Dr. Joyce Van de Bildt

During the Second World War, about 75% of Jews in the Netherlands were murdered, the highest percentage in Western Europe. This high number was attributed in part to the obedience of Dutch civil servants to Nazi commands and the efficiency in implementing them. In a post-war interview, Adolf Eichmann said about the Netherlands that the transports there were running so smoothly that it was “a pleasure to watch.”[1]

In March 2024, following years of planning and construction, a National Holocaust Museum opened in Amsterdam. The museum was designed with the explicit aim to teach schoolchildren and others “how the Holocaust could happen, about its victims and perpetrators,” and most importantly, to teach “how to prevent it all from happening again.”[2] Its establishment was a milestone in the Dutch commitment to inform about the darkest times in European history, and as such, is commendable.

Yet soon after its inauguration, the museum sparked a controversy, raising questions about historical memory and responsibility and a dilemma not unique to the Dutch case: how should countries occupied by the Nazis engage with the vicious and massive crimes committed through the cooperation and, in some cases, initiative, of their own people against the Jewish population?

Israeli columnist Chaim Levinson, who visited the museum shortly after it opened, argued in Haaretz, the leading Israeli liberal newspaper, that Dutch perpetrators and collaborators are “completely absent” from the museum’s exhibition.

Levinson raised very good questions: “Moving on to the question of responsibility – how, in fact, did the Holocaust take place in the Netherlands? Why did they see the Jews, who were their allies and flesh of their flesh, as an enemy that should be destroyed and eliminated? What were the opinions and worldviews behind the Holocaust of Dutch Jews? Could it have taken place in England, too?”[3]

According to Levinson, a visitor to the Dutch Holocaust Museum will not walk away with answers to these questions and won’t learn anything about the role or responsibility of Dutch perpetrators in the Shoah.

Christophe Busch, director of the Hannah Arendt Institute in Mechelen (Belgium), observed that only one section of the museum, called “wallpaper of crimes,” is dedicated to the Nazis and their collaborators. That section sheds light on the perpetrators in all their diversity, albeit briefly and without much explanation. He noted that this part of the museum touches on a complexity that the museum’s curators believe should be tackled in a thorough and nuanced way only within its educational work rather than through exhibitions.[4]

Similar criticisms were offered regarding a Dutch historical television drama about the Jewish Council that was broadcast around the time of the museum’s opening. The Jewish Council was formed by the Nazis in the Netherlands in order to utilize the country’s Jewish leadership to organize deportations with the least resistance. Although the series was widely praised for representing the dilemmas of the Council, it failed to present two critical historical factors that explain the Council’s tragedy: the context of the isolation of the Dutch Jewish community by 1942 and the cooperation of Dutch civil servants in the persecution of the Jews.

Dutch historian and professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Johannes Houwink ten Cates, said: “With the exception of a few professors and their students in Leiden and Delft, and later the churches, hardly anyone stood up for the Jews […] why is this not mentioned earlier in the series?” Moreover, “during the first three hours of this historical television drama, there is absolutely no reference to the cooperation of Dutch civil servants in the persecution. Cooperation in registering as Jews, in enforcing segregation, in removing Jewish children from education, in issuing identity cards (marked with a J for ‘Jew’), in arrests (also by the Amsterdam municipal police) and in transports to the transit camps on the way to the East. In my opinion, this is a serious lack of historical context, because the help of Dutch civil servants in the persecution and the transports was more important to the occupiers than that of the Jewish Council […] The official collaboration went unpunished after the liberation. So many non-Jewish villains and their accomplices […] went free.”[5]

Although Dutch co-responsibility for and complicity in the deportation of the country’s Jews has been discussed, researched, and publicly acknowledged in the Netherlands, there is no unanimous agreement on the extent to which this topic should be broached in the national memory of the Second World War.

