Resistance (in numbers)

L. de Jong writes that before September 1944, there were approximately 25,000 ‘illegal workers’ who acted in an organisational context. Individually operating members of the resistance, people in hiding, people accommodating people in hiding, and other helpers of the underground who did not belong to a resistance organisation are not included in this number. From September 1944, the number of illegal workers increased significantly. By the time of the liberation, about 60,000 people in the northern part of the Netherlands had joined the Domestic Armed Forces (Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten,BS).However, not all of these 60,000 members had actually carried out illegal work in the narrow sense of the word before liberation. De Jong estimates the total number of illegal workers, as defined by him, at approximately 45,000 for the entire occupation period. (L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (‘The Kingdom of the Netherlands During the Second World War’), vol. 10b (The Hague 1981), pp. 744-746.)