Righteous Gentiles and Saving Jews in Holland

Joseph Michman

The decision to exterminate all the Jews of Europe was made in Germany at the very highest
level, which was by Hitler himself, apparently in December 1941. This decision was not
implemented in all the countries of Europe to the same degree, at the same pace and using the
same method. These three components were in fact largely dependent on various factors,
primarily the leaders of the German regime in each individual country and the conditions in
which they worked. The attitude of the local population to the Jews was a major factor in the
three components mentioned here: the scope, the pace, and the method. Holland is an
exception to this rule for many reasons.
Immediately after Holland was occupied, Hitler decided contrary to what had been decided
earlier with the army to establish a civilian occupational government in it rather than a
military government, as in Belgium and France. This decision apparently came in response to
the flight of Queen Wilhelmina, and all the members of the government, to England, a step
that left Holland without authoritative leadership to control the country. This created a
constitutional vacuum. Hitler exploited this golden opportunity to institute a regime of
officials rather than one of generals over Holland. This decision had extremely adverse and
far-reaching effects for all of Holland, but especially for its Jews.
A civil administration in an occupied country generally makes life much tougher for the
citizenry than a military government, and in Holland, the authorities were especially stringent
in all matters that concerned Jews. The appointed governmental officials in occupied Holland
were not mere civil servants; they were people infamous for their ruthlessness in persecuting
Jews. The position of Reichskommissar was given to Arthur Seyss-Inquart: In 1938, he was
the prime minister of Austria who had welcomed the Nazi Anschluss annexation of that
country. Seyss-Inquart, a member of the Nazi party, appointed two of his friends, fanatical
Austrian antisemites like himself, to join the leadership of the government. The other
members of the Nazi leadership in Holland were also filled with an intense hatred for all
Jews, true to the Austrian tradition of antisemitism.
Already in the first few months of his administration, Seyss-Inquart and his government
planned the removal of Jews from all public jobs. From 1941 on, all Jews in Holland were
meticulously registered. In addition, using various sophisticated ruses, all the Jewish
businesses were handed over to Germans and German sympathizers among the local
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population. The official Dutch authorities were unable to contend with the ruthless and skilled
German leadership, which was determined to resolve the Jewish problem in Holland
completely and quickly. In fact, the Dutch officials abandoned the Jews of their country to the
German antisemitic initiatives, despite the fact that Dutch Jews had enjoyed 150 years of full
citizenship rights. When the deportations to the death camps began, the German government
in Holland collaborated with Eichmann and his staff, exhibiting considerable efficiency and
discipline when doing so.
What were the implications of these unique circumstances for the matter of righteous Gentiles
in Holland? Due to the nature of the German government and its efficiency, it was more
dangerous to rescue Jews in the Netherlands than in Belgium or France. Those caught helping
Jews in Belgium or France risked a relatively lenient punishment, but in Holland, they might
be executed or sent to a concentration camp, where the chances of survival were very slim.
The German and Dutch police conducted searches for Jews that were hiding and gave
informers large sums of money for each Jew they helped catch. The German police even tried
to tempt Jews to come out of their hiding paces with false promises that they would be
exempted from deportation.
At first, the occupational governments anti-Jewish policy did not encounter significant
opposition from most of the Dutch population. One exception was the February Strike (1941)
that turned Amsterdam and a number of nearby cities into the site of mass demonstrations
against the cruel arrest of over 400 Jews. But the wave of protest and sympathy for Jews
quickly died out, and the results were in fact worse for the Jews. On the one hand, the strike
created a feeling of complacency among the Jewish leadership, and on the other, caused the
government to take a harder line towards them. Moreover, the groups of activists that
demonstrated in February 1941 were willing to carry out the actions required of them to effect
the deportation of Jews from the summer of 1942 on to transfer them in buses and trains
from the places where they lived to the transit camps and from them to the death camps.
The help that the Jews needed at the fateful moment when the deportations began in July
1942 was more than mass protest demonstrations, which might have affected changes, rather
they needed the creation of opportunities to escape, each person with his or her family, from
the arrests carried out by German and Dutch policemen. The only chance of survival they had
was entirely dependent on the willingness of non-Jews to hide them in their apartments,
provide them with identification papers and ration cards, real or false, and to accompany them
from their homes to the places of hiding. In the summer of 1942, there was no willingness
among the Dutch populace in general to help the Jews in these ways, either due to general
indifference to their fate or because the news of what was being done to the Jews did not
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reach many areas of the country due to the absolute control the German authorities exerted
over the mass media.
Despite this, the first harbingers of spontaneous assistance to Jews appeared just a few days
before the first transport from Amsterdam to the Westerbork transit camp. A young woman
from the city of Utrecht named Cor Basiaanse traveled to Amsterdam, collected a number of
children from their parents homes and brought them to Utrecht, where she hid them among
different families. This act marked the beginning of the organization of four networks that
specialized particularly in the rescue of children: a group of students from Utrecht, a group of
students from Amsterdam, an organization of Christians that called itself Society, Ltd., and
a group of devout Christians connected with an underground newspaper. Together, these four
groups saved about 1,100 children, 90 percent of whom were Jewish, and hid them all over
the country.
It is notable that the student group from Utrecht received support from the archbishop of
Holland, J. de Jong, whose seat was in Utrecht. This phenomenon, of a high-ranking church
figure taking a clear stand against the Nazi authorities was not exceptional. During the
occupation, the official Dutch authorities lost their national and moral standing, and
consequently, the eyes of Dutch believers, Protestants and Catholics both, were turned
towards their spiritual leaders, to whom they went with the problems they encountered,
especially matters of conscience regarding the treatment of the Jews. Quite a number of
priests and ministers stood up for their moral principles despite the Nazi terror. For example,
the Protestant minister B.J. Ader from a village in northeast Holland traveled to the Jewish
hospital in Amsterdam and convinced the doctors and nurses working there to go into hiding.
He was even willing to find them hiding places among the members of his flock and
established a wide network of rescuers headquartered in his home. He was arrested and
ultimately executed for this. Another minister, L. Overduin from the city of Enschede,
together with the members of the local Jewish council and with the help of Jewish and nonJewish industrialists, established a ramified network of couriers and hiding places, especially
in eastern Holland.
The influence of the religious figures was crucial in many cases. It especially influenced the
more homogeneous communities of believers in the villages and towns in which the people
generally knew that certain families were hiding Jews. [...] One such town was Nieuwlande in
eastern Holland, in which over 200 Jewish families were hidden from the Germans.
Southern Holland was liberated in September 1944, but in the Northern part, the German
army surrendered only on May 5, 1945. The danger to the Jews in the areas that were not

