THE HAGUE (AFP).- More than 70 years after the Nazi bombing blitz of Rotterdam turned the port into "a sea of fire" and forced the Netherlands to surrender, a historian has found the city's long-lost letter of capitulation.

"I was looking at archive photos on a German auction site and there was a photo of a document signed by Colonel Scharroo who was in charge of defending the city in May 1940," Gerard Groeneveld told AFP.

"I nearly fell off my chair," the researcher and author added.

The handwritten document had last been seen by the then mayor of Rotterdam at the moment the city surrendered to Nazi Germany, after its historic centre was razed in a terrifying aerial bombardment on May 14, 1940.

The document was believed lost forever.

"It was in a file tucked into the back of a war diary which had been kept by the Germans," Groeneveld said.

The diary had been turned over to senior German officials and then disappeared.

In the early months of World War II, Germany attacked the Netherlands -- strategically placed across the North Sea from Britain -- on May 10, 1940. But Dutch forces fought back and there was quickly a stalemate.

The German army demanded the surrender of Rotterdam, and the head of German ground forces, General Rudolf Schmidt, sent the Dutch forces in the city a typed ultimatum: give up or face a brutal air campaign.

But Dutch Colonel Pieter Wilhelmus Scharroo wrote back by hand that he couldn't accept the ultimatum as it wasn't signed, Groeneveld said.

Schmidt then added a handwritten ultimatum at the bottom of Scharroo's missive, ordering at the same time that the attack on Rotterdam be postponed for the negotiations.

But the order to halt the bombing never reached the German pilots and bombs were rained on the city, which was engulfed in flames.

Much of it was destroyed, some 800 to 900 people were killed and 80,000 were left homeless. The largest fires were only brought under control two days later.

In the hours after the blitz on May 14, 1940, Scharroo wrote "accepted" at the end of Schmidt's ultimatum. This is the document now uncovered by Groeneveld.

After the Germans threatened to bomb Utrecht in a similar fashion, the Netherlands surrendered to the Nazi regime the next day on May 15, 1940.

Groeneveld did not want to reveal how much he had paid for the document, but he hopes to sell it now to a Dutch museum.



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