page_title: History of the Jews in the Netherlands
section_title: The Holocaust
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Jews in the Netherlands / History of Jews in the Netherlands / The Holocaust
caption_attribution_description: English: An image of a monument at former German Nazi camp Westerbork in the Netherlands. Each stone represents a single person who had stayed at Westerbork and died in a German Nazi camp.
context_page_description: The history of the Jews in the Netherlands is considered to begin largely in the 16th century, when they began to settle in Amsterdam and other cities. It has continued to the present. Following the occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany in May 1940, the Jewish community was severely persecuted. About 70% of its members were killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust during World War II.
  The area now known as the Netherlands was once part of the Spanish Empire but in 1581, the northern Dutch provinces declared independence. A principal motive was the wish to practice Protestant Christianity, then forbidden under Spanish rule. Religious tolerance was effectively an important constitutional element of the newly independent state. This inevitably attracted the attention of Jews who were religiously oppressed in different parts of the world. In pursuit of religious freedoms, many Jews migrated to the Netherlands where they flourished.
  During the German Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, 70 percent of the Jewish population of the Netherlands was killed during the Holocaust, which included deportation to concentration and extermination camps.
context_section_description: In 1939, there were some 140,000 Dutch Jews living in the Netherlands, among them some 24,000 to 25,000 German-Jewish refugees who had fled from Germany in the 1930s. (Other sources claim that some 34,000 Jewish refugees entered the Netherlands between 1933 and 1940, mostly from Germany and Austria).
  The Nazi occupation force estimated the number of (racially) Dutch Jews in 1941 at some 154,000. In the Nazi census, some 121,000 persons declared they were members of the (Ashkenazi) Dutch-Israelite community; 4,300 persons declared they were members of the (Sephardic) Portuguese-Israelite community. Some 19,000 persons reported having two Jewish grandparents (it is generally believed a proportion of this number had three Jewish grandparents, but declined to state that number, for fear that they would be classified as Jews rather than half-Jews by the Nazi authorities). Some 6,000 persons reported having one Jewish grandparent. Some 2,500 persons who were counted in the census as Jewish were members of a Christian church, mostly Dutch Reformed, Calvinist Reformed or Roman Catholic.
  In 1941, most Dutch Jews were living in Amsterdam. The census in 1941 indicates the geographical spread of Dutch Jews at the beginning of World War II (province; number of Jews – this number is not based on the racial standards of the Nazis, but by how people identified in the census):
  Groningen – 4,682
  Friesland – 851
  Drenthe – 2,498
  Overijssel – 4,345
  Gelderland – 6,663
  Utrecht – 4,147
  North Holland – 87,026 (including 79,410 in Amsterdam)
  South Holland – 25,617
  Zeeland – 174
  North Brabant – 2,320
  Limburg – 1,394
  Total – 139,717
  In 1945, only about 35,000 Jews of the Netherlands were alive. The exact number of "full Jews" who survived the Holocaust is estimated to be 34,379 (of whom 8,500 were part of a mixed marriages, and thus spared deportation and possible death in the Nazi concentration camps). The number of "half Jews" who survived in the Netherlands at the end of the Second World War in 1945 is estimated to be 14,545; the number of "quarter Jews" was 5,990. Some 75% of the Dutch-Jewish population died in the Holocaust, an unusually high percentage compared with the other occupied countries in western Europe.
  Factors that influenced the greater number of people who died included that the governmental apparatus was relatively intact after the royal family and government fled to London. The Netherlands was not under a military regime. It was the most densely inhabited country of Western Europe, making it difficult for the relatively large number of Jews to go into hiding. Most Jews in Amsterdam were poor, which limited their options for flight or hiding. The country did not have much open space or woods for people to flee to. Also, the civil administration had detailed records that indicated the numbers of Jews, and where they lived. The average citizen of the Netherlands was unaware of the operation of "death camps" for the majority of the occupation. All Dutch citizens were obligated to "register" and undertake work in Germany.  When the Dutch recognised German persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, they conducted the first act of mass civil disobedience in occupied Europe during WWII: the Februaristaking (“February strike”), in order to show their support for Jewish citizens.
  One theory is that the Germans made use of the administrative organizations and Dutch police: 
  "In their preparations for the extermination of the Jews living in The Netherlands, the Germans could count on the assistance of the greater part of the Dutch administrative infrastructure. The occupiers had to employ only a relatively limited number of their own personnel; Dutch policemen rounded up the families to be sent to their deaths in Eastern Europe. Trains of the Dutch railways staffed by Dutch employees transported the Jews to camps in the Netherlands which were transit points to Auschwitz, Sobibor, and other death camps." With respect to Dutch collaboration, Eichmann is quoted as saying "The transports run so smoothly that it is a pleasure to see."
  During t
caption: Monument at Westerbork: Each stone represents one person who had stayed at Westerbork and died in a Nazi camp
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