Rise of Nazi Germany
Unrest continued to plague Europe after the First World War (1914-1918). In Germany, the terms of the Versailles peace treaty were widely resented: swathes of territory had been conceded and massive reparations had been imposed. The Great Depression of 1929 hit Germany hard, providing fertile ground for the rapid growth of the National Socialist German Workers Party (nsdap or Nazi party). In 1933, its leader Adolf Hitler became chancellor and the country descended into dictatorship. Using propaganda and terror, the Nazis strengthened their hold on the population. In 1936, the German army moved into the demilitarised Rhineland, breaking a key provision of the Versailles treaty. Hitler later admitted that it was his most vulnerable moment. But the international response was muted. In 1938 came Germany’s union or Anschluss with Austria, while at an international summit in Munich, Hitler made sure that his annexation of Czechoslovakia’s frontier province, Sudetenland, would meet no opposition. A few months later, Nazi Germany swallowed Bohemia and Moravia. Time and again, other governments chose to appease Hitler rather than stop him.
The Nazi regime imposed rigid censorship on German culture and used the education system to spread Nazi ideology. Political opponents and dissidents received harsh and violent treatment. A boycott of Jews was organised. Jews were attacked and persecuted. In the Netherlands, Dutch fascists formed a party in 1931: NationaalSocialistische Beweging (nsb). At first, its antisemitism was not pronounced. But that changed in 1938 as German Nazis gained influence.
Refugees
In the 1930s, around half of Germany’s five hundred thousand Jews sought refuge abroad, along with many non-Jews. Some arrived in the Netherlands as early as 1933, where the first exiles were generally welcomed. Attitudes soon changed, however, and Dutch policy towards Jewish asylum seekers did not differ much from those of other countries. This was fed in part by a growing prejudice against Jews. In October 1938, Nazi Germany expelled seventeen thousand Jews with a Polish background. Poland refused to admit them and so they were left stranded in no-man’s land. In protest, a Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan assassinated a German diplomat in Paris, Ernst vom Rath. The Nazis fanned the nation’s outrage into a frenzy of state-organised violence on 9 November 1938 that lasted through to the following day and became known as Kristallnacht. Thirty thousand Jewish men were taken prisoner and held in concentration camps, hundreds of synagogues were set on fire and thousands of Jewish businesses were ransacked. The flow of Jewish refugees became a flood, to which the Netherlands responded by closing the frontier. Only those in immediate physical danger were admitted. Detention in a concentration camp was not sufficient reason. Meanwhile, the Dutch government tried to send as many refugees as possible to other countries. And at the same time, in Berlin and Vienna, Truus Wijsmuller was negotiating with the Nazis with the approval of the Dutch government. She managed to get permission to send a train with ten thousand Jewish children out of Germany and Austria. Over eight thousand went via the Netherlands to Britain, while the remaining two thousand found refuge in the Netherlands.
Amsterdam’s Jewish Council was the sole representative body for all the Jews in the Netherlands, ostensibly serving as a state within a state. Copies of the weekly Joodsche Weekblad in which the Jewish Council published the latest Nazi regulations are displayed in the museum.
After May 1940, membership of the Dutch Nazi party, nsb, shot up. Antisemitic nsb members terrorised Jewish neighbourhoods in Amsterdam. These provocations culminated in violent confrontations and in February 1941, nsb member Hendrik Koot was mortally wounded. The Nazis rounded up hundreds of Jewish men as a reprisal, and deported them to a concentration camp. The raid sparked a wave of indignation among the Amsterdam population, culminating in the February Strike.
Resistance to the anti-Jewish regulations spread as opposition to the various orders, the denial of rights and segregation increased. Wilhelmina Westerweel-Bosdriesz, a non-Jewish resister,
described how that developed in 1983: ‘It was extremely subtle, step by step. You have to refuse to take that first step.’ She recalled how the latest regulation prohibiting Jews from entering parks convinced her to take that first step by refusing to enter the park herself. It was the first of many courage acts of resistance that saved many Jewish lives. Her refusal to accept the denial of rights to Jews is projected in the exhibition amid the photos, documents and films that illustrate the exclusion of Jews from society at large.
A final series of regulations followed, including a total ban on travel. Then in the summer of 1942, the Nazis were ready to begin deporting the Jews from the Netherlands. On 26 June 1942, the Nazis announced that Jews would be notified to report to be set to work.
Wouter Veraert
Deprivation
of rights is a process of juridical exclusion. It involves the deliberate restriction of a person’s ability to participate in society. That may be achieved by denying them their rights or by physical segregation. Those deprived of their rights find it harder to take part in public and economic activities. They become increasingly isolated and eventually bereft of all rights, outlawed.
‘The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man.’
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Measures against Jews
The systematic deprivation of property rights and other rights of certain categories of people was a key aspect of Hitler’s racist politics of persecution with which he aimed to create a totally Aryan society in both Germany and Naziheld Europe. Those not considered by the Nazis to be Aryan, and by definition an enemy, had their rights curtailed. Jews were not the only people who forcibly lost their rights in German occupied Netherlands. Others also considered enemies of Nazi Germany, such as Roma and Sinti and Jehovah’s Witnesses were persecuted and denied rights. This did not only affect individuals. The Nazis also took over organisations, such as Jewish businesses, Jewish and nonJewish clubs and foundations, dismantling and liquidating them. In the summer of 1940, the German occupiers banned Freemasonry in the Netherlands, labelling the movement an enemy of national socialism. Masonic buildings, libraries, objects and property were brutally seized, sold and even destroyed across the country.
