Last Thursday we posted on the morally correct stand of the Hon. Geert Wilders , leader of the Freedom Party (PVV) in the Hague Parliament. Wilders had issued a statement demanding that the present Dutch government of PM Rutte issue a long overdue apology to Dutch Jewish survivors and the families of victims for official “passivity” in the face of the murder of more than 100,000 Jewish Citizens by occupying Nazis during the Holocaust. The raising of this issue by Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party (PVV) was prompted by a book, Judging the Netherlands by Manfred Gerstenfeld of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, who was a hidden child during the Shoah in Holland.
Yesterday, it was Gerstenfeld’s turn to take Dutch leadership to task in an opinion column published by Ynet.com, “No Apologies to the Jews”. In it he notes that a recent poll taken in Holland reveal that the issue of an apology garnered less than 27% approval. A sad commentary, but also, evidence of Wilder’s moral courage on the issue.
Here is Gestenfeld’s Ynet.com column:
- A few days ago, a poll found that two-thirds of the Dutch people are opposed to their prime minister apologizing to the Jewish community for the misconduct of the wartime government in exile in London. Only 27% of those polled were in favor of such apologies.
Dutch governments have consistently ignored requests to fully admit the extent of the involvement of the Dutch in the persecution of Jews during the Second World War. Even in recent days, some Dutch historians tried to inflate beyond proportion the importance of a few general remarks on this issue by the current Dutch Queen Beatrix in March 1995 in the Knesset.
She said that there were many Dutch who had resisted the Germans, but they were the exceptions and that “the people of the Netherlands could not prevent the destruction of their Jewish fellow citizens.” Later that year, on National Memorial Day, she added: “Thinking about the Holocaust should fill us with shame.”
This pales in comparison to what French President Jacques Chirac said a few months later: “France committed the irremediable. It broke its word and delivered those it protected to their
executioners. We maintain toward them an unforgiveable debt.” Two years later, Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was even more explicit and said, “Not even one German soldier was necessary to carry out this disgrace.”
Afterwards, the Netherlands fell behind in its apologies compared to other countries. When then-Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende came to Israel in 2005 for the opening of Yad Vashem Museum, I raised the issue of apologies in a short conversation. Balkenende asked me for a letter on this issue. I only received a formal acknowledgement from his staff for it.
At the same opening, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt repeated his apologies for the collaboration of Belgians which he had already expressed in 2002.
On that occasion, Balkenende only said that “the deportation of most of Dutch Jewry was a pitch-black chapter in Dutch history and that coldness and indifference toward the Jews had been dominant.” A month later, he admitted that Dutch authorities had collaborated with the occupiers. The emphasis of his words was more on those who took risks for other people than on the many Dutch traitors.
More international exposure?
Several Dutch historians claim that wartime history is an issue for historians. None of them explained why they haven’t asked for government apologies to the Jewish community for 65 years.
The Dutch apologies issue was raised last week publicly due to statements of former Deputy Prime Ministers Els Borst and Gerrit Zalm in my recent book, Judging the Netherlands: The Holocaust Restitution Process 1997-2000. After the Dutch daily DePers published their quotes on January 4th, Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party, requested that Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologize to the Jewish community.
What happens if the Dutch government follows majority opinion and doesn’t apologize? Most likely, this will lead to more international exposure of Dutch misconduct in many areas. This will include the Dutch government in London taking a year and a half to inquire about the fate of deported Dutch Jews from the Polish government, which sat in the same building. Or how in 1943 Henri Dentz, a Dutch official in London, could not find anyone in the government or even at the Red Cross to read his report, which revealed that 90% of deported Dutch Jews had been murdered.
Much attention will also be focused on Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, who regularly spoke to the Dutch people from London via radio for four years. Only three times during that period did she devote attention to the Jews: Five sentences in total. Before the war, she opposed the establishment of a center for German Jewish refugees in a location that she considered too close to her palace. The distance was 12 kilometers.
Another issue to mention again is Dutch postwar misconduct during the restitution process. Prime Minister Kok, under pressure, apologized for this in 2000, but added that except for one case, this wrongdoing was not intentional. There are, however, many more examples of bad postwar intentions toward the Jews.
A very different type of potential exposure concerns the never properly investigated Dutch war crimes during “police actions” in Indonesia in the late 1940s. More than 100,000 people were killed. The Dutch government has recently apologized to the inhabitants of one village, Rawagede, where all native males were executed without a trial. There are however, several similar cases about which little is known.
Current Prime Minister Rutte would be well advised to consider all of this when he decides whether to apologize or not.
