The issue of Dutch institutional and governmental apologies for Holocaust behavior came to the fore again with the unexpected apology of Dutch Railways to the Jewish community in September 2005. These belated apologies should be seen in a broader Dutch context. After World War II, many myths about crucial aspects of the Dutch Jews' fate substituted for history.
Currently, the Dutch government's refusal to apologize to the Jewish community stands out even more. It should do so for both the collaboration with the German authorities in the Netherlands and the failure of the London government-in-exile to undertake whatever little it could have done for the persecuted Dutch Jews. In 2000 Prime Minister Wim Kok, under pressure, presented partial apologies for the postwar Dutch governments' treatment of the Jews. These expressed a new fallacy: that these failures were unintentional. In March 2005 Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, described the deportation of Dutch Jewry as a "pitch-black" chapter in Dutch history. In April 2005, he became the first prime minister to mention Dutch wartime collaboration without, however, apologizing.
More than sixty years after the end of World War II, occasionally the question reemerges in the Netherlands whether apologies to the Jewish community should be presented by the successor managers of those institutions that participated in the German-controlled process of detention and deportation of most Dutch Jews to their extermination. The same goes for the Dutch government, whose predecessors, in exile in London, ignored what happened to their country's Jews.
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Myth and History
The importance of these belated apologies goes far beyond the specific case of Dutch Railways. The expressions of regret should be seen in a broader Dutch context. After World War II, many myths about crucial aspects of the Dutch Jews' fate substituted for history. Major falsifications of national wartime history occurred throughout Europe, taking specific forms in different countries.
In the Netherlands, there were courageous individuals who took major risks to rescue Jews. The Dutch authorities, on the other hand, executed almost all German orders without protest. Whereas the collaboration of the government authorities has largely been ignored, the size and effectiveness of the Dutch resistance movements has been greatly exaggerated as has the role of the major ones in helping the Jews. At the same time, the importance and numbers of the many Dutch collaborators with the Germans were diminished. Among the latter was a contingent of twenty-five thousand Dutch Waffen SS volunteers.[4]
The myth of widespread Dutch resistance was most affected by the way Anne Frank's story was presented after the war. The publication of her diary, and later the movie based on it, created the impression of broad Dutch support for the Jews in wartime Netherlands. Particularly in the United States, the Anne Frank story fostered a very one-sided picture of Dutch resistance.[5] Almost all the emphasis in her story was put on her time in hiding, whereas no attention was paid to her struggle for survival in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and eventual demise.
Little if any attention was given to the fact that 8,000 of the 24,000 hidden Dutch Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, were betrayed by Dutchmen to the German occupiers. The reward for informing on Jews amounted to about 30 euro in today's money. Most of those betrayed were murdered in the death camps.[6]
Another aspect of Anne Frank's life was only stressed in 1988 when Dutch filmmaker Willy Lindwer received the international Emmy award for his documentary The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank focusing on her short life after betrayal. The director of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam demonstrated his support for the whitewashing of wartime Dutch history when he refused to allow Lindwer to film at the museum. Lindwer quotes him as saying: "Anne Frank is a symbol. Symbols should not be shown to die in a concentration camp."[
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