Discover the story of helmet planter Piet Kuijt in The Hague.
In July 1945, shortly after the war, it became clear on the Waalsdorpervlakte near Wassenaar what terrible things had taken place there during the war. A mass grave was discovered in the dune area, and men dug in the hot sand for the bodies of victims of the occupation. Amid this chaos, Piet Kuijt sat on a dune top, watching the work unfolding before his eyes with a sense of resignation. For him, it was nothing more than a necessary task; he had previously marked the exact locations of the bodies with his probing stick, so that the excavations could be carried out in a targeted way.
Piet knew the dunes between Katwijk and Wassenaar better than anyone. As a helm planter, he travelled through the dune landscape in all weather conditions, sowing marram grass and strengthening the dunes. Every dune hollow, every patch of scrub, every small valley was familiar to him. Because of this role, he was one of the few who could enter the Waalsdorp dune area during the war, which had been declared a prohibited zone (“Sperrgebiet”) by the German occupiers. As a result, he became an eyewitness to more than 250 executions of, among others, resistance fighters who were shot here by the German occupiers. The Germans themselves left no markings at the burial sites, as they wanted to prevent the graves from being found. Piet Kuijt did the opposite: he marked freshly dug graves in a specific way with marram grass so that he could later find and identify them again. This ultimately led to the discovery of the mass grave.
The exhumation of the bodies was gruelling work. Former members of the NSB, interned in the Scheveningen prison, dug out the remains under guard—sometimes with their bare hands. The medical examiner carefully identified the bodies based on clothing and teeth, ensuring that each one was placed in a numbered rough wooden coffin before being taken away.
Piet himself always remained a reserved man. The war had left deep scars. He refused any form of honour and rarely spoke about his experiences. For him, the war was a closed chapter. Only in 2021 was his contribution officially recognised. At cycle path number 10 on the Waalsdorpervlakte, a sign was unveiled: the Pieter Kuijt path, in memory of a man who, with few words, played a key role in commemorating the victims and preserving the memory of what happened during the war.
Disclaimer & source attribution: The stories have been provided by the participating locations and involved volunteers of Bunkerdag and are based on the personal memories of those involved. These are subjective and may differ from historical facts or be experienced differently by others. No rights can be derived from the content.