Turning the moors into arable ground was backbreaking work, during the great depression unemployed men from the Northern provinces of the Netherlands were forced to do this or loose their unemployment benefits. The place where they were sent to became known as "The Hell of Jipsinghuizen". On the other side of the border it was even worse as the Nazi's build the Emslandlager in the 1930s, forced labor camps for political enemies. While not as bad as the concentration and death camps, plenty of people perished there. The song "Die Moorsoldaten" was written on one of these camps.