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The Dutch are facing their Holocaust demons Will the Netherlands ever forgive itself?

Ana Fernandez/SOPA Images/LightRocket /Getty Images

Ana Fernandez/SOPA Images/LightRocket /Getty Images


March 27, 2024   5 mins

There is no tram line 8 in Amsterdam. You could see this as a silent admission of guilt — during the Second World War, it transported tens of thousands of Dutch Jewish people to the Westerbork transit camp, and then on to their deaths. But it is also an omission, an erasure of the history of Dutch complicity as the Nazis murdered three-quarters of its Jewish population.

To this day, evidence is still emerging of how Dutch people looked away — and sometimes even profited — as 102,000 of their fellow countrymen, women and children were murdered. It is the worst record in Western Europe. But now, as survivors approach the end of their lives, the Netherlands seems ready to pass on a truer Holocaust story to a younger generation.

In his new documentary, Lost City, director Willy Lindwer highlights evidence of the tram journey that brought Anne Frank and her family from the Weteringschans prison to Central Station on 8 August 1944 after their “secret annex” hiding place was discovered. It turns out that the Amsterdam transport company, the GVB, invoiced the Nazi occupier for these tram rides for 48,000 Jewish people — and continued to do so even after the war.

“What we discovered,” says Lindwer, “is that the Amsterdam tram collaborated in a massive way with the Nazis. And that last invoice was never paid so Amsterdam got in bailiffs for two years after the war to try to get 80 guilders back from the tram ride that the Frank family was in.”

In the coming years, the Dutch will have to confront more unsettling truths. Earlier this month, the Netherlands opened its first National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam to tell not just the tales of the astonishingly brave resistance, but also stories of the Jewish people who were murdered, the civil servants who betrayed them, and the ordinary people who did nothing — or even took the houses and possessions of the deported.

Inevitably, these two cultural events have become entangled in the public consciousness following Hamas’s bloody attack on Israel on October 7, and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Israeli president Isaac Herzog used a speech at the opening of the National Holocaust Museum to call for the “immediate safe return” of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas — while, outside, crowds of pro-Palestinian protesters turned nasty, apparently jeering at Holocaust survivor Rudie Cortissos and his great-granddaughter (although they said they supported the museum). The number of reported incidents of antisemitism in the Netherlands doubled last year and the Centre for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI) reported an “enormous peak” after October 7.

“The number of reported incidents of antisemitism in the Netherlands doubled last year.”

To understand all this, we must look to history, and the several important ways the Netherlands differed from other Western Nazi-occupied lands. On 10 May 1940, the German army invaded the neutral country, and after five days of fighting and heavy bombing of Rotterdam, the Dutch surrendered. The state was destroyed and a new administration was installed headed by Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian Nazi who would go on to order the deportation of the Dutch Jewish population to Nazi extermination camps.

The Netherlands — in particular, Amsterdam — had for centuries been a safe place of refuge for Jewish people. But during the war, there was far more solidarity with the Jewish populations in France and Belgium than in the Netherlands, possibly because Dutch society was based on separate “pillars”, communities living alongside one another rather than mixing. The geography of this small, densely populated and relatively unforested land certainly meant there were far fewer places for Jewish people to hide.

Indeed, while there was a Dutch resistance movement that smuggled 600 Jewish children to safety from the site of the Holocaust Museum, many citizens also profited from occupation. So-called “Jew hunters” were paid for betrayal, a Dutch railway charged Jewish people for their tickets, Amsterdam levied housing tax on Holocaust survivors for their time in the camps, and Jewish property was routinely stolen. In Lost City, a Jewish woman describes escaping arrest to find all her valuables stolen by her neighbours. Tini Jacobs-van Dulst remembers cycling through the city with her mother in September 1943, aged six, looking at empty houses and choosing one on the Diezestraat. “We never spoke about why these houses were empty,” she says. “I found out myself as a teenager.” And my late neighbour, Maud Hedeman, who survived via a prisoner exchange with Switzerland, could never understand why a Dutch family would not give her father back the family rug when they returned.