Responding to the criticism, the National Holocaust Museum’s chief curator, Annemiek Gringold, argued that the museum does not overlook the complicity of the Dutch in the deportation of the country’s Jews. She pointed out that the museum does explore “this very dark part of the Netherlands’ history, as well as antisemitism in Dutch society before, during, and after the Shoah.” She refers to the museum’s “wallpaper of crimes” as “one of its most prominent sections,” explaining that it exhibits Nazi artifacts of both German and Dutch origin and offers more than 50 digital portraits of perpetrators. “About one-third of the portraits are of Dutch collaborators,” she argued. “They include Dutch Jew hunters, both civilians and police officers, Dutch SS officials, Dutch guards at concentration camps and Dutch volunteers in the German Einsatzgruppen that rounded up and shot Jews and others in Eastern Europe in their millions […] In addition to these accomplices’ acts of betrayal, looting, abuse, and deportation, the exhibition also provides dozens of personal accounts of Jewish victims.”[6]

The Director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter,[7] Emile Schrijver, clarified that one of the museum’s main intentions was to focus on the victims and “to return humanity to those who were deprived of their humanity by zooming in on individual lives” and telling individual stories through personal artifacts.[8]

The construction of memory inevitably involves contestation. Memory scholars have established that there will always be multiple memories of the same event and that struggles and negotiations take place between them.[9] This is also the case in the Netherlands, after decades of self-reflection and a gradual attempt to commemorate the persecution of Jews in the most proper way.

The rather belatedly established National Holocaust Museum is the Netherlands’ first museum solely dedicated to the persecution of the Jews in the country. It complements a string of other places of commemoration that keep the memory of the Second World War alive, the main ones being the Amsterdam Resistance Museum, the Anne Frank House, the Auschwitz Monument, the Westerbork transit camp, the Amersfoort concentration camp, and the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the Amsterdam theater that the Nazis used as an assembly space for nearly 50,000 Dutch Jews before they were deported to transit Camp Westerbork in the east of the country and then to the concentration and extermination camps in Eastern Europe. Younger Jewish children were assembled in the nursery across the street from the theater, and most of them were murdered. After the war, the Hollandsche Schouwburg, with its haunting memories, was left deserted and abandoned for years until finally, in 1962, the auditorium of the theater was dedicated as a memorial to the Dutch victims of the Holocaust.[10]

The new National Holocaust Museum is located across the street from this memorial, in the “Hervormde Kweekschool” – a former Protestant seminary that had a garden adjacent to the nursery where the Jewish children were gathered. The seminary was a crucial part of a rescue operation in which its directors, students, and employees, in cooperation with the Dutch resistance, managed to save about 600 Jewish children from the nursery and transfer them to places of hiding with Dutch families all over the country. The rescue operation was led by Johan van Hulst, who later became a senator and was named Righteous Among the Nations. He died in 2018, aged 107. Also involved in the efforts were Henriëtte Pimentell, the director of the nursery who was murdered in Auschwitz in September 1943, and Walter Süskind, a Jewish council member who died in February 1945 in or near Auschwitz.

The choice of location for the Holocaust Museum raises the question whether its curators sought to highlight this story of resistance against the dark background of the persecution of Dutch Jewry that is presented in the museum itself. This question is especially worth raising given the tendency in the Netherlands, certainly in the past, to give resistance and hiding the more prominent place in the national commemoration of the Second World War.

This was especially true in the first decades after the war when the perception prevailed that everyone in the Netherlands had had it bad; some suffered more than others, but everyone was more or less equal in their suffering. Resistance during the war was glorified and amplified to inaccurate proportions.

From the 1960s onwards, public consciousness of the Shoah increased, accompanied by feelings of bewilderment and shame, as the public was confronted with the first classic historical works and television documentaries on the fate of the Dutch Jews. This was followed by intensive scientific research on the topic.

In the 1980s and 1990s, it was widely recognized in the Dutch public discourse that an obedient Dutch administrative apparatus had significantly contributed to the efficiency of the deportations in the Netherlands; that from top to bottom, Dutch civil servants, railway personnel, and police officers had actively participated in the preparations and facilitation of the persecution of Jews, while the population passively watched.[11]

Officials began to publicly recognize the Dutch complicity in the deportation of the Jews. Queen Beatrix addressed the Knesset in March 1995 and cautiously noted that the Dutch who saved Jews were the exception during the years of occupation, while not directly recognizing that there were those who willingly cooperated with evil.[12]

Her speech was followed by various initiatives for compensation and restitution schemes.[13] On the National Remembrance Day of May 4, 2020, King Willem-Alexander publicly acknowledged that his own grandmother, Queen Juliana, may not have done enough for her subjects who were in need, who “felt abandoned, not heard enough, not supported enough, even if only with words.”[14] In the same year, Prime Minister Mark Rutte publicly apologized for the role of the Dutch government in the persecution of the Jews.[15] This was followed by the unveiling of the Holocaust Names Monument in Amsterdam in 2021 and, finally, the opening of the National Holocaust Museum in 2024.

