The Holocaust
The occupation period 1940 - 1945 (with thanks to wikipedia)
In 1939, there were some 140,000 Dutch Jews living in the Netherlands, among them some 25,000 German-Jewish refugees who had fled 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.
The Nazi occupation force put the number of (racially) Dutch Jews in 1941 at some 154,000. In the Nazi census, some 121,000 persons declared they were members of the (Ashkenazi) Dutch-Israelite community; 4,300 persons declared they were members of the (Sephardic) Portuguese-Israelite community. Some 19,000 persons reported having two Jewish grandparents (although it is generally believed a proportion of this number had in fact three Jewish grandparents, but declined to state that number for fear that they would be seen as Jews instead of Mischling|half-Jews by the Nazi authorities). Some 6,000 persons reported having one Jewish grandparent. Some 2,500 persons, who were counted in the census as Jewish, were members of a Christian church, mostly Dutch Reformed, Calvinist Reformed or Roman Catholic.
In 1941, the majority of Dutch Jews were living in Amsterdam. The census in 1941 gives an indication of the geographical spread of Dutch Jews at the beginning of World War II (province; number of Jews – this number is not based on the racial standards by the Nazis, but by what the persons themselves declared to be in the population census). The total number of 139,717 was spread as follows:
* Groningen 4,682 * Friesland 851 * Drenthe 2,498 |
* Overijssel 4,345 * Gelderland 6,663 * Utrecht 4,147 |
* Noord Holland 87,026 (incl. 79,410 in Amsterdam) * Zuid Holland 25,617 |
* Zeeland 174 * Noord Brabant 2,320 * Limburg 1,394 |
In 1945, only about 35,000 of them were still alive.
The exact number of "full Jews" who survived the Holocaust is estimated to be 34,379 (of whom 8,500 were part of a mixed marriage and thus spared deportation and possible death in the Nazi concentration camps); the number of "half Jews" who were present in the Netherlands at the end of the Second World War in 1945 is estimated to be 14,545, the number of "quarter Jews" 5,990. Some 75% of the Dutch-Jewish population perished, an unusually high percentage compared with other occupied countries in western Europe.
Factors that influenced the great number of people who perished were the fact that the Netherlands was not under a military regime, because the queen had fled to England, leaving the whole governmental apparatus intact. Another explanation is that vast majority of the nation accommodated itself to circumstances:
"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.
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 quoted as saying 'The transports run so
smoothly that it is a pleasure to see.'".
During the first year of the occupation of the Netherlands, Jews were forced to register with the authorities and were banned from certain occupations.
Starting in January 1942, some Dutch Jews were forced to move to Amsterdam; others were directly deported to Westerbork, a concentration camp near the small village of Hooghalen which had been founded in 1939 by the Dutch government to give shelter to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, but would fulfill the function of a transit camp to the Nazi death camps in Middle and Eastern Europe during World War II.
All non-Dutch Jews were also sent to Westerbork. In addition, over 15,000 Jews were sent to labour camps.
Deportations of Jews from the Netherlands to Poland and Germany began on 15 June 1942 and ended on 13 September 1944.
Ultimately some 101,000 Jews were deported in 98 transports from Westerbork to Auschwitz (57,800; 65 transports), Sobibor (34,313; 19 transports), Bergen-Belsen (3,724; 8 transports) and Theresienstadt (4,466; 6 transports), where most of them were murdered. Another 6,000 Jews were deported from other locations (like Vught) in the Netherlands to concentration camps in Germany, Poland and Austria (like Mauthausen). Only 5,200 survived.
At the same time, there was substantial collaboration from the Dutch population including the Amsterdam city administration, the Dutch municipal police, and Dutch railway workers who all helped to round up and deport Jews.
One of the best known Holocaust victims in the Netherlands is Anne Frank. Along with her sister, Margot Frank, she died from typhus in March 1945 in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp|Bergen-Belsen, due to unsanitary living conditions and confinement by the Nazis. Anne Frank's mother, Edith Frank-Holländer, was starved to death by the Nazis in Auschwitz. Anne Frank's father, Otto Frank, survived the war.
Dutch victims of the Holocaust include Etty Hillesum and Abraham Icek Tuschinski. 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.