Anti-Jewish regulations were the main instrument used by the Nazis to implement their policy of juridical exclusion. In the Netherlands, they deprived Jews of their rights long before the first deportations from Westerbork in July 1942. This was reflected on the street by signs prohibiting Jews from entering, and the requirement to wear a yellow star. These physical images of legal exclusion have become familiar symbols of the persecution of the Jews. In fact, the Nazis used every means available to exclude Jews from many different fields of social and economic life, alternating tortuous juridical and bureaucratic regulations with terror on the street.
The German occupiers published their principal measures to deprive Jews of their rights in a periodical Verordnungsblatt für die besetzten niederländischen Gebiete. These introduced extreme legal injustice to the Netherlands. The infamous regulations are displayed on the walls of the National Holocaust Museum as a kind of wallpaper of crime. The Dutch-Jewish lawyer Abel J. Herzberg described the process of juridical exclusion and its oppressive impact in Kroniek der Jodenvervolging (Chronicle of the Persecution of the Jews). He explained the rationale behind the incremental deprivation of rights as follows: ‘These were the methods, which created an ever-growing unrest, and increasingly accentuated that the Jew had ceased to be a legal subject, and was indeed bereft of all rights. In effect, outlawed, protected by no one, and – from the German perspective – not even susceptible to protection.’
Mayor Gijs van Hall
the ner tamid at the unveiling of the memorial, 4 May 1962.
The Nazis continued to operate the Hollandsche Schouwburg as a deportation centre for Jews caught in hiding until 19 November 1943. That was the last transport. It seems that they may also have used Frank House at number 29 to accommodate children in that last period. It was later used to store packages meant for Westerbork. Meanwhile the Nazis and collaborators continued to hunt for Jews in hiding, and deportations of Jews from prisons and transit camps went on.
No precise figures are known for the total number of children who passed through the Crèche. It’s thought to be between three and five thousand. Around six hundred were rescued.
Deportation centre to memorial
In June 1944, Nationale Hypotheekbank, owners by forfeit, sold the theatre at auction. Two property investors, Harry and Louis Linthorst, bought it and revamped the theatre. After the war they reopened it under a new name: Piccadilly. Under pressure from outraged Jewish survivors, the city council rejected Piccadilly’s application for an entertainment license. Various activists, Jews and non-Jews, set up a committee under Sam de Wolff to collect money to buy back the former theatre from its new owners. In 1949, the committee gained possession, and gave the property to the city of Amsterdam on 9 March 1950, on condition that it would never be used for entertainment and a memorial would be installed with a ner tamid, an eternal flame. Desolate and unused, the building fell into disrepair. The weathered free-standing statues were taken from the roof for safety. The wooden eaves were also removed either side of the pedestal. To replace the cornice the wall was extended. It was not until 1960 that work started on transforming the Hollandsche Schouwburg into the envisaged site of remembrance and reflection. The plan was developed by architect Jan Leupen of the city’s Public Works department, with a chapelle ardente, a memorial room, by Leon Waterman, a Jewish architect. In 1962, the time had come: mayor Gijs van Hall lit the ner tamid, designed by artist Johan Sterenberg.
Leupen had left the nineteenth-century façade intact, as well as the gable wall where the balustrade had been. The entire exterior was repainted in a warm grey contrasting with the greenish-brown doors. The central three doors gave way to an openwork fence showing passers-by a view of the memorial inside. The former theatre hall was now a lawn and on what had been the stage stood an obelisk on a plinth in the form of a star of David. Behind this, inscribed on the wall, were the words: In memory of those who were deported from this place, 19401945. Visitors came in through the central hall into the remembrance area, the whole space encompassing the entire ground floor area, and none of the upper floors. Trees and shrubs were planted amid the grass.
Publication for the Jewish Houses project, 4 May 2011, distributed as a supplement with copies of
the Holocaust Museum is also national: both having received financial backing from the municipality and central government. At the same time, national initiatives are in place to give greater visibility to the history of the Shoah and to keep the memory of that history alive with projects such as Stolperstein pavement memorials, Theater na de Dam performances at the annual 4 May ceremonies, Open Jewish Houses and the Parool newspaper’s ‘Is this your house’ 2011 campaign to show the houses from which Jews were deported in Amsterdam.
Video
Meanwhile, these initiatives have also garnered unwelcome responses from various sections of society; plans for the construction of the National Names Memorial were opposed in the neighbourhood, both when it was initially proposed for Wertheimpark and when its alternative location on Weesperstraat was selected. Similarly, the placing of pavement memorial plaques has also met with resistance. Some people resent being reminded of the Shoah every day. Recent decades have seen the advent of Holocaust fatigue – a sense that it’s time for these constant reminders of the Shoah to end –while fears have been expressed that young people know less and less about what happened in the Second World War. Paradoxically, we find ourselves in a situation in which social engagement with the history of the Second World War is declining at a time when initiatives to keep that history alive and combat ignorance about the Shoah among young people are increasing.
Nonetheless, the Second World War still remains a litmus test in discussions about right and wrong, giving it a central place in our collective consciousness. That this history will continue to play a role in Dutch society seems incontrovertible. For the Jewish community, the way its memory is expressed, and how the Jewish experience and consequent suffering are acknowledged in this context, will largely determine its relationship with Dutch society in general. With the opening of the National Holocaust Museum, an institution has come into being that will continue to focus attention on the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands from start to finish.
