laughter, his reasons for buying a new truck. ‘No, grandpa, it’s not so I can gather up all the Germans in our country and take them away!’ ‘The best kind of recycling?’ an old Dutchman once asked me on a train to Dusseldorf. ‘A German eating pork!’