city in theNetherlands to draw up an official expansion-plan, incorporating the (surrounding) municipality ofLonneker.
World War II
During the Second World War Enschede was one of the first Dutch cities to be captured by the Germans, being the city closest to Germany. Resistance members helped many of the Jews from Enschede to hide on farms in the vicinity. Out of approximately 1300 Jews in Enschede, 500 were saved (38.5%), compared to less than 20% in the rest of the Netherlands. This high survival rate is attributed to three members of the Jewish Council of Enschede, Sig Menko, Gerard Sanders and Isidoor Van Dam who took the initiative, against the advice of the Jewish Council of Amsterdam, of urging their community to go into hiding and not to answer the call-up of the Germans for "labour in the East". They were in a position to support these directions to their flock since they had access to funds, to power in the community and to a well-developed underground movement headed by a prominent Protestant minister, Leendert Overduin (Yad Vashem). Due to carelessness the resistance group was betrayed by an infiltrator and all its members were killed by German soldiers while gathered in a basement. The Germans threw in some grenades, a few days before the allied troops liberated the city. Even though "De ondergrondse" (the resistance, litt. the underground) was the main resistance group, many other citizens risked their lives, for example by rescuing allied pilots who were shot down while on bombing missions. Because it was close to Germany (only a few kilometers from the town of Gronau in Germany) and housed a German command center, Enschede was frequently bombed by allied troops, aiming for the German command center or mistaking Enschede for a German city. Enschede was liberated on 1 April 1945 by Allied, mainly Canadian, troops.
The end of the industrial
