“I miss empathy at Defense,” says Hans Klaassens from Laaghalen. His family is one of the families in the area hit hard by the expansion plans. On the ground where Defense plans to train with 150 soldiers and helicopters, Klaassens has a spiritual grove to commemorate loved ones. “It’s a place for us to find comfort.”
It’s make or break this week in Hooghalen, Laaghalen and Laaghalerveen. The government is expected to decide at the end of the week whether the expansion of the De Haar training ground can go ahead in its current form. The plans can count on criticism from the environment, but are mainly accompanied by a lot of uncertainty and intense sadness.
The history of the Klaassens family in Hooghalen goes back almost a century. Even before the construction of the A28, the family farmed on the characteristic escarpments surrounding the village. “The best soil for farming is ash soil,” the family knows.
“The great thing is that it is also in a special condition due to the missing land consolidation,” says Klaassens. My father had to quit the farm at the time and also sold the arable land. But he always kept the bush because he thought it was such a beautiful bush.”
Several family members, such as his father himself, and an uncle and nephew who died in a car accident in 2009, have therefore been given a place in the grove. “It is also an important place for my parents to give a place to that suffering.”
Once a week, Klaassens visits the bush when he picks up his mother from the nursing home in Beilen. “Then she always asks me: can we turn left for a moment, to the stone?” says Klaassens. “I often pass by here myself, then I take a stroll.”
Especially in the past year, when the family suffered yet another tragedy, Klaassens visited the place a lot. His son Diëm (20) went missing in March after going for a walk after work.
Klaassens and his daughter stand by the stone when he talks about it. There are tears in his eyes. “We found him after a week in a deep lake in Gasselte. He drowned there,” he says. “I would also like to place his urn here.”
But less than two months after his son’s death, the Ministry of Defense placed a claim on the grove, stating that they wanted to acquire the land for the new training ground at De Haar. “It causes so much uncertainty, ambiguity and so much extra sadness,” says Klaassens.
“You go from one suffering to another. And if it is a forest plot of several hundred hectares, it could be an essential part of the training area, but this concerns a piece of 2,000 square meters. It is on the edge of the training area. How simple would it be to move the boundary a little.”
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