WILLIAM LEONE DEGRELLE (@WILLIAMLEONEDEGRELLE41)

Folk that lives, Builds Its Future Part 1 Germanische Leitheft First Year, 1941, Issue 3. It was in October 1941. From Amsterdam, the journey went towards the north. We might have already travelled 40-50 kilometres, then we suddenly saw only very young trees and only very new farmsteads. The Sod had not yet grown together like on the old meadows of the land crossed up to that point. New Land! Single-Family farmsteads everywhere, then suddenly more houses: a church, a school, post office and public buildings, a store, dairy and peasant coop close to each other, but still not an actual village, this slootdorp. The signposts pointed to Middenmeer and Wieringerwerf. These three little towns that are actually more a center point than villages, form the core of the surface of new land, reclaimed land that had been won from the northwestern part of the former Zuiderzee. What a sum of intellectual preparatory work, of will power and sweat had been necessary in order to create this work. Twenty Thousand Hectares had to be diked in struggle against low tide and high tide, had to be drained, made fertile and occupied with a few hundread farms. And what a bounty of vitality then grows from such a work! In 1929 the main Dike was finished and already in 1932, 1933 and 1936 the schools of the three villages were opened with 128, 154 and 109 children! But the Dutch were not satisfied with this success, for only one part of such reclaimed land, although by far the biggest part, provides fully worthy peasant land. The Zuiderzee must provide even more land in this centuries long struggle of these people with the sea. In preparation and in part under already under cultivation is the northeastern reclaimed land with 48,000 hectares, the south western reclaimed land with 56,000 hectares and the southeastern reclaimed land with 96,000 hectares, thus altogether another 200,000 hectares, which in surface area corresponds to about a dozen large-scale farms in the Ukraine But they did not initially tackle the individual stretches of reclaimed land. Instead they first did something that the soldier would compare with the preperation for a battle of encirclement: they eliminated the enemy's main mass with his inexhaustible reserves, the north sea with low tide and high tide, that stands behind the West Frisian islands ready for ever new attacks That was done through one of Europes most daring and large scale building plans, through the construction of an almost 30 kilometre closing dike. It closes off the Zuidersee, the southern sea, from the north sea and the shoals. continued soon