Dutch PM apologizes for Dutch complicity in the Holocaust.

Dutch Government Apologizes For Wartime Complicity with Nazis

A recent apology to the Jews by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte for Holland’s war-time complicity with the Nazis, has re-opened a painful chapter of the Holocaust.

“Since the last survivors are still among us, I apologize today in the name of the government for what the authorities did at that time,” Rutte said. “Our government did not act as the guardian of justice and security.”

It was the first time a prime minister of the Netherlands acknowledged the heinous role of the Dutch police in rounding up and deporting over a hundred thousand Dutch Jews to the death camps.

Rutte, in office since 2010, has resisted calls for issuing such an apology, including by Dutch Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs in 2015 and by the Party for Freedom in 2012. Rutte always claimed there was not enough “objective information” upon which to determine the Dutch government’s culpability in the destruction of the Jews.

Of the Netherland’s pre-war Jewish population of 135,000, seventy-five percent were murdered in the death factories of Auschwitz and Sobibor. Of the 24,000 Dutch Jews who were in hiding, 8,000 including renowned teenage diarist Anne Frank and her family, were betrayed to the Nazis.

Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the government has finally acknowledged this inhumane conduct.

“Too many civil servants carried out the orders of the occupiers,” said the prime minister after having taken part in a silent march in January commemorating the victims of World War II.

“The bitter consequences of the drawing up of registers (of Jews) and of the expulsions have not been adequately recognized,” he said. “Seventy-five years after Auschwitz, anti-Semitism is still among us. That’s exactly why we fully recognize what happened and say it out loud.”

Dutch Railway Acknowledges Guilt in Shipping Jews to their Death

The government’s apology was prompted in part by a decision last July by the Dutch state-run railway [NS], to pay millions of dollars in compensation to Holocaust victims and their families, after accepting responsibility for transporting huge numbers of Jews to Nazi concentration camps.

The company built a new rail line during WWII and over time transported more than 100,000 victims to Nazi concentration camps.

After being expelled from their homes, plundered of all their possessions, and driven onto death trains, the Jews’ were subjected to a final humiliation; they were forced to pay for their death ride to Sobibor, Auschwitz and other killing centers.

The payment, collectively amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars (equivalent to many millions today) was stolen from the Netherlands’ Jewish Bank and the Dutch railway took its share.

The NS apologized years ago for what it called “a black page in the history of the company,” but failed to come up with any program for compensation. Finally, in July 2019, after pressure from Holocaust activists and survivors, the railway committed to paying over $74 million in compensation to surviving Holocaust victims and their families.

Survivors React

While the NS’s reparations proposal was met with effusive praise in many quarters, survivors noted that decades of foot-dragging had ensured that the majority of Dutch victims were no longer alive to benefit from the agreement.

Alfred Kurz, an elderly Jew who in 1943 was transported by the Dutch National Railway to Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany, said he was glad that “something was finally done,” but was “very critical of the timing.”

Kurz, who lives in Cherry Hill, N.J., told the Jewish Week that “the money at this point is meaningless. I’m 82 and one of the youngest survivors around. Ninety percent of those who survived are dead. Just the fact that they waited 70 years to make restitution for their bad behavior is a travesty. “

Kurz said he was six years old at the time, living with his family in Amsterdam. He remembers the Nazis “did a block-by-block roundup of the Jews. They came with sirens and dogs to rouse people out of their houses and onto the train. We were taken – my mother, sister and I.”

The train took the prisoners “about 100 miles” to a transit camp at Westerbork at the country’s border, recalled Kurz. From there, the Nazis put them on transports to killing centers outside the Netherlands. Kurz said his father had been taken by the Nazis to Auschwitz almost a year earlier and was killed there after about a month.

Noble Rescuers?

A pervasive myth of the post-war years in the Netherlands was that a great majority of the Dutch people had showed solidarity with the Jews, identified with their suffering, and had taken risks to help them.

