Europe|Amsterdam’s Mayor Apologizes for City’s Role in the Holocaust
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/world/europe/amsterdam-holocaust-apology-wwii.html
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
The city “horribly abandoned its Jewish residents,” more than 60,000 of whom were deported and killed during World War II, Mayor Femke Halsema said on Thursday.
April 24, 2025, 4:35 p.m. ET
Eighty years since the end of World War II, Mayor Femke Halsema of Amsterdam apologized on Thursday for the city’s role in the persecution of its Jewish residents during the Holocaust, in a rare acknowledgment of a collective moral failure by a city leader.
“Amsterdam’s’ government was, when it mattered, not heroic, not determined and not merciful,” she said. “And it horribly abandoned its Jewish residents.”
Ms. Halsema issued the apology in a speech at a Holocaust commemoration at the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theater that the Nazis turned into a major deportation center from which many of Amsterdam’s Jews were sent to concentration camps in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe.
Before the Holocaust, Amsterdam, the Dutch capital, had 80,000 Jewish residents. The Nazis, with help from local officials, deported and killed more than 60,000 of them.
“Administrators and officials were not only cold and formalistic, but even willing to cooperate with the occupier,” Ms. Halsema said. “That was an indispensable step in the isolation, humiliation, deportation, dehumanization and murdering of 60,000 Amsterdam Jews.”
The city government collaborated with the Nazis on multiple levels; municipal officials mapped out where Jews were living and local police officers helped in the deportation of their fellow citizens.
English (US) ·