Charlotte van den Berg was a 20-year-old college student working part-time in Amsterdam’s city archives when she and other interns came across a shocking find: letters from Jewish Holocaust survivors complaining that the city was forcing them to pay back taxes and late payment fines on property seized after they were deported to Nazi death camps.
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How, the survivors asked, could they be on the hook for taxes due while Hitler’s regime was trying to exterminate them? A typical response was: “The base fees and the fines for late payment must be satisfied, regardless of whether a third party, legally empowered or not, has for some time held the title to the building.”
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Following her discovery in 2011, Van den Berg waged a lonely fight against Amsterdam’s modern bureaucracy to have the travesty publicly recognized. Now, largely due to her efforts, Amsterdam officials are considering compensating Holocaust survivors for the taxes and possibly other obligations, including gas bills, they were forced to pay for homes that were occupied by Nazis or collaborators while the rightful owners were in hiding or awaiting death in the camps.
“I didn’t expect any of this to happen, though I’m happy it finally did,” Van den Berg told The Associated Press in an interview. “I never dreamed that compensation could be the result.”
An unpublished review of those files by the Netherlands’ Institute of War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies — or NIOD — found 217 cases in which the city demanded that returning Jews pay the taxes and penalty fees for getting behind in their payments.
Two Dutch newspapers, Het Parool and De Telegraaf, have received leaked copies of the report and published its conclusions. The report found that the city’s top lawyer advised politicians of the time not to enforce the fines, but the recommendation was rejected. Politicians worried granting one claim might lead to more.
“The city made a conscious decision to reject this advice, which cannot be described otherwise than as a totally needless callousness toward (Jews) who had their property taken during the war,” De Telegraaf quoted the report as saying.
Amsterdam’s official ruling of Sept. 12, 1947, a public document viewed by the Associated Press, was that “the city has the right to full payment of fees and fines” and that most excuses — including that property had been seized by the Nazis — were invalid.
Ronny Nafthaniel — a leader of the Dutch Jewish community who sat on a vetting panel for the NIOD report and has reviewed a copy — said the papers’ reporting is accurate. Spokespeople for the NIOD and the city declined to comment on the findings ahead of a statement planned next week.
Nafthaniel said many of the homes were sold to Dutch collaborators who left the bills unpaid and fled at the end of the war.
Auschwitz’s barbed wire fences (photo credit: Isaac Harari/Flash90)
Auschwitz’s barbed wire fences (photo credit: Isaac Harari/Flash90)
“Another thing that happened, and this is almost too sad to relate, is that Jews got back from Auschwitz — and then got an invoice for the gas that had been used in their homes,” Nafthaniel said.
The Netherlands deported a relatively high percentage of its Jews during the Nazi occupation of 1940-1945 compared to other European countries, in part because of its efficient bureaucracy. An estimated 110,000 Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust, including teenage diarist Anne Frank. Around 30,000 survived the war, many later emigrating to Israel.
The Institute report recommends that the city now pay survivors or their families 4.9 million euros ($6.7 million): 400,000 euros for the fines and 4.5 million euros for the back tax payments on homes they were unable to use while in hiding or incarcerated at German camps.
However, these are only for one type of housing tax, specifically fees for long-term leases when the city owns the ground a house is built on. Nafthaniel said there were numerous other categories of unfair charges — such as the retroactive gas bills — but remaining records may be too spotty to do anything about those. There is also a major unanswered question about whether Jews who paid the back taxes and fees without filing a formal complaint should also be reimbursed.
In one of the letters Van den Berg found, a Jewish man asked for an extension in paying the back taxes because his home had been seized by an organization created by the Nazis in 1941 to despoil Jews of their property. Before deportation, the man was also forced to surrender his assets to the Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co. bank in Amsterdam, which transferred them to the Third Reich — leaving him with neither the house nor funds to pay for taxes on it.
“In conclusion,” the man wrote, “I’m asking you in handling this matter to be led by moral considerations.”
No response was found in the archives, Van den Berg said.
None of Van den Berg’s colleagues or superiors had the time or inclination to take the matter further. So she took up the challenge: “My feeling was, they were too important to just let them lie there,” she said. “This was an injustice that was done, not something you could just put aside and forget about.”
She did further research and found there were public records on the postwar tax charges in city archives, eventually leading to 342 case files in all.
Van den Berg notified city officials about the documents and received assurances they would be fully investigated. Now and then she checked in, only to learn that nothing had been done. In March 2013, Van der Berg heard that the documents were “one signature away” from being destroyed, as other documents from the era had been. She was told that didn’t matter because they had been digitized, but she felt it was important to preserve the physical evidence.
She hoped the letters would one day go on public display.
In desperation, she turned her findings over to Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool in March 2013.
The publication caused an outcry, and the city quickly commissioned a more thorough study by the NIOD to examine the documents and place them in a wider context of the city’s postwar treatment of Jews. The study, partly leaked by the newspapers, is due to be officially released this month.
