Among Dutch civilians, over 5.000 died as forced labourers in Germany, some in allied bombing raids, some through illness and hard conditions of work: over 300.000 Dutchmen were at work in Germany by the end of the war, only a few of whom went voluntarily. In the closing months of the war, press-gangs rounded men up in street-trawis and house searches, and put them to work to patch up railways which were now under increasing allied bombardment. Nearly 3.000 Dutchmen and a few women were executed by the Germans, usually in reprisal shootings: when the German police chief was wounded by resisters in April 1945, more than 250 Dutch hostages were executed. Another 20.000 civilians died as a result of military operations. At the time of the airborne operations against Nijmegen and Arnhem, the allies asked the Dutch railway workers to strike, and they paralysed most of the Dutch railway system for the rest of the war. Sadly, this strike did more material damage to the people of the western Netherlands than to the Cerman military, who gave priority to their own traffic. Bad weather and shortage of petrol, combined with the effects of the strike, prevented supplies of food from the producers of the north-west from reaching the towns of Holland. There, rations fell to starvation level, at 500 calories daily, and, in spite of Swiss and Swedish Red Cross assistance, the old and poor suffered severely: an estimated 16.000 extra deaths resulted. To those Dutch dead we should add about 100.000 murdered Jews, to get a total civilian loss of life inflicted by German occupation of over 150.000. It is an instructive measure of the lethal nature of German occupation to compare this with the loss of life of a country of comparable population, like Australia.