The Holocaust in the Netherlands

The Holocaust in the Netherlands was organized by Nazi Germany in occupied Netherlands as part of the Holocaust across Europe during the Second World War. The Nazi occupation in 1940 immediately began disrupting the norms of Dutch society, separating Dutch Jews in multiple ways from the general Dutch population. The Nazis used existing Dutch civil administration as well as the Dutch Jewish Council "as an invaluable means to their end". In 1939, there were some 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands, among them some 24,000 to 25,000 German-Jewish refugees who had fled from Germany in the 1930s (other sources claim that some 34,000 Jewish refugees entered the Netherlands between 1933 and 1940, mostly from Germany and Austria). Some 75% of the Dutch-Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust. The 1947 census reported 14,346 Jews, or 10% of the pre-war population. This further decrease is attributed to massive emigration of Jews to the then British Mandate of Palestine (present-day Israel). There is debate among scholars about the extent to which the Dutch public was aware of the Holocaust. Postwar Netherlands has grappled with construction the historical memory of the Holocaust and created monuments memorializing this chapter Dutch history. The Dutch National Holocaust Museum opened in March 2024.

Background on the Dutch Jews


During the late nineteenth century and into the 1930s, Dutch Jews increasingly secularized and became more and more integrated into general Dutch society. Many were no longer religiously observant or followed Jewish cultural practices. While Dutch society formed segments or "pillars" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Jews were not a separate pillar, but rather tended to be affiliated with existing pillars. Many Jews, for example, no longer lived in the informal "Jewish Quarter." The Dutch tradition of religious tolerance, dating from the 17th century when Jews began settling in the Netherlands, especially Amsterdam, culminated in a Jewish emancipation that made them full citizens.

The extent to which Dutch Jews were assimilated and felt accepted by the larger society has been identified as a special vulnerability with respect to the German occupation, which began with their invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. Dutch Jews were not very alert to the mortal threat of Nazi ideology and its zealous implementation of the policy to eliminate Jews, the Final Solution. The Netherlands had been a destination for German refugees, both Jewish and non-Jewish, fleeing the Nazi regime -- most famously, the family of Anne Frank. But Dutch Jews, unlike Dutch royalty, did not likewise flee the Netherlands upon the Nazi invasion. Dutch Jews, along with the general Dutch population, took a wait and see attitude toward the occupation.

In contrast to other policies that the Nazis applied toward the general Dutch population, they targeted Jews with systematic elimination. The response of the Jewish leadership in the Netherlands was to "pursue a policy of compromise [with the occupation] that was more Dutch than Jewish, thereby co-operating reluctantly in successive small steps (in the hopes of avoiding 'a worse fate'... [T]he segmented Dutch society regarded the problems of the Jews as a Jewish matter (barring a few exceptions)."

Overview
In 1945, only about 35,000 Jews of the Netherlands were alive. The exact number of "full Jews" who survived the Holocaust is estimated to be 34,379 (of whom 8,500 were part of mixed marriages, and thus spared deportation and possible murder in the Nazi concentration camps). The number of "half Jews" who survived in the Netherlands at the end of the Second World War in 1945 is estimated to have been 14,545; the number of "quarter Jews" was 5,990. Some 75% of the Dutch-Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust, an unusually high percentage compared to other occupied countries in western Europe.

Factors of the larger death toll included the relatively intact governmental apparatus after the royal family and government fled to London. The Netherlands was not under a military regime. It was the most densely inhabited country of Western Europe, making it difficult for the relatively large number of Jews to go into hiding. Most Jews in Amsterdam were poor, which limited their options for fleeing or hiding. The country did not have much open space or forest for people to flee to. Also, the civil administration had detailed records of the numbers of Jews, and their addresses. It is not entirely clear how much the average citizen of the Netherlands was aware of the operation of death camps for most of the Occupation. All Dutch citizens were required to "register" for work in Germany. 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 Nazis moved swiftly to suppress further citizen action and there was no further public action after the top Nazi official, Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart, warned the Dutch public that they would be draconian consequences.

One theory is that the Germans made use of the administrative organizations and Dutch police: "'In their preparations for the extermination of the Jews living in the Netherlands, the Germans could count on the assistance of the greater part of the Dutch administrative infrastructure. 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. Trains of the Dutch railways staffed by Dutch employees transported the Jews to camps in the Netherlands which were transit points to Auschwitz, Sobibor, and other death camps.' With respect to Dutch collaboration, Eichmann is quoted as saying 'The transports run so smoothly that it is a pleasure to see.'"

