Eight years from the end of the Second World War, Mayor Femke Halsma of Amsterdam apologized on Thursday for the role of the city in the persecution of his Jewish residents during the Holocaust, in a rare recognition of a collective moral failure by a leader in the city.
“The Government of Amsterdam was, when it counted, not heroic, not determined and not merciful,” he said. “And his Jewish residents are horribly abandoned.”
Mrs. Halsema issued the apologies in a speech in a commemoration of the Holocaust at the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theater that the Nazis turned into an important deportation center from which many of the Jews of Amsterdam were sent to the concentration camps in the Netherlands and in other parts of Europe.
Before the Holocaust, Amsterdam, the Dutch capital, had 80,000 Jewish residents. The Nazis, with the help of local officials, deported and killed over 60,000.
“The administrators and officials were not only cold and formal, but even willing to cooperate with the occupant,” said Mrs. Halsema. “This was an indispensable step in isolation, humiliation, deportation, dehumanization and murder of 60,000 Jews of Amsterdam.”
The city government has collaborated with the Nazis on several levels; Municipal officials mapped where local Jews and police officers lived contributed to the deportation of their fellow citizens.
“Anti -Semitism was not brought to the Netherlands by the German occupant,” said Mrs. Halsema, “and it has not disappeared after the liberation. There has always been hatred against the Jews – even in this city – and there is still”.
Mrs. Halsema announced that the city would hit 25 million euros (about $ 28.5 million) to promote Jewish life and the visibility of Judaism in the city. A new committee for six people will decide how to spend these funds.
“I didn't expect it,” said Keren Hirsch, a councilor of Amsterdam, of the investment. Mrs. Hirsch, who is Jewish, added: “Much is not known about Judaism and the history of Amsterdam”.
In all the Netherlands, the Nazis expelled 75 percent of the country's Jewish population at concentration camps during the Second World War, the highest percentage in Western Europe. Most of them lived in Amsterdam. The city transit authority and other agencies have contributed to removing 102,000 Jews and 220 Romans, also known as Rome and Sinti, from Amsterdam.
“You can't go back in time, you can't cancel what the Municipality did,” said Mrs. Hirsch. But, he added, “Having excuses is important for me. In this sense, words count for me.”
The official excuses of the city arrive five years after the former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte apologized on behalf of the government for not having protected the Jewish citizens of the country during the Second World War.
“With the last survivors who remained among us, I apologize on behalf of the government for government actions at that moment,” said Rutte in a memorial in 2020.
The country as a whole has spent the last few years dealing with the dark chapters of his past. In 2023, the Willem-Alexander King apologized for the role of his country in the slave trafficking, a rare direct excuses for a historical injustice by a European monarch in session. Rutte apologized on behalf of the government months earlier.
In 2022, Rutte also apologized to the Indonesia people for the institutionalized violence of the Dutch army during the Indonesian war of independence, which began in 1945. Also in 2022, the Dutch Defense Minister apologized for the role of the Netherlands in the role of 1995 in the 1995 massacre of about 8000 Muslim men and males in the Bosnian city of Srebrenica.