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liberated did not abate up to that date, continuing far beyond the period of persecution in other
European countries. [...]
Towards the end of the war, the police apparatus together with the Dutch collaborators
stepped up their efforts to capture Jews and opponents to the regime, whose number grew as
Germanys downfall drew closer. In April-May 1943, the large strikes began that included the
trains system and the students who refused to sign a commitment to refrain from anti-German
activities. The number of those hiding and living underground for political reasons soared to
300,000. The Jews made up fewer than 10 percent, about 25,000. At that time, many homes
were opened to Jews by people who, until that time, had refused to take in Jews.
The Westerweel group, a well-known underground organization named for its charismatic
leader, managed to save hundreds of young people using stolen or forged papers.
The number of Dutch Jews murdered in the Holocaust is relatively large compared to the
other Western European countries. The main reason this was so lay in the extreme antisemitic
nature of the occupational government in Holland. Hollands political leadership in fact
surrendered to the demands and dictates of the occupational regime and influenced the lower
echelons to collaborate with the branches of the German police, notwithstanding the fact that
this ran completely counter to the Dutch constitution. The opposition to the persecution of the
Jews developed spontaneously among individuals or small groups who were unable to accept
the humiliation of the Jews and their deportation from Holland. The motives of the rescuers
can be defined as humanitarian or religious. Of greatest importance was the public protest by
leaders of the churches against the anti-Jewish policies. They influenced the local religious
leaders to lend a hand to the Jews, who encouraged their flocks to hide Jews in their homes.
Helping Jews in Holland posed a far greater risk than in France or Belgium. Many of the
rescuers paid for their acts of bravery with their lives, and were shot or sent to concentration
camps in Germany.
Joseph Michman, Righteous Gentiles and Saving Jews in Holland, On the Path of
Remembrance, (Heb.), 29, 1998, pp. 13-18.