Tags: Manfred Gerstenfeld, Geert Wilders, Judging the Netherlands, offical Dutch apology for Holocaust behavior, Ynet.com
The job of arresting Jews in Holland was given to the local civilian “Green Police”. They also operated “Hollandsche Schouwburg” the theater that was used as the holding and deportation center within Amsterdam, from whence 60,000 to 80,000 Jews were sent to the Westerbork and Voght concentration camps, guarded by the Groen Politie, Green Plicie, albeit with German commanders.
The mass arrests in some Dutch towns, like Groningen in the north, were orchestrated by the municipal authorities. The mayor, municipal council members and police officials selected Jewish homes and businesses for themselves before the deportation. Groningen, which had been the 4th largest community in the Netherlands before the war, had the lowest survival rate.
Ironically, their were recently 2 cities with Jewish mayors, Jacques Wellage Groningen, and the antisemitic Job Cohen in Amsterdam.
Bureaucrats at the Ministry of the Interior complained too the Germans that too many Jews were forging identity cards. At their request, the Germans canceled required that all cards be replaced, printed with new technologies and ink, that made forging Aryan documents much harder. This contrasts with the bureaucrats in Belgium, who at the Queen Mother’s request, secretly supplied Jews with materials for creating Aryan documents with authentic booklets, stamps and inks.
Both royal families fled to London, yet the German born Queen Mother Elizabeth of Belgium chose to remain in the country during the occupation. She used her prestige many times to encourage Belgians to protect Jews, and was awarded the Righteous Gentile award by Yad Vashem.
What a disgrace.In Amsterdam they have a house dedicated to Ann Frank , a girl they see as a national heroine.This girl was “given”
to the Nazis by a dutch man while she and others were hiding from the
Nazis during WWII.
She died in a concentration camp.
Holand did not fight the Nazis.She surrendered one two three while the US crossed the ocean to fight her war.
I have nothing but disgust for this country who is now full of Arabs and drugs.
Surprise, surprise! It is silly to ask for an apology, instead ask the Dutch to return the homes Jews have once lived in. Europe still lives on the property they stole from
from the murdered Jews. To me, as a Holocaust survivor Europe is a criminal continent soaked with Jewish blood. 21 European countries murdered their own Jews.
Why did they do it?. For money, they still live in our homes, they simply moved in our homes without spending a cent.
We Jews are always accused of being greedy money changers, but it is the gentile world who are the murderers, robbers and thieves. The Holocaust survivors
today live in poverty, while our murderers enjoy the property they stole from us.
I don’t care about apologies from our enemies, the harm they have done make words meaningless, the return of the property they stole would have some meaning I don’t see
them doing it.
Holocaust survivor
What is the point of this waste of energy. Jews still begging for crumbs from their masters? This incredible subservience appears to be without shame. Accept that the europeans, and their culture, have been involved in a chronic, congenital, serial slaughter of the jews after first depriving them of their homeland and are now engaged in depriving the jews of their homeland again in collaboration with new jew killers. Dont expect change in the short span of 60 years. Instead see them for what they are, despise them for what they are and focus energy on building an Israel that will reverse the european slaughters and swindles not through begging but through might.
Ian’t it time for the Israel government to apologize for the eviction and destruction of 26 communities -towns villages and exiling over 9000 people from the only home they had known
Tuning most of them into dependants of the welfare system instead of the honorable self suficiant tax paying assets which they had ben
_many have developed stress related diseases many have developed cancers and numbers of soldiers who were forced to carry it out suffer from depression nervous breakdowns and there have been reports of tens of suicides
“If I was Dutch, and I knew that collaboration to the Nazis was primarly from the Catholics and some Catholic told me that I needed to apologize for the treatment of Dutch Jews during the Nazi invasion, I would tell them to go shove it too”</
…If I were a catholic Dutch, I would aknowledge it with heightened shame.
Kudos for Manfred Gerstenfeld´s fight for recognizion of europe´s guilt in the Shoah.
I suspect there is more to this issue than meets the eye. Geert Wilders is Catholic. One of the unexplored facets of the onslaught of the Third Reich is the role that religion played in confronting or collaborating with the various Nazi invasions. The Netherlands is a traditionally Protestant country with a significant Catholic population and we really need to know exactly how this played in collaborating or resisting the Nazi invasion. For example, Lutheranism is popularly blamed for antisemitism in Germany. But not only was Hitler Catholic and the rest of the founding party Catholic, he was not even German, he was from Austria, a Catholic country. And it was the Lutheran countries who were the most resistant to Nazi invasion. It was the Catholic countries who were the most inviting. Nowhere did Protestant countries surrender to Nazi invasion. The Swedes announced neutrality as they did in WWI and the Nazis came, but it was negotiated, it was not an invitation.
If I was Dutch, and I knew that collaboration to the Nazis was primarly from the Catholics and some Catholic told me that I needed to apologize for the treatment of Dutch Jews during the Nazi invasion, I would tell them to go shove it too.