Anne Frank, The Dutch And The Jews

If you're familiar with the Anne Frank story, you may recall that on July 6, 1942 she and her family went into hiding for the first time in the secret annexe that her father Otto had prepared at his business premises in Amsterdam. What triggered this dramatic move was Anne's older sister Margot receiving a summons the previous day from the German occupying authorities to report for deportation to a labour camp in Germany. At the time such deportations of Jews were becoming systematic in the Netherlands, many to concentration camps in German-occupied Poland. Indeed, the labour round-ups were really a piece of German subterfuge, to lull the victims into a false sense of (relative) security, for in reality almost all Dutch Jewish deportees were taken directly to extermination camps such as Auschwitz or Sobibor. If we take a look at the bigger picture here - the context of Anne Frank's plight in occupied Holland - it's a bit of shock to learn that the Netherlands deported more of its Jews (almost 75% of them to be precise, of which only some 2% survived) than any other Nazi-occupied western European country. Why was this? After all, like its neighbours Belgium and France, the Netherlands had been a liberal parliamentary democracy for decades, and in all three countries the percentage of Jews in the population was tiny (1.5% in Holland, even less in France and Belgium), Moreover, the great majority of Dutch Jews were well assimilated, over centuries, whereas many French and Belgian Jews were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe or refugees from Hitler's Germany. The Franks were themselves newish arrivals in the Netherlands, having fled Germany in 1933. The real difference, that made life much tougher for Dutch Jews, comes down to the type of regime established by the Germans in these countries. In France, a large part of the country was run by a French administration at Vichy which, though anti-semitic and happy to round up Jews at first, soon began to insist that no Jews who were legal French citizens could be touched: so most Jews deported from France were 'foreigners', without French citizenship papers. In Belgium, the government was run by the German military, as was the German-occupied part of France, and there was little attempt to impose Nazi values on either country as the Wehrmacht prepared for what it hoped would be the invasion of England. This was not the case in Holland, where Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch government fled to England and the civil administration was taken over by virulently anti-semitic German SS leaders keen to 'Nazify' the Dutch, whose blond Nordic features recommended them as a 'brother nation'. There was resistance in Holland to anti-Jewish measures, some of it violent, but by July 1942, when Jewish deportations began in earnest in all three countries, only in the Netherlands was the process under the exclusive control of the German police, who (mindful of previous popular protests) adopted a 'softly-softly' approach entailing misinformation and deception: so, for example, tens of thousands of provisional exemptions were issued but then rescinded one by one or Jewish hospitals, care homes and orphanages were at first left alone before being abruptly closed down and their occupants swiftly deported. In contrast, in France and Belgium, Jewish round-ups were conducted with considerable violence, giving warning to remaining Jews to flee or go into hiding. In the Netherlands, some 28,000 Jews went into hiding, but about 60% were betrayed by collaborators, as happened to the Franks. It's been estimated that Jews in hiding in the Netherlands were compelled to move some 4 to 5 times on average, which suggests that a fiercely anti-semitic or collaborationist climate was created or harnessed (it's hard to know which) by the occupying authorities. It was certainly the case that, as elsewhere, Dutch deportations could not have been achieved on such a scale without the collaboration of the Dutch police and the Dutch Jewish Council, both of whose members had frankly little choice faced with German intimidation (though by the spring of 1943 the Germans were complaining that Dutch policemen were offering passive resistance in carrying out their duties). As a footnote, it's worth pointing out that after the war the Dutch narrative of resistance was reluctant to acknowledge a distinct Jewish story of suffering (though it has to be said this was by no means exclusive to Holland), so that Otto Frank struggled to find a publisher in the Netherlands for Anne's diary. Only after an English translation was made in the US, followed by a play and a film, did Anne's story become iconic. The Anne Frank House museum was eventually established in Amsterdam in 1960.

Dutch Jewish deportees board trains at the transit camp at Westerbork in north-eastern Holland. The fiction maintained by the authorities was that these people were being taken to labour camps in Germany - and the queues here do look calm and orderly. However, many of these victims had heard otherwise on the grapevine and boarded these goods wagons (in themselves hardly inviting) with some trepidation. In reality, almost all these trains went straight to death camps in Poland. Of the 107,000 Dutch Jews deported, 102,000 perished

If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again.

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