At the time of the liberation of the Netherlands on 5 May 1945, more than 40,000 Dutchmen were still outside the country. Most of them were victims of the German Arbeitseinsatz. Those men were usually not working far from the Dutch border and were physically and psychologically ready to return to the Netherlands on their own. The opposite was true for the five thousand Jewish survivors and the approximately ten thousand interned political prisoners. These prisoners were in inhuman conditions in the middle or eastern part of Germany and couldn’t do anything but wait for help.