The Netherlands had the highest Jewish mortality rate in occupied Western Europe. Of around 140,000 Jews living in the country at the start of the German occupation in May 1940, around 107,000 were murdered, a death rate of 75 per cent. The figure is striking because the Netherlands had been one of the most tolerant countries in Europe for Jewish refugees during the 1930s, with a long tradition of Jewish settlement going back to the sixteenth century, and because the Dutch population had reacted to the early German anti-Jewish measures with remarkable public hostility, including the only general strike against the persecution of Jews anywhere in occupied Europe. By 1945, however, three quarters of the Dutch Jewish community was dead. The reasons are a particular combination of factors that made the Netherlands, despite its sympathetic public, the most dangerous Western European country for Jews to be caught in.
The community
Dutch Jewry traced itself to the sixteenth century, when Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal settled in Amsterdam under the relatively tolerant Dutch Republic. The Portuguese Synagogue, opened in Amsterdam in 1675, is one of the oldest functioning synagogues in Europe. Ashkenazi Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe arrived later and outnumbered the Sephardim by the eighteenth century. By 1940 around 80,000 of the Dutch Jews lived in Amsterdam. Smaller communities lived in The Hague, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Arnhem and the smaller cities. Around 25,000 of the Dutch Jews in 1940 were not Dutch citizens but refugees who had reached the Netherlands from Germany and Austria in the late 1930s, when Dutch refugee policy had been comparatively generous.
The German occupation, May 1940
Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940. The Dutch government surrendered five days later and went into exile in London under Queen Wilhelmina. The German occupation authority, unlike the military administrations in Belgium and France, was a civilian Reich Commissioner, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian Nazi who had handed Austria to Germany at the Anschluss. Seyss-Inquart was an ideologue who pushed harder and earlier on the Jewish question than the equivalent administrations elsewhere in Western Europe.
Anti-Jewish measures came progressively from October 1940. Registration was followed by exclusion from the civil service, the professions, public transport and entertainment venues. Jewish-owned businesses were Aryanised. The yellow star was introduced in May 1942. The Dutch civil registration system was unusually thorough by European standards, with detailed records of every resident’s religion, address, occupation and family. The Germans had ready-made deportation lists.
The February strike, 1941
In February 1941, in response to the first German round-ups of Jews in the Amsterdam Jewish quarter, dock workers and tram drivers across Amsterdam went on strike in solidarity with the Jewish community. The strike spread to other Dutch cities. It was the only general strike against the persecution of Jews in occupied Europe. The Germans broke the strike in two days with arrests and shootings, but the public message was clear. The Dutch population was not going to cooperate willingly with the deportations.
The deportations
The deportations from the Netherlands began in July 1942. Jews were summoned by letter to report for what they were told was labour service in the east. They were taken to the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theatre in Amsterdam that served as the assembly point, and from there to the Westerbork transit camp in the north of the country. Trains ran from Westerbork to Auschwitz, Sobibor and Bergen-Belsen at intervals of a few days. Around 107,000 Dutch Jews were deported. Of those, around 5,000 survived. The Westerbork camp was, in a particular irony, run by the Dutch Jewish community itself: the camp staff and clerks were Dutch Jews under German oversight, and they kept the deportation lists, organised the trains, and managed the day-to-day operations of the camp until they too were deported on the final transports.
Why the Dutch death rate was so high
The Dutch mortality rate of 75 per cent stands out from the rest of Western Europe. The reasons are several. The civil registration was unusually thorough and gave the Germans accurate data. The Dutch geography did not offer easy escape routes: the country was small, flat, and surrounded by occupied territory or the sea, with no neutral land border. The Dutch police participated in round-ups, particularly in the later phases of the deportations, which the German occupation forces were not large enough to conduct alone. The Netherlands Railways operated the deportation trains as a normal commercial service, billing the SS at standard third-class fares. The Dutch civil service, while individually obstructive in some cases, did not collectively refuse cooperation in the way the Belgian Secretaries-General did. And the German Reich Commissioner pushed the deportations harder than the equivalent administrations in Belgium or France did.
The hiding
Around 28,000 Dutch Jews went into hiding in the Netherlands during the deportations. Around 16,000 to 18,000 of them survived. The most famous case is the Frank family, who hid in the annex behind Otto Frank’s office on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam from July 1942 to August 1944. They were betrayed and arrested. Anne Frank died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945, weeks before the camp was liberated. Her sister Margot died at the same time. Otto Frank survived. Anne’s diary, written during the two years in hiding, became one of the most widely read books of the twentieth century.
The Dutch hiding networks were organised partly by Dutch Resistance groups, partly by religious communities (particularly Calvinist Reformed congregations in rural areas), and partly by individual neighbours. Around a quarter of those who hid were betrayed, in many cases by Dutch informers paid by the Germans. The collaboration of a layer of the Dutch population with the German programme is the part of the Dutch story that the post-war Netherlands has had most difficulty acknowledging.
The post-war reckoning
The Dutch state was slow to acknowledge its own role. The post-war Dutch government took the position that the deportations had been a German crime. Dutch institutional acknowledgement of Dutch participation came only in the 1990s and 2000s. Netherlands Railways formally apologised in 2005 and paid reparations to surviving deportees and the families of the dead in 2019. The Dutch state apologised in 2020 for the role of Dutch authorities. The Anne Frank House on the Prinsengracht is one of the most-visited museums in the country. The Hollandsche Schouwburg is now a memorial. The Portuguese Synagogue, which the Germans never destroyed, still holds services. The community today numbers around 30,000 to 40,000 people, recovered partly through immigration, partly through the survivors who came back.
See also
Sources
- Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, Arnold, 1997
- Jacques Presser, Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry, Wayne State University Press, 1988
- Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller, Jodenvervolging in Nederland, Frankrijk en Belgie 1940-1945, Boom, 2011
- USHMM: The Netherlands