Two Hats United: Dutch-Canadian Bond Honored in Ottawa

Princess Margriet of the Netherlands unveiled the Man With Two Hats monument in Apeldoorn on May 2, 2000, with a twin sculpture simultaneously unveiled in Ottawa, Canada, honoring the Dutch-Canadian bond forged during World War II. The monument, designed by Henk Visch, depicts a figure wearing both a Dutch and a Canadian hat, symbolizing the shared history between the two nations. Canadian troops played a decisive role in liberating the Netherlands from German occupation in 1944-45, a sacrifice that the Dutch people have remembered with extraordinary consistency for over eight decades. During the occupation, the Netherlands suffered one of the worst famines in modern European history, the Hongerwinter of 1944-45, in which an estimated 20,000 Dutch civilians starved to death. Canadian forces, under the First Canadian Army, fought through flooded polders, fortified villages, and fierce German resistance to liberate the country in a series of campaigns from September 1944 to May 1945. Nearly 7,600 Canadian soldiers are buried in Dutch war cemeteries, and local communities maintain these graves with a care that has moved generations of Canadian visitors. Princess Margriet herself embodied the connection. She was born in Ottawa on January 19, 1943, where the Dutch royal family had taken refuge during the war. The Canadian government declared her maternity ward temporarily extraterritorial so that the princess would not acquire Canadian citizenship, preserving her place in the Dutch succession. In gratitude for Canada's hospitality, the Dutch government sent 100,000 tulip bulbs to Ottawa in 1945, a gift that grew into the annual Canadian Tulip Festival, which now draws over a million visitors each spring.