The best-known of the Holocaust victims in the Netherlands is Anne Frank, a German Jewish refugee. Along with her sister, Margot Frank, she died from typhus in March 1945 in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Disease was widespread in the camps because of unsanitary living conditions deliberately created by the German occupiers. Anne Frank's mother, Edith Frank-Holländer, was murdered by starvation in Auschwitz. Her father, Otto Frank, survived the war. Other noted Dutch victims of the Holocaust include Etty Hillesum, whose writings were later published; Abraham Icek Tuschinski, and Edith Stein, who converted to Christianity and is also known as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Maurice Frankenhuis built a collection of documents, authored diaries and collected artifacts spanning five decades, from World War I through World War II including hiding, and incarceration in Westerbork and Theresienstadt. His research revealed that he, together with his wife and two daughters may have been the only native Dutch family to survive as a unit.

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.

Occupation
The neutrality of the Netherlands did not protect it from the Nazi invasion of May 1940. 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. A key aim was to separate Dutch Jews from their legal protections and Dutch cultural milieu, extinguishing first their rights and then their lives. Rather than leaving the Dutch government independent or setting up a military occupation, the Nazis' plan for the Netherlands involved implementing a civil occupation. Leaders appointed by the Germans to head the civil administration of the Netherlands were all Nazis with a strong ideological history. Hitler's representative, the Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart, quickly took command of the Dutch administrative system as the Reichskommissar for the occupied Dutch territories. Hanns Albin Rauter was appointed the Higher SS and Police Chief (HSSPF). Rauter reported directly to Heinrich Himmler. One of Rauter's first initiatives involved consolidating the Dutch police under the Nazi-controlled Ministry of Justice. Rauter positioned the SS and the police to have full authority over the entire Jewish population of the occupied Netherlands. This gave the SS and the police the ability to persecute Jews in the Netherlands, and eventually implement the Final Solution. Rauter had not only the Dutch police, but 4,700 German police personnel at his disposal. After Germany took control of the Dutch government, 128 cases of suicide by Jews were reported.

Registration
The Nazi authorities issued a series of regulations that had profound impacts for Dutch society, classifying Dutch Jews separately from the general Dutch population. It was a key factor in the implementation of policies leading to the genocide. Dutch Jews overwhelmingly complied with registration. As of May 9, 1940, all businesses owned in whole or in part by Jews or directed by a Jew were required to register with the government, including companies with Jewish shareholders. By explicitly naming Jews as the target category of the law, the Occupation authorities defined its parameters in Article 4. The initial definition of a Jew was any person who had three or more Jewish grandparents, or had two Jewish grandparents and belonged to a Jewish congregation or was married to a Jew. The definition of a Jewish grandparent was a person who had ever belonged to a Jewish congregation. The definition of a Jew later became more sweeping, with one Jewish grandparent sufficing. "Registration had come to mean compulsory submission of a complete personal history."

As of November 1940, the Nazis forced all Jewish officials and public servants to register with the Dutch authorities. Subsequently, over 2,500 Jews lost their public positions. Only the forced removal of Dutch Jews from secondary and higher education incited a response from the public. On 10 January 1941, Seyss-Inquart mandated the registration of Jewish citizens. This decree included Jewish citizens with one Jewish grandparent. Citizens identified as Jewish had their identification cards marked with a black J. Carried always, these identification cards were a useful tool for the perpetrator to distinguish who was Jewish. Furthermore, these identification cards were nearly impossible to forge. The birth, death, and marriage records of Jews in the Netherlands were marked to differentiate them from the non-Jewish citizenry. By 1942, Jews were forced to wear a yellow star on their clothing.

The geography of the Netherlands made it impossible for Jews to flee. The country of Holland is less than 20,000 square miles of flatlands. During the civil occupation, it is estimated that 25,000 Jews in the Netherlands went into hiding. Of these 25,000, a third were caught and deported. Of those who survived, 4,000 were little children. Some were betrayed by friends, or strangers who agreed to hide them under false pretenses. Others were caught by the police.

Expropriation and Theft


Before being deported and murdered, Dutch Jews were systematically stripped of all of their properties and possessions, including businesses, real estate, financial assets, artworks and household possessions. Gerard Aalders, a Dutch researcher at the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, estimated that the Dutch Jewish community was "the most affected by German rapacity". Looting organisations included the Dienststelle Mühlmann, headed by Kajetan Mühlmann under Seyss-Inquart, and the LiRo bank, a Jewish bank called Lippmann & Rosenthal & Co. that had been taken over by Nazis to disguise theft as legal transactions, among others.

