On the night of 6–7 March 1945, resistance fighters attempting to obtain a vehicle for transporting meat fired on the car carrying Hanns Albin Rauter near Woeste Hoeve. Rauter survived seriously wounded; his driver and adjutant were killed. The German occupation authorities carried out mass reprisals on 8 March. The researched memorial records describe 274 executions across several sites, including 117 at Woeste Hoeve. Gerrit was among those shot there, having already been in custody for weeks. [15,22,40,45,46] The official postwar correspondence and war-grave forms establish 8 March 1945 as Gerrit’s death date. The Apeldoorn civil death register, entry 795, records his death at 9 a.m. and was registered on 14 May 1945; it names his wife Jannetje Fikse and parents Hendrik Blaauw and Hendrikje Flier. A family death notice used an approximate date, “around 9 March”; that contemporaneous uncertainty should be retained without displacing the later confirmed date. [42–47; October 2026 update] Gerrit was executed in retaliation for an attack in which no reviewed source places him as a participant. His documented earlier resistance work, the suspected pilot-assistance case and the subsequent German reprisal are connected historically, but they are not the same event. [22,43–46]
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