When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 The US and several European countries started to do bussiness with him and his nazi party. The Netherlands was one of them. All of them putted a blind eye to what was already quite evident. That the nazis hated Jews and had already started to make clear that they wanted to get rid of them. At that time in the Netherlands the Freethinkers had their radio programm in National Radio which was financed by the state. When they started in their programms to warn their listeners about Hitler and his plans, their programm was shut down. The reason the government gave was that they had vilified a befriended Head of State.
When the persecution of Jews in Germany started in full with the Kristal Nacht (Christal Night) when all Jewish shops where ransacked and destroyed by Nazi thugs, many Jews started to flee towards Germany’s borders, also to the border with the Netherlands. All those who could not show that they had money to spend, were sent back into Germany. Those who could show they had riches could pass. It is necessary to mention that the Dutch government was very aware of the persecution of Jews in Germany at that moment. This was the first inhumane treatment given to fleeing Jews and by the highest level of government. The Jews who were allowed to pass could continue their bussinesses in the Netherlands until the razias to round up Jews in nazi occupied Netherlands started. Only in Amsterdam lived 80.000 Jews by then. There were Jewish districts where the more wealthy Jews lived and districts where the poorer Jews lived, called Jewish neighborhoods. Apart from those area’s there were also Jews living throughout the whole city. Other Jews lived in other cities and town throughout the country.
When the razias started they were done in plain daylight before the eyes of everybody. The public services (mostly tramways) of the cities collaborated transporting the captured Jews to assemble points where they had to wait for further transport to concentration camps in the east part of the Netherlands. The Dutch Railway company collaborated providing the transport means. From there the Jews were put on German cargo transport trains to the concentration camps in Germany.
Everybody saw what was happening. Most did not care. Nobody blocked the tramways or the trains. As if all the Jews were going in vacation in Germany. Ofcourse there were people, good people who tried to save some Jews and Jewish children, hiding them from the nazis. But on the total population they were the minority of a minority.
There were also those for whom it was not enough to just stand by doing nothing. They actively helped the nazis to catch Jews, even Jews already in hiding (a very well known example is the betrayal of the hiding place of the Franck family in Amsterdam). The nazis offered 5 guilders (at that time quite a sum of money) for each Jew brought tot heir attention.
The dehumanisation of the Jews in the Netherlands did not end there. When finally the war had ended and a small number of concentration camps survivers returned to Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, they found their houses with all their belongings inside occupied by other people. When they said who they were and told the occupants that this was their home before the deportations, the door was slammed in their faces. The surviving Jews had no passports anymore, so they could not identify themselves properly. When they went to their bank to retrieve money or savings, the bank told them that if they could not show an identity card the bank would not give their money. No one welcomed their surviving Jews back with open arms. On the contrary. After so much pain and suffering, lost family members and trauma, they were treated as trash. No help of any kind was offered. After this horribe experience many of the survivers decided to emigrate to better horizons.
This is the horrible story of the Dutch Jews in a nut shell. For sure comparable stories can be found in other European countries.
After the war The Netherlands started to change history. The role of resistance fighters was magnified. Those noble fighters who fought underground against the nazis and their Dutch offical collaborators (of which there were many by the way). For sure those resistance groups were brave people, mostly communists. But their number was small. The country needed some heroism to cover up the inkt black page of the treatment of the Dutch Jews. The condemnation of all Germans for their crimes was a constant propaganda. We were the good ones, they were the bad ones, all of them, even the children. That is what a nation does to hide the shame and guild it feels after the curtain has fallen.
We know how deep that guild and shame is in all of Europe. But instead of looking them in the face and acknowledge them and start a process of reconciliation, this shame and guild was transfered exclusively to the German population. This shame and guild was also transfered to supporting the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine. A place in the Middle East where already a population lived, called Palestinians.
There is nothing against Jews wanting to find a place to live together, even a state. But if in that place are already living millions of others, not Jews, the issue becomes complicated.
It becomes even more complicated when those who decided to create a Jewish state calling it Israel are Zionists who did not suffer from the Holocaust. At the contrary. They started to make suffer the population which lived already in Palestine. Their goal from the start was and still is to to get rid of all Palestinians. The UN decided differently and partitioned Palestine between Palestinians and Israelis. The so called 2 state solution. Since that day the Zionists have practised an action that was also practised by the nazis. It was called creating ‘lebensraum’ for the German people. Lebensraum means living space. It was one of Hitler’s reasons to start his expansion war to the east against the Sovjet Union. To create new lands for German settlers.
And this is exactly what the Zionists have done and are doing. More than 70 years of stealing lands from the Palestinian population. Imprisoning 2 million people in an open air concentration camp called Gaza. Populating the Westbank more and more with settler extremists, mostly flown in from the US, stealing more and more land there until nothing is left for Palestinians to live.
The Zionists learned well from the nazis. The degradation propaganda against the Palestinians as being inferior, not more than animals who want to kill Israelis. Israeli children in school are teached to fear the Palestinian animals, and that already 70 years and more, right since the first Kibbutz. Even the starving methods of the population in Gaza at this moment after having transformed their habitat in smoking piles of rubble. All this the Zionists learned from the nazis. They are not mere Jews, they are Zionists. And there is the big difference. They use the Holocaust to keep the whole West in check and under their thumb. Every condemning expression against them is broadcasted as antisemitism, by which they forget by the way that also the Palestinians are semites. They have appropriated the Holocaust and use the shame and guild of Europe for their own fascist interests.
The deadly hypocrisy of Europe has brought us to what we all are witnessing in Gaza and the Westbank. The collaboration of our governments to a new genocide. And not because suddenly they love the Jews. They never did and they are not loving them now. What they did and do is supporting and collaborating again with a fascist and criminal group who has brainwashed the Israeli population as did the nazis with the German population. Goebles once said “if you repeat a lie a thousand times the whole population will believe it as truth.”
If after WW2 the European governments woud have installed a deep going work of reconciliation in which the bad treatment of Jews (and not only during WW2 but in all the centuries before) would be recognized, a healing process would have been able to start to finally overcome and eliminate the mistrust and hate towards Jews. And Europe would have been free to condemn and not collaborate with a Zionist regime.
Now instead Jews living in The Netherlands and Europe once again feel unsave and attacks on them and their synagoges have already happened. Like history repeating itself. What was not done after WW2 comes visiting again today. This time the responsables for attacks on Jews are the Zionists and the European governments who supports them.
It is the result of a deadly and unresolved European hypocrisy that has festered for 80 years.
