Amsterdam made Jews pay rent while in WWII camps
Amsterdam council has vowed to probe revelations that it
forced Jews returning from World War II concentration camps to pay rent
arrears, even if their homes had been destroyed or occupied by Nazis.
The scandal, involving an unknown number of Jews and
non-Jews living in city-owned properties, was uncovered by a young art history
student in Amsterdam's archives.
Less than a quarter of Amsterdam's Jewish population
survived the war, with the Netherlands occupied by the Nazis from 1940 to 1945.
"On their return, Jews received letters from
Amsterdam council demanding the settling of their back rent," the art
historian, Charlotte van den Berg, 23, told AFP.
The council even issued fines for late rent payments for
homes that were confiscated and occupied by Nazi forces or members of the Dutch
collaborationist NSB movement.
Van den Berg was a student at Amsterdam Free University
when she made the discovery while digitising Amsterdam's municipal archives in
2010.
She decided to dig deeper.
"I wanted to know if the city had ever corrected
these measures taken in 1946," Van den Berg told AFP.
"Unfortunately all I could find was a reduction in
fines from 1947," some of which were levied on homes destroyed by Second
World War bombings, she said.
Holocaust survivor David Bonte, 91, told Amsterdam's Het
Parool newspaper that demands for back rent from Jews were widespread at the
time.
His family received a bill in 1946 for unpaid back rent
on their council-owned property.
"How dare they harass us, people who had been
through so much?" he said.
Van den Berg cannot yet say how many people or how much
money were concerned by the rent demands.
"All I can tell you is that 342 people asked for
money that they had paid to be returned. They weren't all Jews," she said.
"Most of them were Jews, but there were also people
who suffered through the war years in different ways, their business had no
income for example and they just couldn't pay their rent anymore," she
added.
There was however a procedure to get a partial refund on
fines paid to the council for late rent.
"The cut off date for starting that procedure was
May 1, 1948, and only half the fine could be refunded," she said.
Some of the letters written to Amsterdam council at the
time show the anger and disbelief felt at the money being asked.
"People wrote about their return from the
concentration camps or how they hid during the war. Penniless, they sometimes
were just asking for a little more time to pay the bill," Van den Berg
said.
A businessman named J. W. Levending wrote on June 29,
1946: "So we must again pay the piper? Those who for years lived in
suffering, locked up, from whom everything was taken by the Germans."
"We get the bill that should have been paid by the
men from the NSB; and fines despite the fact that we weren't even there. I
wonder that these gentlemen the bureaucrats can be so ignorant of the situation
that they demand such payments?"
Despite the protests, Amsterdam's civil servants
persisted with demands for money, strictly applying the rules.
Amsterdam City Hall has promised to probe the matter.
"We will investigate in order to find out exactly
what happened, this will be done as quickly as possible and for as long as it
takes," Bartho Boer, a spokesman for Amsterdam Mayor Eberhart van der
Laan, told AFP.
The Central Jewish Council said it hoped that "the
mistakes of the past would be corrected," its president Jigal Markuszower
told AFP.
Of around 80,000 Jews deported from Amsterdam, where the
vast majority of Dutch Jews lived, only 18,000 survived.
"The rent matter was already partly known, but
details were missing," said Ronny Naftaniel, former head of the Centre for
Information and Documentation on Israel.
"It's good that thanks to Ms Van den Berg's efforts
this is resurfacing now," he said.
Amsterdam has now made contact with Jewish organisations,
the national archives and others to find out to what extent Jews living
elsewhere in the Netherlands were affected by the back rent demands.
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