Memory and heritage scholar David Duindam observed that the self-critical view of the Holocaust reflected a broader political tendency to acknowledge the painful and embarrassing parts of Dutch national history. Another aspect of this tendency is the way the Dutch colonial past has been extensively addressed over the last decade. There is an urge to make room for these histories that used to be marginal and to present them to a large audience in national places.[16]

However, Dutch historian Johannes Houwink ten Cate notes that this fixation on injustice, characteristic of the present “age of apology,” also has a converse effect. With regard to the Second World War, he argues, the new tendency to trivialize resistance and to present collaboration as if it was the norm is being resisted by large segments of the Dutch public.[17]

Ten Cate observes that feelings of guilt and shame about the Holocaust have been disappearing from the public debate. For example, it is common to express the idea that the Dutch lack of solidarity with the Jews is a myth. Likewise, the distinction between good and evil has become blurred. Dutch writer and artist Chaja Polak identifies this as part of a broader tendency to manipulate history and a dormant forgetting of the Shoah.

According to historian Frank van der Vree, who recently published his volume The Netherlands and the Memory of the Persecution of the Jews 1945-2024, a common sentiment in the Netherlands remains that “this was done to the Netherlands as a nation. The Dutch are not collectively looking away from the Holocaust, and the persecution of the country’s Jews is not denied or repressed, but at the same time, the specific character of the mass murder of Jews receives little attention.”[18]

According to a study by the Claims Conference published in January 2023, only 44% of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z and only half (50%) of all Dutch respondents support recent efforts by Dutch leaders to acknowledge and apologize for the Netherlands’ failure to protect Jews during the Holocaust; 39% of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z and 31% of all Dutch respondents opposed such acknowledgments and apologies, while 17% of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z and 19% of all Dutch respondents said they were not sure.

The same study showed shortcomings in historical knowledge about the Holocaust in the Netherlands, especially among young people. Twelve percent of all respondents believe the Holocaust is a myth or the number of Jews killed has been greatly exaggerated, while 9% are unsure. These numbers are higher among Dutch Millennials and Gen Z, where 23% believe the Holocaust is a myth or the number of Jews murdered has been greatly exaggerated, while 12% are unsure. More than half of all respondents (54% of all respondents and 59% of Millennials and Gen Z) do not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.[19]

This reality is accompanied by an ongoing controversy surrounding Holocaust education and sensitivities involving the wars in the Middle East, which conflated in an unfortunate way at the opening of the National Holocaust Museum on March 10, 2024.

During the inauguration, a crowd of anti-Israel demonstrators gathered in the street, demonstrating against the war in Gaza as well as the arrival of Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog, who attended the opening of the museum. At this vulnerable moment for the last survivors of the concentration camps, the Hitler salute was seen several times. Palestinian flags were waved, and “From the River to the Sea” was chanted.

The shouts of the crowd even drowned out the words of the King of the Netherlands, who was trying to address local television reporters. The demonstrators’ verbal attacks on a Holocaust survivor and his great-granddaughter who received the honor of attaching a mezuzah to the museum’s entrance and who were then rushed through a small opening in the angry crowd with their heads bowed evoked painful memories of something the museum is trying to educate against.

In the aftermath of the event, the Dutch Jewish community expressed its shock at the public aversion against Jews in front of this symbolic museum. It raised the question of how long Dutch civil society and the city’s leaders “will continue to accept the demonization of Jews” and when they would finally take a stance to protect the Jews.[20] This call is a stark echo of the past, when most Dutch Jews felt entirely abandoned by their leaders and fellow citizens in the Second World War.

Historian David Wertheim, Director of the Menasseh ben Israel Institute for Jewish Studies, commented: “The fear is very existential. It stems from the traumatic experiences of the Shoah: the idea that the Jewish community thought it was safe and it wasn’t.”[21] Levinson, in his Haaretz column, touched on these feelings by asking: “Why were the Jews considered such a disturbance to this calm and pleasant life, both then and today?” and “Why is the most heavily guarded building in central Amsterdam a Holocaust museum?”[22]

[1] Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller, “The Netherlands: The Highest Number of Jewish Victims in Western Europe,” Anne Frank House publication, https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/netherlands-greatest-number-jewish-victims-western-europe/.

