Putting on the garments of penance for the war, that is what more municipalities are now doing

She is not the first, but she was very outspoken. “Cold and indifferent,” is how Roermond mayor Yolanda Hoogtanders described the way her municipality dealt with the local Jewish community during and after the Second World War on Wednesday. After the mayors of Nijmegen and Maastricht, among others, previously issued similar apologies, Roermond also decided, some eighty years later, that it was time to put on the mantle of repentance.

It does not surprise professor of legal philosophy Wouter Veraart of the Vrije Universiteit that several municipalities apologize relatively soon after each other. “If one municipality investigates its own past and apologizes, the other also wakes up. You also see this with research into the history of slavery.”

Veraart often sees that it takes a very long time for governments to take this step. “The government generally finds it very difficult to identify its own role and to acknowledge that mistakes have been made.”

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It took until 2000 for Prime Minister Wim Kok to apologize for the post-war actions of the Dutch government towards the returning Jews. After Kok acknowledged during a Holocaust conference in Stockholm that the government had failed to provide justice, a wave of outrage erupted because he refused to apologize. They followed suit. Twenty years later, Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologized for government actions during the persecution of Jews.

Warnings and fines

Many Dutch municipalities are now investigating their role and are offering an apology, often in combination with a sum of money for the benefit of the Jewish community.

The seed of that wave of excuses, says Ronny Naftaniel – former chairman of the Central Jewish Consultation – lies in Amsterdam. In 2013, a student came across objections in the archive against reminders and fines for unpaid leasehold from the years 1942-1945 that returning Jews had to pay. That discovery led to research by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), which was followed in The Hague and Rotterdam. NIOD is now conducting further research in Amsterdam, this time into the role of the municipality in the deportation of Jewish Amsterdammers.

Professor of European cultural history Wim van Meurs from Radboud University sowed the seeds a little later: in the efforts of the Pointer journalism platform. Based on 'the Real Estate Books' (Verkaufsbücher) of the occupying forces, Pointer has been studying the expropriation and sale of Jewish real estate during the war for years. Of the 218 municipalities in the Real Estate Books, there are: according to Pointer 145 ordered an investigation.

In recent years, Radboud University has been involved in 25 such studies of municipalities into their war history. “After such an investigation, the municipality always makes excuses,” says Van Meurs. According to the professor, the fact that not all excuses generate a lot of publicity is partly because some mayors are better at it than others and the research results are not always presented to a large audience. In addition, during his investigations he did not encounter any excesses such as in The Hague and Amsterdam where returning Jews had to pay leasehold and street tax (a predecessor of the property tax) for the years they were absent.

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Broad research

Naftaniel believes that municipalities should conduct as broad an investigation as possible: not just into the handling of Jewish real estate, as he believes many municipalities are now doing. Then more abuses will surface. “Take Amsterdam where Jews were charged for the tram of their own deportation or Eindhoven where they had to pay for the signs 'forbidden for Jews'.”

According to the former CJO chairman, such studies also function as a mirror for the present. From a strict legal perspective, government action at the time was correct because it was within the law. “But it was extremely immoral. That is the lesson for today's civil servants on issues such as the Benefits Affair. Are you going to act according to the letter of the law or are you going to let your common sense and heart speak?”

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