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My name is Mieke Kirkels. Welcome to my website.

After an early retirement, I moved from the city of Rotterdam to a village called Margraten, located to the east of Maastricht. In 2008, a national oral history project was started in the Netherlands: ‘Heritage of WWII – Eyewitness stories.’ Together with the local heritage foundation, I started the ‘Fields of Margraten’ project that related to the American cemetery in the village.

From local farmers I had learned that 20,000 American soldiers had been dropped on their farmland by African American soldiers since September 1944.

As an oral historian and project manager, I have worked since then on paying attention to the fact that African American soldiers helped to liberate the Netherlands about 80 years ago. Up until that time, I was unable to trace any records about them in Dutch history books or archives, nor about the fact that the US Army completely segregated units during WWII.

In 2009, it was only by shear chance that I met an African American veteran who was not amused to hear this from me and said,

“People should know!”

That was the crux of what has kept me writing about what I call ‘Black Liberators’.

Read more on the page “About me“.