[2] See the official website: https://jck.nl/en/location/national-holocaust-museum.

[3] Chaim Levinson “Missing at Amsterdam’s New Holocaust Museum: The Dutch Collaborators,” Haaretz, August 19, 2024, https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2024-08-19/ty-article/.premium/one-thing-is-missing-at-amsterdams-new-holocaust-museum-dutch-collaborators/00000191-6a71-db7c-afdf-fe713eec0000.

[4] Christophe Busch, “The Janus face of the National Holocaust Museum [Dutch],” Historisch Nieuwsblad, April 30, 2024, https://www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/de-januskop-van-het-nationaal-holocaustmuseum/.

[5] “The Jewish Council is once again the scapegoat [Dutch],” Historisch Nieuwsblad, April 2, 2024, https://www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/de-joodse-raad-is-toch-weer-de-zondebok/.

[6] Annemiek Gringold, “Dutch Collaborators Do Play a Prominent Role at Amsterdam’s New Holocaust Museum,” Haaretz, August 26, 2024, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-08-26/ty-article-opinion/.premium/dutchcollaborators-do-play-a-prominent-role-at-amsterdams-new-holocaust-museum/00000191-89cc-d954-add7-8fdec4870000.

[7] The National Holocaust Museum and the recently renovated memorial in the Hollandsche Schouwburg are part of the so-called “Jewish Cultural Quarter” (JCK) in Amsterdam that also includes the Jewish Historic Museum, the Children’s Museum, and the Portuguese Synagogue with its historic Jewish library Ets Haim.

[8] “National Holocaust Museum full of stories [Dutch],” Benjamin, March 27, 2024, https://joodswelzijn.nl/benjamin/nationaal-holocaustmuseum-vol-verhalen/.

[9] Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” The American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997), 1398.

[10] For two in-depth studies, see: David Duindam, Fragments of the Holocaust: The Amsterdam Hollandsche

Schouwburg as a Site of Memory (Amsterdam University Press, 2018) and Site of Deportation, Site of Memory:

The Amsterdam Hollandsche Schouwburg and the Holocaust, ed. David Duindam, Hetty Berg, Frank van Vree

(Amsterdam University Press, 2018).

[11] Margreet Fogteloo, “Finally Room [Dutch],” De Groene Amsterdammer, no. 17, April 24, 2019, https://www.groene.nl/artikel/eindelijk-ruimte.

[12] For the text of Her Majesty’s speech on March 28, 1995: https://m.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/Documents/SpeechPdf/Beatrix.pdf.

[13] Rianne Oosterom, “Why the Netherlands is only now getting a National Holocaust Museum [Dutch],” Trouw, March 8, 2024.

[14] Speech by King Willem-Alexander, National Remembrance Day [Dutch], May 4, 2020, https://www.koninklijkhuis.nl/documenten/toespraken/2020/05/04/toespraak-van-koning-willem-alexander-nationale-herdenking-4-mei-2020.

[15] Speech by Prime Minister Mark Rutte at the National Commemoration at the Auschwitz Monument, Amsterdam, January 26, 2020, https://www.government.nl/documents/speeches/2020/01/26/speech-by-prime-ministermark-rutte-at-the-national-commemoration-at-the-auschwitz-monument-amsterdam.

[16] Oosterom, “Why the Netherlands is only now getting a National Holocaust Museum.”

[17] Fogteloo, “Finally Room.”

[18] Oosterom, “Why the Netherlands is only now getting a National Holocaust Museum.”

[19] Claims Conference Netherlands Holocaust Poll, January 2023, https://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Claims-Conference-Netherlands-Dual-Topline-1.pdf.

[20] Naomi Italiaander, “Enough is Enough [Dutch],” Jonet, March 12, 2024, https://jonet.nl/de-maat-is-vol-columnnaomi-italiaander/.

[21] “Don’t Say: You are an Antisemite. But: What You Said is Antisemitic [Dutch],” Nederlands Dagblad, November

6, 2023.

[22] Haim Levinson “Missing at Amsterdam’s New Holocaust Museum: The Dutch Collaborators.”