From WWII Amsterdam, a deeply disturbing story of Dutch complicity with the Nazis

[Behind the Aegis]

I am a musician who has spent a good deal of his touring life in the Netherlands. Holland was the first country in Europe that took to my music in a major way, beginning in 1988 when I began giving solo guitar concerts there.

I love the Netherlands, especially Amsterdam, which is truly one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Over the years I’ve spent literally months at a time there using the city as my base of operations in Europe.

Dutch director Willy Lindwer’s shocking and deeply disturbing new documentary Lost City reveals Amsterdam to me in a very new light indeed, although I still will always love the city. It concerns Amsterdam during the Holocaust, a period which has been extensively documented in books and films, with the figure of Anne Frank looming large as a symbol of the destruction of its Jewish community. Under the Nazis, 3/4 of Holland’s Jewish population was murdered. The willing cooperation of the Dutch administrative authorities with their German overlords is a shameful episode, which by war’s end resulted in the death of 102,000 Dutch Jews.

Yes, there was a spirited and ferocious Dutch resistance against their German occupiers throughout World War II, which was joined by Dutch people of all faiths. I’ve personally visited a house in Enschede where one of my oldest gentile friends and her family hid a Jewish citizen during the war in a secret alcove built into the back of their large fireplace. But their heroic resistance was to little avail. Of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands in 1939, by the end of the war only 35,000 remained alive, and not in Holland, which was declared “Judenrein” by the Third Reich in 1944. Many of the Jews who were lucky enough to escape emigrated to what is now Israel.

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