The image of the compassionate Dutch has been reinforced by the impressive number of Dutch rescuers honored at Yad Vashem and cited at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Of all the nations of Europe, the numbers of Dutch heroes are surpassed only by Polish ones, writes Holocaust researcher Frank Bovenkirk.

Another factor contributing to the Dutch’s war-time image as noble rescuers is the fact that the Netherlands was the only country occupied by the Germans in which citizens participated in a general strike (in February 1941), mainly to demonstrate solidarity with the Jews.

In addition, Dutch student resistance managed to save three or four thousand Jewish children from certain death, by lodging them with foster families for the duration of the war. Under the Nazis, this was a crime punishable by death.

Lastly, there were no extermination camps in The Netherlands, and the Dutch did not actively participate in the killing of Jews. The mass atrocities, for which the Nazis had so many willing executioners in the occupied countries, did not take place on Dutch soil.

Annihilation of a Community

Yet the sheer magnitude of the destruction of Dutch Jewry overrides claims of staunch Dutch resistance to the Nazis. The image of heroic rank-and-file citizens protecting their Jewish countrymen begins to crumble in the face of the sweeping decimation of the Jewish community, and how it was carried out.

The historical record clearly attests that those who helped save Jews in the Netherlands comprised a small minority. The Nazis found little resistance to their occupation. The Dutch police and civil service and the national railway company were widely complicit in hunting down Jews and transporting them to killing centers.

No country in Western Europe had a higher percentage of its population voluntarily joining the ranks of the Nazis than the Netherlands, attests historian Manfred Gerstenfeld of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

The flight of Holland’s Queen Wilhelmina and her top ministers to England days before Holland’s capitulation to the Nazis, cleared the way for the Dutch government to march in lock step with Nazi orders.

From her refuge in London over the next five years, Queen Wilhelmina made many speeches to her countrymen, infusing them with hope for victory and liberation. In all those speeches, “there was a total of five sentences about the Jews,” writes Gerstenfeld.

The laying of the groundwork for genocide began in the Netherlands with the typical Nazi pattern of social and economic discrimination against the Jews, followed by segregation. Jews were ousted from their jobs and professions and their freedom of movement restricted.

These ominous steps were followed by the identification and registration stage, in which meticulous lists were drawn up of all Jewish residents along with their addresses. Laws were then enacted requiring Jews to wear a yellow star on the armband, and have “J” officially stamped in their passports.

Wholesale Complicity

The Dutch bureaucracy assisted in all these stages. Assisted by the Dutch Jewish Council (who did not realize to what extent their efforts would be suicidal), Dutch authorities assembled comprehensive lists of all Jews residing in the country, identifying them by name and address.

Then came Nazi edicts confiscating Jewish property under a legal pretence of “registering” it, prior to the “resettlement” of the Jews.

The Dutch banks took an active role in the registration (and later partial confiscation) of massive amounts of Jewish property and assets, estimated by some historians as exceeding $12 billion in current values.

Until the death trains left Holland, the Nazis made limited use of their own troops, relying instead on Dutch policemen to do much of the dirty work. Dutch police arrested and rounded up the families, forcing them to board trains that transported them to the Dutch internment camps at Westerbork and Vught. There, Dutch guards carrying out Nazi orders prevented anyone from escaping.

From these transit points, the Jews were shipped directly to Auschwitz, Sobibor and Bergen Belsen. Only 5,000 survived. In Amsterdam, alone, 66,000 of the 80,000 Jews were murdered.

The systematic looting of Jewish properties had begun well before deportation, greatly enabled by Dutch banks. On German orders, Dutch banks sent out forms to Jewish clients “legalizing” the transfer of their deposits to LIRO, the bank the Nazis created to expropriate money from the Jews.

“Many Amsterdam stock market traders made good profits on the sale of shares and bonds stripped from the Jews,” notes historian Gerstenfeld.

Much of this collaboration came to light in the late 1990s as the Netherlands, following the lead of other European governments and in response to pressure from the United States, began to face up to some of its shameful wartime practices.

