Camp Westerbork, also known as Westerbork transit camp, was a Nazi transit camp in the province of Drenthe in the Northeastern Netherlands, during World War II. It was located in the municipality of Westerbork, current-day Midden-Drenthe. Camp Westerbork was used as a staging location for sending Jews to concentration camps elsewhere.
Amersfoort is a city and municipality in the province of Utrecht, Netherlands. As of 31 January 2023, the municipality had a population of 160,902, making it the second-largest of the province and fifteenth-largest of the country. Amersfoort is also one of the largest Dutch railway junctions with its three stations—Amersfoort Centraal, Schothorst and Vathorst—due to its location on two of the Netherlands' main east to west and north to south railway lines. The city was used during the 1928 Summer Olympics as a venue for the modern pentathlon events. Amersfoort marked its 750th anniversary as a city in 2009.
The history of the Jews in the Netherlands largely dates to the late 16th century and 17th century, when Sephardic Jews from Portugal and Spain began to settle in Amsterdam and a few other Dutch cities, because the Netherlands was an unusual center of religious tolerance. Since Portuguese Jews had not lived under rabbinic authority for decades, the first generation of those embracing their ancestral religion had to be formally instructed in Jewish belief and practice. This contrasts with Ashkenazi Jews from central Europe, who, although persecuted, lived in organized communities. Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was referred to as the "Dutch Jerusalem" for its importance as a center of Jewish life. In the mid 17th century, Ashkenazi Jews from central and eastern Europe migrated. Both groups migrated for reasons of religious liberty, to escape persecution, now able to live openly as Jews in separate organized, autonomous Jewish communities under rabbinic authority. They were also drawn by the economic opportunities in the Netherlands, a major hub in world trade.
Herzogenbusch was a Nazi concentration camp located in Vught near the city of 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. The camp was opened in 1943 and held 31,000 prisoners. 749 prisoners died in the camp, and the others were transferred to other camps shortly before Herzogenbusch was liberated by the Allied Forces in 1944. After the war, the camp was used as a prison for Germans and for Dutch collaborators. Today there is a visitors' center which includes exhibitions and a memorial remembering the camp and its victims.
A Stolperstein is a ten-centimetre (3.9 in) concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. Literally, it means 'stumbling stone' and metaphorically 'stumbling block'.
The History of the Jews in Amsterdam focuses on the historical center of the Dutch Jewish community, comprising both Portuguese Jews originally from both Spain and Portugal and Ashkenazi Jews, originally from central Europe. The two separate groups have had a continuing presence since the seventeenth century. Amsterdam has been called a Jerusalem of the West and the "Dutch Jerusalem". The Holocaust in the Netherlands devastated the Jewish community, with the Nazis murdering some 75% of the approximately 80,000 Jews at time present in Amsterdam, but the community has managed to rebuild a vibrant and living Jewish life for its approximately 15,000 present members.
The Mechelen transit camp, officially SS-Sammellager Mecheln in German, also known as the Dossin barracks, was a detention and deportation camp established in a former army barracks at Mechelen in German-occupied Belgium. It served as a point to gather Belgian Jews and Romani ahead of their deportation to concentration and extermination camps in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust.
Jan Jozef Lambert van Hoof was a member of the Dutch resistance in World War II, who cooperated with Allied Forces during Operation Market Garden. He is credited with disabling explosives placed by the Germans to destroy a vital bridge to delay allied liberation, and was later executed in action. Before and during the war, Van Hoof was a Rover Scout, and the Scouting medal the Nationale Padvindersraad was named in his honour.
Walraven "Wally" van Hall was a Dutch banker and resistance leader during the occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. He founded the bank of the Resistance, which was used to distribute funds to victims of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and fund the Dutch resistance. Van Hall was executed by the German occupier in Haarlem shortly before the end of the war and buried at the Erebegraafplaats Bloemendaal.