After the war, the extent of this betrayal was not discussed. For many Jewish people, the memories were simply too painful. Tram line 8 was scrapped, “Euterpestraat”, the street of the German headquarters, was renamed after resistance fighter Gerrit van der Veen, and there was little space for the Jewish war experience in public life.

“The memories of Dutch Jews were mostly suppressed,” says Bart Wallet, professor of modern Jewish history at the University of Amsterdam. “All the attention went to the resistance and to the military that liberated the Netherlands. Jews specifically didn’t fit the image that people wanted to convey during memorial activities and monuments… The Jewish community held their commemorations until the Sixties exclusively inside synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, not in a public sphere.” Only now, he says, can the Dutch people bear to face the full story. “The Holocaust Museum is a pivot point in Dutch memory culture.”

But for many Dutch Jews, this doesn’t go far enough. Holocaust survivor Salo Muller, who won group compensation from the NS railway service to repay the cost of Holocaust train tickets, has also demanded an apology and reparation from Amsterdam’s trams.

Simmering in the background, meanwhile, is a row over a public-funded “cold case” study naming Jewish Council member Arnold van den Bergh as the “betrayer” of Anne Frank’s family. Rosemary Sullivan’s bestselling book on the case, The Betrayal of Anne Frank, was stoutly refuted by historians in the Netherlands and later withdrawn. It is seen by some as implicitly blaming the Jewish population for its own destruction. To the frustration of relatives, who have retained an American law firm to defend Van den Bergh’s name, the deeply contested book is still available in other countries.

Further research on the involvement of Amsterdam’s government in the Nazi’s antisemitic policies is expected to be released this year by the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. “We saw ourselves as the nation of Anne Frank,” says emeritus professor Johannes Houwink ten Cate. “It hurts when we are forced to see ourselves as the nation of the tram driver transporting the Frank family to the station and from there to a transit camp, and to a death camp from there. It took us a long time to come to terms with our not-so-good track record during the Holocaust.”

This reassessment is a function of a former colonial nation wrestling with its identity. The background is one defined by tumult: where Geert Wilders wins an election by attributing all social woes to asylum seekers, where middle-class Amsterdammers blame “expats” for their housing crisis, and where, in government, the Dutch apparently lose their famed ability to “polder” across differences and form a normal coalition.

And in this polarised, politically fragmented country, it throws up the question of who “belongs”, where we all originally come from and how much that actually matters. Was Dutch tolerance ever all it was cracked up to be? And where on earth is it now?

Faced with such a task, looking honestly at the past is a good place to start. But it is an uncomfortable journey, just like the tram ride when Willy Lindwer realised that, on the way to their deaths, Anne Frank’s family would have had a brief glimpse of their secret annex.

It’s a sentiment shared in Lost City by Izak Salomons, who was imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen. At one point, he explains how his sweet, six-year-old grandson asked him how he survived the war. “I said: ‘Well, we were in a camp…The Germans weren’t very nice.’ Then I saw that he was welling up and so to comfort him, I said, ‘Now they are nice again.’

“He mulled it over and then said: ‘True, but they are still ashamed.’”


Senay Boztas is a journalist living in Amsterdam.


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Ex Nihilo
Ex Nihilo
7 months ago

We obsess over the guilt of the dead who actively or passively abetted the Holocaust in WW II and yet pity the people of Gaza, who are equally complicit in enabling, actively or passively, the genocide that Hamas is dedicated to visiting on modern Jews? It always requires greater moral courage to confront hate in real time than from the safe distance of three quarters of a century.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
7 months ago
Reply to  Ex Nihilo

Because many don’t see the current goings on in the Middle East as a continuation of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a uniquely evil event, whereas the Israel Palestine conflict is simply a long running feud over territory, albeit one split along religious lines. The Holocaust also had clearly defined victims and perpetrators, whereas the conflict in the Middle East has two sides seemingly as bad as each other.
In my opinion constantly evoking the Holocaust and trying to link it to current day events and skirmishes trivialises the unique evil of that time

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

I’m against whichever side films itself committing rape, dismemberment, beheadings, shootings, and suicide bonbings.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
7 months ago
Reply to  Julian Farrows

Both sides are deplorable in my opinion. Hamas are animals but I can’t ignore 30,000 killed either, a majority of which have been women and children

Jane Watson
Jane Watson
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

And how on earth do you come to the conclusion that a majority of the dead are women and children?

harry storm
harry storm
7 months ago
Reply to  Jane Watson

or that 30k were killed at all?