Deportations
When Seyss-Inquart and Rauter gained power over the Dutch administration, there were 140,000 Jews in the country. As many as 80,000 Dutch Jews lived in Amsterdam alone. The residency status of Jews in the Netherlands was irrelevant to Seyss-Inquart and Rauter. Seyss-Inquart stated "The Jews, for us, are not Dutchmen. They are those enemies with whom we can come neither to an armistice nor to a peace." Rauter sent progress letters to Himmler informing him that "In all of Holland some 120,000 Jews are being readied for departure." These "departures" that Rauter spoke of were the deportations of Dutch Jews to concentration and extermination camps.

Below are a sample of deportations from The Netherlands to labor and extermination camps.

In all, 107,000 Jews were deported from prisons in Germany and the Netherlands to concentration camps. Of these, only 5,200 survived. In total 102,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis (three-quarters of the pre-war Jewish population of the country). Some were native Dutch, and others were refugees who had sought asylum in the Netherlands.

Controversy about Jewish orphans
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a controversy arose concerning the Jewish children who survived their parents during the Holocaust. The children were often hidden by the Dutch Resistance with non-Jewish families. One scholar of the controversy contends that "The history of the Jewish war orphans in the Netherlands, while part of the post war era, represents a direct continuation of the Holocaust and its prolonged aftermath of human suffering." When the Nazis began to vigorously implement deportation of Jews from the Netherlands, Jews allowed members of the Resistance to place many children with non-Jewish families; they survived the war when their parents did not. Jewish children could be more easily hidden than Jewish adults, so a disproportionate number of the Jews who survived were children. "[T]his type of rescue operation could be organized on a serious scale." How these young survivors should be considered in the postwar era created a controversy between Resistance members and Jewish adults surviving the Holocaust, who wished to rebuild the Dutch Jewish community. These two groups had different visions of the children's future; each considered themselves making better decisions for their guardianship. Resistance fighters' role in hiding children during the war earned them legal standing with the Dutch governmental commission established to determine their fate. Children were often smuggled out of Amsterdam to many other places in the Netherlands, where they were integrated into existing non-Jewish families. In the postwar period, the Dutch government established principles to consider the welfare of the children that recognized the role of the Dutch resistance. The assumptions the Commission for War Foster Children made to determine guardianship were that the parents were not returning; the status of children was equivalent to abandoned or neglected offspring, not orphans; members of the Resistance had legal standing on the commission, while Dutch Jews were invited to join the commission only as individuals, not representatives of a group. The commission did not recognize the children's being Jewish as relevant to their placement, and that their individual welfare was a Dutch matter, not a Jewish matter. For Dutch Jews, the way that the commission was conceived and functioned was as an adversary." One hidden child's story is part of the permanent exhibition at the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam. Ellen Mieke Olman was separated from her parents at nine months, and fostered by a Christian family. After the war she was reunited with her biological mother, a person of whom she had no memory and subsequently had a difficult relationship. "I called my mother 'ma'am'".

Historical memory and memorials
In the postwar period, Holocaust memorials were created in many places directly under Nazi control and there are now scholarly works on the holocaust in historical memory. The Netherlands has been part of this process of memorialization and scholarly assessment. The Dutch government established National Holocaust Remembrance Day as the last Sunday in January, while a number of counytries fix the commemorations date at January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. The Netherlands figures in comparative studies of memorialization of the Holocaust The changes over time of memorialization in the Netherlands has been the subject of study. The Resistance Museum in Amsterdam, founded in 1984 by members of the Dutch resistance, tells the complicated story of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and the varieties of Dutch response to the Nazis' policies resulting in the annihilation of three-quarters of Dutch Jews. The museum catalogue published a catalogue of the new permanent collection in 2023.

There are various types of Holocaust memorialization including a digital archive of Dutch Holocaust victims' names. 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. Some other sites of memory in Amsterdam have a much lower profile. Scholars study Holocaust sites of commemoration in the Netherlands, examining visitors' motivations for seeking them out and their emotional responses.

Historical conceptions of the Holocaust in the Netherlands are dynamic, with an examination of the Dutch Resistance. A study of Holocaust memorials examines the conception of the Holocaust perpetrators. Holocaust aftermath memory in Dutch education is a subject of concern. As the Netherlands has become a multiethnic society, scholars have examined historical memory of the Holocaust of different ethnic groups. There is also scholarly work on the Holocaust in the Netherlands and conceptions of Dutch decolonization.