Nafthaniel said other painful revelations have come to light during the investigation, such as a chain of letters during the occupation where Amsterdam city officials complained that “dog tax” revenue had plummeted, and demanded compensation from German authorities.
They never mentioned the reason for the decline in revenues: the dogs’ Jewish owners had been deported.
Naftaniel praised Van den Berg’s role in uncovering the documents.
“She is absolutely a hero” he said. “She pushed her bosses and all the civil servants around her to open up these files, even when they told her not to bother.”
Glad to be of help to you, Phoenix.
@ M Devolin:
Thanks Michael.
And like the title if this thread says, “one person can make a difference”… So don’t even THINK of quitting the forum (same for you, dove).
How else was I to find out about this book?
Seriously.
There was actually a Nazi Party in Holland before and during the war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Movement_in_the_Netherlands
Also read the book (and watched the movie), Phoenix. Very disturbing.
“In post-war testimony the head of German security in Amsterdam averred that ‘the main support of the German forces in the police sector and beyond was the Dutch police. Without it, not 10 percent of the German occupation tasks would have been fulfilled.’ Contrast Yugoslavia, which required the unflagging attention of entire German military divisions just to contain the armed partisans.” –Tony Judt, from Postwar (also a very informative book on Dutch and French complicity in the Holocaust)
Phoenix, a good book to read on this subject is Ashes in the Wind (the destruction of the Dutch Jews), by Jakob Presser. The truth about what happened in Holland during the Holocaust is very, very ugly.
@ SamG:
Your comment, Sam, prompted me to do a little research… and this is one such source, supporting your statement:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/people/dutch.html
I am still shaking my head in disbelief as I read the excerpt from the book”Pack of Thieves”…..
To ‘add oil to the fire’, we watched last night “the reader”. … Which left me with the same silent rage, felt after reading your comment….
EVERYBODY KNEW!!!
THIS WHOLE ACCURSED CONTINENT IS GUILTY!!!!
AND JUST TO BE SURE THAT THE AMBERS OF HATE AND VISCERAL ANTISEMITISM IS ALIVE AND WELL, TODAY, ON EASTER SUNDAY, CHRISTIAN CHURCHES (all silent during the holocaust) ARE WORKING OVERTIME!!!!!!!!
Contrary to what many of us have been brainwashed to believe almost the entire Jewish population in Holland perished during WW2. The Dutch were a nation of stool-pigeons and they gave away Jews for money (I think it was 7 Gilders per head, paid by the Germans). Also, there was a large contigent of Dutch volunteers who fought in the Waffen-SS.
@ Eric R.:
I love the manner in which the bureaucratic mind functions !!!
Perhaps the Dutch are at last receiving their well deserved just rewards for their actions and inactions toward their Jewish citizens.
Holland’s Muslim inhabitants are serving it up quite readily.
@ the phoenix:
I love your cartoon video clips! Keep em coming!!
One more problem. I lost control of the ads you see. I can”t even remove them or change them.
dove Said:
I think this iPad has outlived it’s usefulness ….
http://youtu.be/j2UlSQDOaqE
@ the phoenix:
Check out comment #4. Do that and the comment box opens up to almost full screen.
Many have commented about the ‘narrow strip’ that we now have to type our comments.
It has been suggested to pull/click on the right corner etc…
It does not seem to work that well…
But, the way I get around that is by copy/pasting and compose the comment elsewhere. When finished, I copy and paste it into the comment box….
A great feature that you have introduced, is the instant posting available which enables to see the discussion flow on different threads.
Thank you!
@ Eric R.:
Click on the little gizmo beside the ABC on the top left of the comment box and it will open up for you.
The idea of Dutch tolerance towards Jews is as much a fantasy as the French resistance. They are every bit as despicable when it comes to Jew-hating as any Eastern European country, and the fact that they exterminated 75% of their Jews is proof of it. By comparison, the similar percentage in Belgium was 40%.
It is an ugly, degenerate, savage, worthless excuse for a country, (hiding under a neat, civilized veneer) that deserves the enslavement it is going to get under Islam. I can’t wait for the Jihadists to blow up all those windmills and tulip fields.
Pim Fortuyn was their last chance to save their culture, and they murdered him. Now let them rot.
(Oh, and Ted — now, the window for typing in comments is only three lines high)
@ Ted Belman:
Don’t you just loved being retired and doing the things you want to do instead of the things you have to do?
You make retirement look like ‘no time off’. I don’t think I will ever retire! 🙂 I like the ABC spell check but I better start using it more. It would help in creating less curses against me! 🙂 And I figured out the little gizmo beside the ABC. So it’s pretty operational from my end. Have a good day! 😉
The primary modification that I have been working on was on was to make the center column and comments narrower and to keep the outside columns even when we click “read more”.
It turned out to be very complicated and the changes produced other problems which I am trying to solve. I lost the ability to have paragraph separation in article and in the comments.
And I ended up with a font that I thought was too small. So I am trying to have it a bit bigger.
If you see other problems, let me know.