Pedro the Exile
Pedro the Exile
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

as opposed to Hamas fighters?Your source would be what?

Matt M
Matt M
7 months ago

In the first week of this conflict I read the news: “Israel bombs hospital, 500 dead”. I saw the footage of the smouldering ruins.
Then it transpired that it wasn’t an Israeli rocket that hit the hospital but an Islamic Jihad mortar.
Then it transpired that it didn’t hit the hospital but the hospital’s carpark.
Then it transpired there were no casualties as the carpark was empty at the time of impact.
The whole thing was a Hamas invention swallowed without question by the western media.
Then I decided to never believe another report on casualty figures or watch any footage.

harry storm
harry storm
7 months ago

His “source,” whose every word he takes as gospel, apparently, is Hamas.

Y Chromosome
Y Chromosome
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

It is oh-so easy to condemn the IDF for inflicting civilian casualties while battling an enemy who intentionally imbeds with the innocents. William T. Sherman knew something of winning wars, and this is what he had to say: “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. … Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.”
Until you have faced bullets and buried your friends, you have no place to comment. Israel is accepting volunteers. You can go to Gaza and show us how it’s done.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
7 months ago
Reply to  Y Chromosome

organised war is always about taking resources from another, continuation of politics by another means.

Peter Lee
Peter Lee
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

You believe that. Why.?

harry storm
harry storm
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

How do you actually know 30K were killed, genius? you take the claims of terrorists known to lie and lie again, as gospel, and no doubt disbelieve what the Israelis say.

0 0
0 0
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

The majority of them were terrorists.

Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

No, there’s an a additional ingredient in the Hamas Israel conflict, in that Hamas and the those citizens that tacitly support them (we can argue about numbers) want all Jews killed because they are Jews. It’s not fundamentally about territory.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
7 months ago

I disagree. If Israel had been created in Europe after the war (which would have made more sense) then I don’t believe the Jews would be of any interest to the various sects in the Middle East. Hamas would today be busying themselves against the various Sunni factions instead

D. Gooch
D. Gooch
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Israel wasn’t some magical gift to the Jewish people suddenly thought up by Westerners after the war. Jews began returning the land in waves, small at first, in 1882 — 65 years before independence and 35 years before the British decided to endorse the notion of a Jewish homeland. Ben Gurion has been in Palestine and working for a Jewish homeland for about 42 years already.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
7 months ago
Reply to  D. Gooch

There has been murmurings beforehand obviously, but it was the horrors of the Holocaust that was the catalyst for the creation of the state, with Jewish emigration from Europe encouraged especially by the Americans. However it was good of those major powers to carve a chunk off the Palestinian land rather than give up anything of their own, very noble

D. Gooch
D. Gooch
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Again, the Holocaust was not something disconnected from the Middle East. The Arab leadership of Palestine threw their lot in with Germany in the 1930s and 40s. Had they not been so vehemently opposed to Jewish migration to Palestine, millions may have been saved. And had Rommel been successful in North Africa, there should be no doubt what the fate of Palestine’s Jewish population would have been.

The Second World War was exactly that – a global war – and the formation of Israel was part of the reformation of nations and borders that took place in its aftermath, with tens of millions of people were displaced in Europe and South Asia alone. Israel was no magic gift. Zionists fought for their home and took in more than a million displaced Jews from both Europe and the Arab world, while about half that number of Arabs were displaced also when they refused to accept the existence of their Jewish neighbours.