Why was the percentage of Dutch Jews that were slaughtered so

high?
Manfred Gerstenfeld
The percentage of Dutch Jews murdered by the Germans and their collaborators in World
War II was higher than in any other Western European country. When the war broke out,
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there were 140,000 Jews living in Holland, representing about 1.6 percent of the total
population of the country. In Amsterdam, the Jewish population numbered 9.5 percent of the
citys population.
About 107,000 Jews were deported from Holland; 102,000 of them were murdered. The
others hid, or were married to non-Jews and were thus saved from deportation, or tried to
escape to other countries. Fewer than a thousand survived the war in Westerbork, the transit
camp from which most of the Dutch Jews were sent to their deaths in the east.
Numerous explanations have been offered for the high proportion of Jews murdered. Even
before the capitulation of the Dutch army only five days after the German invasion on May
10, 1940 Queen Wilhelmina had fled to England. She did so without consulting her
government, which decided afterwards to follow in her footsteps. 1
The Germans had planned to establish a military government in Holland. However, Hitler
recognized the opportunity to establish a civilian Nazi government in the governmental
vacuum created by the flight of the queen and the government. A representative of the Reich
was appointed as early as May 18 to serve as the head of the civil government in Holland.
This representative, an Austrian Nazi leader, Dr. A. Seyss-Inquart, reported directly to Hitler.
Seyss-Inquart brought with him a number of other Austrians, who subsequently proved their
efficiency in organizing the plundering and deportation of the Jewish population of Holland.
Historian Jozeph Michman, the former chairman of the Institute for the Study of Dutch Jewry,
which is located in Jerusalem, has suggested yet another factor to explain the widespread
repercussions of the Holocaust in Holland: He maintains that Hitler in fact intended to turn
Holland into part of the Third Reich after the war. Indeed, many Nazi leaders claimed that
Holland had been mistakenly separated from Germany some time in the distant past.
One of Eichmanns delights
Because Hollands administrative system ran very smoothly and the documentation of all
individuals was exemplary, it was very easy to round up the Jews. The occupiers handed
down orders and the Dutch authorities carried them out. Another explanation often raised
credited the high proportion of Dutch Jews that were murdered to the fact that Holland is a
small, flat country in which it is much more difficult to hide than France or Belgium. This is a
weak argument: After all, in the final years of the war, plenty of hiding places were found for
the Dutch laborers summoned to the work camps in Germany. Towards the end of the war,
hundreds of thousands of Dutch people were hidden, and only five percent of them were
Jews.

Nanda Van der Zee, Om Erger te Vaarkomen. Amsterdam : Meuiennolf. 1997. p.141ff.

Copyright 2009 Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority

After the flight of the queen and government, the government ministries directors-general
had the highest authority that remained of the original Dutch government. Because they were
in an inferior position vis--vis the German occupier, these officials, who were experienced in
administrative matters, did not represent a significant rival to the German occupier.
Consequently, they helped to place the administrative institutions at the disposal of the
occupier. 2 This fact aided in the identification of Jews, their isolation from Dutch society and
ultimate deportation after their property had been looted. By August 1941, all the Jews were
required to register with the authorities. Of the 160,000 that did so, 140,000 were deemed
full-fledged Jews in accordance with the Nazi racial laws.
In their preparations for the extermination of Dutch Jewry, the Germans could count on the
help of the majority of Hollands administrative infrastructure. The occupiers required very
little manpower of their own. It was the Dutch police that rounded up the families designated
for transport to their deaths in Eastern Europe. The trains of the Dutch Train Administration,
staffed by Dutch employees, transported the Jews to the transit camps in Holland, the first
station on the way to Auschwitz, Sobibor and other death camps. Van der Zee writes that
when relating to the collaboration of the Dutch, Eichmann said, The transports start out in
such a smooth fashion its a delight to see. 3
From: Netiv: January 2000, The attitude of the Dutch to the Jews during and after the
Holocaust Myth and reality, pp. 57-64, (Ariel Center for Policy Research).

With the help of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc

2
3

See Gerhard Hirschfeld, Bezetting en collaboratie. Haarlem: Beont, 1991.

V. der Zee p.42.

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