The Holocaust in the Netherlands
The Holocaust saw the mass murder of Dutch Jews by Nazi Germany in occupied Netherlands during the Second World War.
[1] Some 75% of the Dutch-Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust, an unusually high percentage compared to other occupied countries in western Europe.
Postwar Netherlands has grappled with constructing the historical memory of the Holocaust and created monuments memorialising this chapter of Dutch history.
[5] Jews began settling in the Netherlands from the 17th century, where they benefited from the Dutch tradition of religious tolerance, especially in Amsterdam.
Over the next two years, the German occupiers worked with the existing Dutch bureaucracy to gain control of the administrative system to implement its own policy aims.
[7]: 70 Leaders appointed by the Germans to head the civil administration of the Netherlands were all Nazis with a strong ideological history.
Rauter positioned the SS and the police to have full authority over the entire Jewish population of the occupied Netherlands.
[8]: 21 This gave the SS and the police the ability to persecute Jews in the Netherlands, and eventually implement the Final Solution.
[8]: 66 German authorities issued a series of increasingly strict regulations to isolate and exclude Jews from the general Dutch population, a key factor in the policies leading to the genocide.
"[10] In October 1940, Dutch authorities required all civil servants to sign a “Declaration of Aryan Descent” that neither they, their spouse, nor their parents or grandparents were “part of the Jewish faith.” The following month, summary dismissals of Jewish public servants began, including Lodewijk Visser [nl], president of the Dutch Supreme Court.
Similarly, the birth, death, and marriage records of Jews in the Netherlands were marked to distinguish them from the non-Jewish citizenry.
[7]: 71 About 25–30,000 Jews went into hiding as onderduikers (literally “under-divers”)—most famously Anne Frank, who hid with her family in an Amsterdam house from July 1942 for over two years.
At a vacation home called “The High Nest” near Naarden, a succession of Jews and other fugitives lived in secrecy from January 1943.
[14] 21 Dutch people have been awarded the Jewish Rescuers Citation by B’nai B’rith for helping to save Jews from deportation.
[15] The onderduikers in turn drove a reward system for “Jew-hunters”—notably the Henneicke Column, originally a group tasked with inventorying abandoned Jewish properties, which became a bounty-hunting operation.
The Henneicke Column delivered 8,000-9,000 Jews to Nazi authorities between March and October 1943 alone, earning up to 15 guilders per head.
"[6]: 601 In January 1942—the same month as the Wannsee Conference, where the Holocaust was largely strategized—all Jews in The Netherlands were “evacuated” to the three Jewish districts of Amsterdam.
[11]: 68 The Jewish Council was informed on 26 June 1942 that all Jews between ages 16 and 40 would be deported to Germany for labor[21]: 261 , with a requirement to produce 800 names per day.
The governmental apparatus was left relatively intact after the royal family and government fled to London, and The Netherlands was not under a military regime.
[29] Initially, Dutch society recognized German persecution of the Jews, they conducted the first act of mass civil disobedience in Nazi-occupied Europe: the Februaristaking ("February strike"), to show their support for Jewish citizens.
The occupiers had to employ only a relatively limited number of their own personnel; Dutch policemen rounded up the families to be sent to their deaths in Eastern Europe.
Other noted Dutch victims of the Holocaust include Etty Hillesum, whose writings were later published;[32] Abraham Icek Tuschinski, and Edith Stein, who converted to Christianity and is also known as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
[33] In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a controversy arose concerning the Jewish children who survived their parents during the Holocaust.
Resistance fighters' role in hiding children during the war earned them legal standing with the Dutch governmental commission established to determine their fate.
[35] In contrast to many other countries where all aspects of Jewish communities and culture were eradicated during the Shoah, a remarkably large proportion of rabbinic records survived in Amsterdam, making the history of Dutch Jewry unusually well documented.
[44] The built urban environment of Dutch cities has incorporated Holocaust memorials, with a list of giving locations.
In Amsterdam, Anne Frank House has become an important site of memory, one of the few that focuses on a single individual to tell a much larger story.
[46] Scholars study Holocaust sites of commemoration in the Netherlands, examining visitors' motivations for seeking them out[47] and their emotional responses.
