Holocaust -Lest we forget
Deaths in Concentration Camps
In 1939, there were some 140,000 Dutch Jews living in Amsterdam , among them some 25,000 German-Jewish refugees who had fled Germany in the 1930s In 1941, the exact number of "full Jews" who survived the Holocaust is estimated to be 34,379.
Some 75% of the Dutch-Jewish population perished, an unusually high percentage compared with other occupied countries in Western Europe.
The Dutch Royal family fled the country leaving the government machine in place and it seems that the vast majority of the Dutch nation accommodated itself to circumstances: During the first year of the occupation of the Netherlands, Jews were forced to register with the authorities and were banned from certain occupations.
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Sadly, the Germans were able to count on the assistance of the greater part of the Dutch administrative infrastructure and particularly the Amsterdam local government in their quest to exterminate the Jews from the Netherlands. Dutch policemen rounded up the families to be sent to their deaths in Eastern Europe. Trains of the Dutch railways staffed by Dutch employees transported the Jews to camps in The Netherlands which were transit points to Auschwitz, Sobibor, and other death camps.
Starting in January 1942, some Dutch Jews were forced to move to Amsterdam; others were directly deported to Westerbork, a concentration camp near the small village of Hooghalen which had been founded in 1939 by the Dutch government to give shelter to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, but would fulfill the function of a transit camp to the Nazi death camps in Middle and Eastern Europe during World War II.
Deportations of Jews from the Netherlands to Poland and Germany began on 15 June 1942 and ended on 13 September 1944. Ultimately some 101,000 Jews were deported in 98 transports from Westerbork to Auschwitz (57,800; 65 transports), Sobibor (34,313; 19 transports), Bergen-Belsen (3,724; 8 transports) and Theresienstadt (4,466; 6 transports), where most of them were murdered. Another 6,000 Jews were deported from other locations (like Vught) in the Netherlands to concentration camps in Germany, Poland and Austria (like Mauthausen). Only 5,200 survived.
One of the best known Holocaust victims in the Netherlands is Anne Frank. Along with her sister, Margot Frank, she died from typhus in March 1945 in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, due to unsanitary living conditions and confinement by the Nazis. Anne Frank's mother, Edith Frank-Holländer, was starved to death by the Nazis in Auschwitz.
Of the Barmes family left in Amsterdam after Nathan and Sarah moved to London many were murdered by the Germans in the concentration camps.
Here is a list of all those who perished or were missing