Adrian Smith
Adrian Smith
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

The concept of a Jewish homeland within the region known as Palestine dates back to the 1897 (it was part of the Ottoman empire at that time), it was a lot more than murmurings. It is true that Britain in particular felt a degree of guilt as they prevented Jews from fleeing to Palestine at the start of the war.
However there is and never was “Palestinian” land as you describe it. The area that became known as Palestine has always had a mixed population and has been ruled over by one empire or another for thousands of years – there has never been a Palestine self ruled by a coherent and unified “Palestinian” people. The British were the last in a long line of empires to rule it (before that it was part of the Ottoman empire). At the time of the UN’s formation of Israel it was about 50% Jews and 50% Arabs. The Jews were awarded 55% of the land area because a lot of that area was useless dessert. The Arabs rejected the UN decision and immediately turned round and attacked the Jews. The Jews won even when neighbouring Arab states later piled in. Israel has since grown by being attacked and counter attacking effectively.

Terry M
Terry M
7 months ago
Reply to  Adrian Smith

The ancient Romans pinned the name on the Land of Israel. In 135 CE, after stamping out the province of Judea’s second insurrection, the Romans renamed the province Syria Palaestina—that is, “Palestinian Syria.” They did so resentfully, as a punishment, to obliterate the link between the Jews (in Hebrew, Y’hudim and in Latin Judaei) and the province (the Hebrew name of which was Y’hudah). “Palaestina” referred to the Philistines, whose home base had been on the Mediterranean coast.
cite
Even the name Palestine is a direct insult to Jews – who have been in that space for at least 2000 years.

Peter Samson
Peter Samson
7 months ago
Reply to  Adrian Smith

According to the Jewish Virtual Library (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-and-non-jewish-population-of-israel-palestine-1517-present), at the time of the UN partition decision in 1947, Jews constituted 32% of Palestine’s population, Moslems and Christians 68%.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

why should Israel have been created in Europe when thousands of years of history show the Jewish people being from where the country actually is?

Pedro the Exile
Pedro the Exile
7 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Agreed that it trivialises the unique evil but so does
the Israel Palestine conflict is simply a long running feud over territory,
A useful simplification for avoiding reality -feud doesn’t sound too bad does it-a bit like neighbours arguing over a fence rather than the barbaric invasion by psychopaths on 07/10 who then proceeded to slaughter & rape defenceless women & children without warning or reservation and then filmed it before taking hostages in contravention of all known international law.And rather contrary to Hamas’s founding charter and their stated intentions immediately after the attack.to keep doing it

Edwin Blake
Edwin Blake
7 months ago
Reply to  Ex Nihilo

Netanyahu and his cronies tacitly supported Hamas all the years because of their shared opposition to a two-state solution (look it up if this is still news, GIYF). So by your logic he was also complicit in the Gaza attack?!

harry storm
harry storm
7 months ago
Reply to  Edwin Blake

That’s so stupid. Netanyahu’s supposed ‘support’ for Hamas is irrelevant. There is no logic to your ‘logic.’ Unless the word “complicit” has a new meaning, which might be possible, given how apparently even university presidents in the US are “complicit” in the so-called “genocide” in Gaza.

Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
7 months ago

Faced with immoral rulers some of the population will fight, some will collaborate, the vast majority will keep their heads down and try to get on with life. It was ever thus.

Generations not faced with the same dilemmas (yet) signal their virtue by judging their forefathers.

Kieran P
Kieran P
7 months ago

Don’t really see the point of this article.

harry storm
harry storm
7 months ago
Reply to  Kieran P

You mean you don’t want to see it.

Francisco Menezes
Francisco Menezes
7 months ago
Reply to  Kieran P

Agree with you. This article contains no news. Dutch Jews better move to Israel. A conclusion drawn already years ago by Manfred Gerstenfeld and Frits Bolkenstein.

Mike Downing
Mike Downing
7 months ago

Our defining characteristic as a species is not language but our propensity for storytelling; we tell stories about ourselves, our lives, our loves, our families, our friends, our countries, our history, our faiths and our civilisations.

Unsurprisingly since our memories are extremely malleable and nobody (apart from masochists) wants to beat themselves up, we forget things over time and embroider until we can often barely remember the starting point.

But that doesn’t stop the queasy feeling when a fact or two pops up and confronts us.

Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
7 months ago

European antisemitism has increased as Muslim invaders have invaded. The entire problem is due to Muslim Jew-haters.

