Amsterdam mayor issues formal apology for city’s role in persecution of Jews during WWII

The Mayor of the Dutch capital Femke Halsema issued a formal apology for the city’s involvement in the persecution and deportation of Jews during World War II.

She was speaking from the Jewish Cultural Quarter during a commemoration service on the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 24, Caliber.Az reports citing Dutch media.

The mayor acknowledged the municipality’s failure to protect its Jewish citizens during the event for Yom HaShoah, acknowledging that “when it truly mattered, the Amsterdam government was not brave, not resolute, and not compassionate. It gravely failed its Jewish residents”.

On behalf of the city government, she offered her “sincere apologies” and stated that there is a responsibility to remember and honour the victims of the Holocaust. She detailed how the city government actively collaborated with the occupying Nazi forces — from mapping out Jewish residences and enforcing registration requirements to making public transport available for deportations. She also described the mandatory registration of Jews as a critical step in their systemic dehumanisation and extermination, resulting in the murder of 60,000 Jewish Amsterdammers.

By early 1941, Jews were required by the German forces to register with the authorities. In total, about 160,000 people registered throughout the whole of the Netherlands, including thousands of refugees and individuals of mixed heritage and some 25,000 Jewish refugees from the German Reich, like the family of the infamous diary author and Amsterdam resident Anne Frank.

The Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies will soon complete an investigation into the role of all municipal services that were involved in the exclusion and persecution of Jewish Amsterdammers during World War II. 

he Netherlands, which had maintained neutrality for a century before the outbreak of WWII, was invaded by Nazi Germany on May 10, 1940. Between 1942 and 1945, over 107,000 Jews from the Netherlands were deported, mostly to concentration camps in Auschwitz and Sobibor, where the majority were killed.

By Nazrin Sadigova