The ‘Wire of Death’ Killed Thousands Along the Dutch-Belgian Border
In World War II, Germany invaded the Netherlands and Belgium in order to get at France from the northeast, but in WWI, the Germans invaded only Belgium, and the Netherlands remained neutral. That left a lengthy border through which smugglers, spies, and saboteurs, slipped back and forth, and prisoners of war escaped to freedom. By the end of 1914, over a million Belgians had crossed into the Netherlands as refugees.
Guarding the porous Belgian-Dutch border tied many German soldiers, who were desperately needed elsewhere. Early in 1915, an electric fence had been set up along a stretch of the Swiss border to isolate some Alsatian villages from Switzerland, and it proved effective. So the Germans decided to replicate it on a grander scale, along the Belgian-Dutch border.
Construction commenced in the spring of 1915 of a 5 to 10 foot high electric fence with 2000 to 6000 volt wires running through it, and covering over 125 miles of the Belgian-Dutch border from the Scheldt River to Aix-la-Chapelle. Those caught within 100 to 550 yards of the fence who could not explain their presence were summarily shot.
By war’s end, about 3000 people had been killed along what came to be known as “The Wire of Death”, and newspapers in the southern Netherlands carried almost daily reports of unfortunates who had been “lightninged to death”. Nonetheless, while the fence reduced border crossings, it did not eliminate them. Many crossed the border using creative methods such as tunneling beneath the fence, using extra high ladders, pole vaulting it, or tying porcelain plates to their shoes in order to insulate them.
