Eighty years after the end of World War II, Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema apologized Thursday for the rare recognition of collective moral failures by city leaders about the city's role in persecution of Jewish residents throughout the Holocaust.
“The government in Amsterdam was not heroic, undecided, unmerciful when it was important,” she said. “And it abandoned that Jewish inhabitant in horror.”
Halsema issued an apology in a Holocaust memorial speech at the Netherlands Schöburg, a theatre where the Nazis have transformed into major deportation centres where many of Amsterdam's Jews have been sent to concentration camps in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe.
Before the Holocaust, the Dutch capital, Amsterdam, had 80,000 Jewish residents. With the help of local officials, the Nazis deported and killed more than 60,000 people.
“The administrators and officials were not only cold and formal, but were even happy to work with the occupying people,” Halsema said. “It was an essential step in isolation, humiliation, dehumanization and murder of 60,000 Amsterdam Jews.”
The city government worked with the Nazis on multiple levels. Local government officials mapped the places where Jews lived, and local police officers helped deport fellow citizens.
“Anti-Semitism was not brought to the Netherlands by German occupiers,” Halsema said.
Halsema announced that the city will invest 25 million euros (approximately $28.5 million) to promote Jewish life and the visibility of city Jewish religion. The new six-member committee will decide how to use these funds.
“I didn't expect that,” Amsterdam trustee Kellen Hirsch said of the investment. Jewish Hirsch added: “There is much unknown about the history of Judaism and Amsterdam.”
All over the Netherlands, the Nazis deported 75% of the country's Jewish population to concentration camps during World War II. This was the highest percentage in Western Europe. Most of them lived in Amsterdam.
“We can't turn back the time. We can't turn back what the local government did,” Hirsch said. But she said, “It's important to me to get an apology. In that sense, the words are important to me.”
The city's official apology comes five years after former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Latte apologized on behalf of the government for not protecting the country's Jewish citizens during World War II.
“The last survivor remaining among us, and I would like to apologise on behalf of the government for the actions of the government at the time,” Latte said at the 2020 memorial.
The whole country has spent the last few years taking into account the dark chapters of the past. In 2023, King Willem Alexander apologized for his country's role in the slave trade. Latte apologized on behalf of the government a few months ago.
In 2022, Latte also apologized to Indonesians for institutionalized violence in the Dutch Army during the Indonesian War of Independence that began in 1945. Also in 2022, the Dutch Defense Minister apologized for the Dutch role in the 1995 massacre of around 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Slevnica.
