The Amsterdam municipality will donate 10 million euros ($11.3 million) to the city’s Jewish community to compensate for back taxes that Amsterdam’s Jews who survived the Holocaust were forced to pay on their return to the city. As reported by the DutchNews.nl website, the announcement of the donation, which is to go Jewish community projects, was made on Sunday by Amsterdam’s mayor, Eberhanrd van der Laan, at the opening of a new national Holocaust museum there.
Last September, it was announced that families would be reimbursed for penalties charged for overdue payments during the war, with average compensation at the time said to be about $1,800, and a limited number of families were to be compensated. But a May 15 statement from the city stated that the approach was not practical due to the unavailability of information about the charges. Instead it was decided that compensation would be more made generally to the community for projects such as the Holocaust museum and funding a Holocaust memorial for those who were deported.
The issue first made headlines in 2014, when a historical study discovered that hundreds of Dutch Holocaust survivors who returned to Amsterdam after the war were required to settle overdue bills, city taxes and fines, accumulated while they were in camps or in hiding. The study, authored by the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, found over 200 such cases. Even Jews who returned from Auschwitz were required to pay the bills, including money owed for gas that was unpaid by squatters residing in their property during the war.
The impetus for the study came several years ago when a Dutch student working part-time at the Amsterdam archives came upon some unusual documents: letters sent by survivors to the municipality, in which they complained for having to pay bills and fines sent to homes confiscated from them.
“I felt these documents were too important to just let them lie there,” the student, Charlotte van den Berg, said. “It’s an injustice, not something you can just set aside and forget.”
Among the documents cited by the study were the municipality’s responses to the letters of complaint. “The base payments and the late payment penalties have to be paid, regardless of the question whether a third party, legally or not, held the property for a while,” read one response. “The municipality has the right to receive full payment for the bills and penalties,” read another.
According to Yad Vashem, about 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands when the Germans invaded the country in May 1940. The deportation of the Jews to the Nazi camps started in the summer of 1942. Most of the Jews were deported to Auschwitz and Sobibor. The final tally of Jews deported stood at 107,000 in 1944, when the last transport was dispatched. Only 5,000 returned after the war. Over 75 percent of the Netherlands’ Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
Originally published HERE
