8 - The War, 1940–1945

Summary

THE GERMAN OCCUPATION of the Netherlands and National Socialist domination lasted five years, in which short span of time more than 100,000 Dutch Jews were murdered. Their killing formed part of the Nazi plan for the mass destruction of European Jewry. Antisemitism was the cornerstone of National Socialist ideology and policy and in the Netherlands, as elsewhere, the first phase included the branding of Jews as the wellspring of unparalleled social evil. The German occupation empowered the persecutors to turn their hatred of the Jews into a political strategy. This took place step by step: first the enemy isolated Jews by stripping them of their civil rights, goods, and property. Then Jews were forced to live in a society segregated in every last detail. This process occurred on Dutch soil, but was ultimately sealed by deportation and —concealed until the very end—by premeditated murder.

Jewish life in the Netherlands during these years of terror was thus brought to a pass that was in complete contrast with the course it had run over the centuries. Before the National Socialist era, Jews and Jewish institutions had to make fundamental decisions about their role in society and to define the meaning of their identity and their attitude to it, questions in which the reform of the Jewish religion and the rise of Zionism played their part. Many Jews who had no ties with a synagogue based their philosophy on the liberal or socialist ideology. In 1940, however, their very existence was suddenly being threatened and the relevance of such problems as assimilation and integration was altered radically. The lives of all Jews were at stake and their social existence was increasingly determined by persecution. They were isolated by the enemy and had a Jewish Council imposed upon them, a delusory form of self-government that was run for the benefit of the persecutors and that led to grave internal tensions. In addition, solidarity and indifference, aid and betrayal, life and death, put relations between Jews and non-Jews to the extreme test. The links between individual and society were fundamentally transformed for all Jews.

Historians still argue about the details and the nature of this disaster, and not a few of them doubt whether consensus on the subject can ever be reached.