Queen Wilhelmina returned to the already liberated part of the south of Holland to a village near Breda on May 2, 1945, almost five years to the day after German occupation. The plane carrying her home contained just five people: the queen herself, Princess Juliana, a government official, and Peter Tazelaar and Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema as her appointed adjudants. She settled for the time being at the Anneville Estate in Ulvenhout, near Breda. This would be her temporary residence until the whole of Holland was liberated.
The end of the war was expected any day, and when it happened, on May 4, Peter was having a drink with some military police on guard at the gates. They were listening to music on the radio, when suddenly, it was interrupted by a special announcement. The German High Command had capitulated in Holland. The war had ended.
Peter was so excited by this fantastic news that he forgot all protocol and raced to the queen’s study, bursting in unannounced and barely able to speak from emotion. He was the first person to inform the queen that hostilities had ended. The queen, equally overcome, shook his hand endlessly and gave him two big kisses on his cheeks.
Although Peter was now formally in service to the queen as her adjutant, court life was intolerable for him and thus short-lived. He could not live a life restricted by rules and regulations. Queen Wilhelmina understood him only too well. She had a soft spot for Peter and allowed him more leeway than anybody else, but there was a limit to the freedom he was given. Peter resigned within months, but the special place she kept in her heart for him was such that, five years after her death, Peter, at her request, would lay the wreath at her grave on behalf of all Engelandvaarders. Even when she was no longer alive, she still honored him.
In the beginning of August 1945, Peter flew out to Ceylon and from there on to Java, not only with the intention of collecting his mother from a Japanese concentration camp, but also to fight the Japanese. But the war in the East had ended abruptly after the Americans dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, and the Japanese, as a result, had capitulated immediately. So when Peter arrived in the Dutch East Indies, he joined the Military Police of the First Infantry Battalion of the Royal Dutch Indonesian Army (KNIL) as its head instead.
Indonesia, or the Dutch East Indies, had been part of the Dutch empire for nearly three hundred years, until in the early twentieth century the fight for decolonization slowly began. When the Japanese invaded Indonesia in 1940, many of the freedom fighters were supportive as they initially saw the Japanese as liberators from the Dutch. But they soon realized that they would be exchanging one yoke for another. When the war in the East suddenly ended with the dropping of the atom bombs, these freedom fighters turned on the Dutch still remaining as well as on some of their own population, such as the Chinese and the communists. The atrocities they committed on their own countrymen were terrible. Peter was in charge of tracking down and interrogating these fighters. It was a difficult job for him, because many of these men had been his friends from his youth. But he could not tolerate their cruel behavior, which caused him a great deal of shock and heartache. In March 1946, he was wounded and returned to Holland.