Edwin Blake
Edwin Blake
7 months ago
Reply to  Paul Thompson

What an incredibly ignorant statement. Antisemitism is worse now than Germany under the Nazis? Hitler was a Muslim I suppose. And that is just one example. There were ghettos throughout Europe. Spanish Jews fled to Islamic north Africa after the Moors were driven out.
I usually think Islamophobia is a rubbish concept but it appears I was wrong in this case.

Dr E C
Dr E C
7 months ago
Reply to  Edwin Blake

The only region in the world where an active Nazi was feted & celebrated after WWII, instead of standing trial or going into hiding, was the Middle East. Look up the Grand Mufti Husseini & how he was hailed as ‘the scourge of the Jews’ on arrival in Egypt. Then look at how Nazi propaganda throughout the war years was translated & disseminated throughout the Middle East & you might get closer to understanding the direct links between Nazism & today’s radical Islamists

harry storm
harry storm
7 months ago
Reply to  Paul Thompson

True, but don’t overlook 2000 years of history that makes many Europeans, including those in power, blame the ‘collective jew’ ie israel for defending itself against murderous terrorists. The powers-that-be still consider the collective Jew untrustworthy and never worthy of the benefit of the doubt, as the vitriol from legions of Israel-haters and the recent actions of western governments confirm.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
7 months ago

So what is it that today’s Dutch are supposed to do? Everything is so much more clear in hindsight, aided by the obnoxious habit of viewing the past through the lens of the present. We have the same thing in the US where people act as if slavery is still occurring and that this is the only country where it existed. Lay out the facts to the best of everyone’s ability. Then what? When the pro-Hamas people ‘turn nasty’ and Jews are again attacked by some in the populace, it appears that very little indeed was learned from history.

ruth novaczek
ruth novaczek
7 months ago

no mention of Steve McQueen’s Occupied City?

Ex Nihilo
Ex Nihilo
7 months ago

It may appear a two-sided conflict to some but only because the Nazis were defeated and history stripped away the many apologists and sympathizers of their time who did their best to make it appear there were two sides. Back then it was National Socialism as a credible answer to Marxism. Fundamentalist radical Islam is every bit as evil as Naziism, every bit as genocidal, every bit as xenophobic, every bit as murderous. Thousands of acts of terrorism and multiple wars in the name of Islam around the world do not comprise “skirmishes”. ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houtis, bombings of multiple embassies, train stations, concert halls, restaurants, airliners, ships, the World Trade Center, kidnappings, beheadings, major offensive wars against Israel by Islamic forces in 1947, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 2023, the Intifadas, and many, many more. To call this trivial is to be morally equivalent to a Holocaust denier.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
7 months ago

No mention that today’s Netherlands have a large Muslim population. How many of them celebrated the rape, torture and murder of Jews on October 7th?

Skink
Skink
7 months ago

A thoughtful article marred in the end by another leftie knee-jerkism: a jab at Geert Wilders.

El Uro
El Uro
7 months ago

This reassessment is a function of a former colonial nation wrestling with its identity.
Without any connection to the content of article –
When I hear the word “identity” …, I release the safety on my Browning!
They shove this word into everything from cesspools to palaces, much like Hollywood idiots telling you “you know”.

Craig Young
Craig Young
7 months ago

Odd to write all this and make no mention of the Dutch SS units. Largest one detailed here…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Legion_Netherlands
Or the fact the Germans deliberately tried to starve the Dutch population in 1944/45, in revenge for broad Dutch support of the western allies during Operation Market Garden (See, “A bridge too far”.)
PS: A better link about the Dutch SS…
https://www.historynet.com/in-the-uniform-of-the-enemy/

iambic mouth
iambic mouth
7 months ago

In the meantime, a daycare center in a town in Germany, named after Anne Frank, decided to rename late last year, because “children have hard time understanding this story” and the parents wanted “a message more focused on international diversity, hence the new name of World Explorers.” It was happening in the same time when there were anti-Israel protests in German towns were, in the country which devised the “final solution” people were shouting “gas the Jews”. But then, you will hear German and Dutch leftists politicians denouncing and sneering my country, Poland, publicly in the European Parliament, for being antisemitic and xenophobic: but I understand that it’s just a transfer of their own guilt.

Terry Davies
Terry Davies
7 months ago

The Germans….ashamed? Really?