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

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.

The main question hanging over Lindwer’s excellent new film is how the Germans could have removed so many Jews so quickly and efficiently from densely populated Amsterdam in the space of more or less a year.

And the answer, shamefully, is the all-too-willing Dutch administrative and police complicity in rounding up the Jewish community and efficiently shipping them off to the camps via the extensive city tram system. Uncomprehending Jews were rousted from their homes in the middle of the night by Dutch police in the three Jewish Quarters the Nazis had set up in Amsterdam. They were pushed into waiting tram cars to the Central Station, where they were herded like cattle into packed trains that led to concentration camps in Holland, Germany and Poland. Adolph Eichmann is on record remarking that “the transports run so smoothly it is a pleasure to see.”

Lost City draws upon more than 20 documents hitherto thought lost, which horrifically not only detail the day-by-day schedules of all 900 Dutch trams leased to the German occupying forces for the purposes of removing the Jewish community, but also show the price paid in stolen Jewish money by the German occupiers to the GVB, Amsterdam’s public transport company, for services rendered,

Recently, in a gruesome postscript that became a national scandal in the Netherlands, a post-war invoice was discovered for 80 guldens (about $40,000 today) sent by the GVB — which stills run the trams in Amsterdam — to West German authorities for the cost of transporting Anne Frank, her family, and dozens of other Jews. The GVB even sent a debt collector after the war to Germany demanding payment of the outstanding 40K still “owed.”

The good news is that, along with the raising of Dutch Holocaust awareness after the war,  reparations have been paid to the few survivors of the tram deportations who managed to return to the country alive (one survivor, Salo Muller, received 50 million euros in group compensation from the Dutch railway for profiting from transporting Jewish people to their deaths).

And in a country with a rapidly expanding Muslim immigrant population, many of whom are unaware of or indifferent to the Holocaust, many educational programs in the Dutch public school system are actively teaching the full history and lessons learned in regard to this terrible episode in the history of the Netherlands.

Also encouraging is the reception for this documentary in Holland itself. When the documentary was first released, GVB’s owners made some equivocal statements basically denying and disavowing any responsibility for their predecessors’ actions — until the current mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, saw the film and threw her support in full behind it.

Now, Lost City has not only been shown widely in theaters across Holland, and in the public schools there, and on buses and trains. It will soon have its first televised broadcast in the Netherlands. It is an instructive and extremely moving documentary that should be required viewing for anyone who believes that “It can’t happen here.”