The Weerbaarheidsafdeling was the paramilitary arm of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (NSB), the fascist political party that collaborated with the German occupiers of the Netherlands during World War II. The organization, roughly equivalent to the German SA, was founded in 1932 by Anton Mussert, co-founder of the NSB in 1931 and its leader until the end of the war. Members wore and marched in black uniforms and were thus called "blackshirts". In 1933 the Dutch government banned the wearing of uniforms, and the WA was disbanded in 1935 in order to forestall the Dutch government's banning it. In 1940, after the German invasion, the WA became openly active again, and more ruthless than before. They specialized in violent attacks, particularly on the Dutch Jewish population.
Hollandsche Schouwburg is a museum in Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
The Holocaust in the Netherlands was organized by Nazi Germany in occupied Netherlands as part of the Holocaust across Europe during the Second World War. The Nazi occupation in 1940 immediately began disrupting the norms of Dutch society, separating Dutch Jews in multiple ways from the general Dutch population. The Nazis used existing Dutch civil administration as well as the Dutch Jewish Council "as an invaluable means to their end". In 1939, there were some 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands, among them some 24,000 to 25,000 German-Jewish refugees who had fled from Germany in the 1930s. Some 75% of the Dutch-Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust. The 1947 census reported 14,346 Jews, or 10% of the pre-war population. This further decrease is attributed to massive emigration of Jews to the then British Mandate of Palestine. There is debate among scholars about the extent to which the Dutch public was aware of the Holocaust. Postwar Netherlands has grappled with construction the historical memory of the Holocaust and created monuments memorializing this chapter Dutch history. The Dutch National Holocaust Museum opened in March 2024.
The Committee for Jewish Refugees was a Dutch charitable organization that operated from 1933 to 1941. At first, it managed the thousands of Jewish refugees who were fleeing the Nazi regime in Germany. These refugees were crossing the border from Germany into the Netherlands. The committee largely decided which of the refugees could remain in the Netherlands. The others generally returned to Germany. For the refugees permitted to stay, it provided support in several ways. These included direct financial aid and assistance with employment and with further emigration.
The Vrije Groepen Amsterdam was a federation of Dutch resistance groups in Amsterdam during the final years of World War II. The VGA was founded in late 1943 to coordinate the activities of Amsterdam's resistance groups. The groups counted some 350 members, about a fifth of whom had a Jewish or part-Jewish background. The VGA focused primarily on hiding Jews from the Nazis and caring for Jews in hiding. Their activities included distributing falsified identification documents, as well as ration cards and financial support, to Jews and others in hiding and to members of the resistance movement.
Max Reisel was a Dutch semiticist and a teacher at the Montessori Lyceum Rotterdam. He strove in the dissemination of knowledge about Judaism in general and Hebrew language in particular. He played an important role in the field of education in the Netherlands.
Maria Aloysia Löwenfels PHJC, was a German religious sister. She converted from Judaism to Catholicism. In 1936, she fled to the convent of the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ in Lutterade, Netherlands. In 1938, she was confirmed as a novice. On 9 August 1942, she was murdered in the gas chambers of concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 2015, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Limburg announced that a beatification process had been started.
The Romani are an ethnic group that live in the Netherlands; part of the broader Romani diaspora. Though they represent a small portion of the national population, the plight of those in the Roma community has received ongoing national attention.
The Network of War Collections is a partnership of over 250 archival institutions, museums, remembrance centers and libraries in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the former Dutch colonial empire, and internationally to bring together scattered collections of resources pertaining to World War II. The network is financed by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport and receives a contribution from the National Fund for Peace, Freedom and Veteran Care.
The Dutch National Holocaust Museum is the first official museum on the Holocaust in the Netherlands. It is located in an historic building in the Jewish Cultural Quarter of Amsterdam, near a former child care center that played a role in rescuing Jewish children. The museum tells the story of the Holocaust through the lives of individual victimised men, women, and children. There is a floor-to-ceiling display of all the laws limiting and obliterating the rights of Jews in the Netherlands, who since the eighteenth century had been Dutch citizens with equal rights.