Postwar Abuse of Survivors

As the image of the “benign rescuers” began to unravel, the Dutch also had to deal with the issue of their immediate postwar attitude toward broken, impoverished death camp survivors.

This vulnerable group was given an ice-cold reception, reflected in post-war outrages committed by Dutch authorities.

“As soon as you registered after staggering back from the camps, you received a government notice demanding back taxes,” attested Dutch survivor Rabbi Joseph Polak, author of After the Holocaust, the Bells Still Ring, in an interview with Yated.

Polak and his mother survived Westerbork and Bergen Belsen, and were liberated from a death train by Soviet troops.

“The Dutch government also did nothing to compel insurance companies to honor policies survivors were entitled to,” Polak recalled. “My mother was refused on the ground that she hadn’t paid premiums during the years she was imprisoned in a death camp. The company was allowed to get away with this.”

The survivors were further hurt by the immoral application of Dutch inheritance tax laws. These laws allowed the state to claim a significant part of the assets of those who were murdered, instead of turning them over to their heirs.

More here:

https://yated.com/dutch-government-apologizes-for-wartime-complicity-with-nazis/

What happened in continental Europe in the 40s shouldn’t be whitewashed with bullshit.

We can thank Clive Palmer for Lambie.
We can thank the voters of Tasmania for Lambie

The Senate, and more particularly Tasmanian Senators, have always represented obvious difficulties for the Australian democracy. There is a legitimate role for an upper house but it does need work.

On the matter of the upticks and downticks, they are going to stay until the new OT appears, and then, I will remove the plugin that allows both.

Dover, it’s sad that it has been abused in this way. It will, however, offer great respite for the few mental invalids that were forced to spend most days up and down ticking comments by people they disliked. I’m just wondering what Woddenhead, Turtlehead, and the Bush Hog, along with a couple of others, are going to do with the spare time.

Salvatore, Iron Publican
Feb 9, 2024 11:50 AM

He could of course re-open his own blog and insert the up and down tick plug-in and offer it there. This could increase the comment traffic compared to the past when “Public House” accumulated 279 comments over 15 years.

Advice to Dover, from an experienced blogger is always worthwhile.

The Treasury secretary proving the old adage that if you’re a bureaucrat and the public know your name you aren’t doing your job properly. Treasury hasn’t been worth bothering about for years.

Kevin M

I actually like the ticking because it shows -especially the downs- when you’ve hit paydirt with some of these feral swine.

However, like US elections, it ought to be one tick one time for a particular comment, otherwise it’s gamed.

Someone on Discord recently commented on how exactly these putrid varmints (like those I mentioned) earlier are “frauding” the system.

However, as Jacky-Jacky has to sound out each letter and syllable before she knows what the word is, she will give up before she is through the first sentence.

As do most elephant trackers – comes with the brassard.

They too couldn’t wait to ship Jews off.

I can barely imagine how this must haunt the Jewish soul.

I remember regularly reading Frank Knopfelmacher in Quadrant many years ago (if you aren’t familiar with him, worth looking up). He wrote that when he arrived in Australia in the mid-50s he found the country to be relatively free of antisemitism* compared to Europe. If it existed, he thought, Australians generally were too polite to say anything in public.

We have now made progress to the point where NSW Police turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to the vilest demonstrations of antisemitism in our history.

* An exception would have been the old Bulletin, which was anti-Asian and anti-Jewish, but which Knopfelmacher was possibly unfamiliar with.

Honestly, am I reading the special counsel finding wrong in that what dementia did with the docs is not way over the top and that the fcker has serious mental deficiencies? How does the first part not help Trumpster?

H B Bear
Feb 9, 2024 12:20 PM

As the recipient of more than a few serial downticks

You’re a victim now of a total of 3 downers, Bear? 🙂

On the matter of the upticks and downticks, they are going to stay until the new OT appears, and then, I will remove the plugin that allows both.

Nooooo!
I revel in my downticks.
It appeals to my contrarian side to know I have pissed someone off.
What on earth will we talk about now?
However, it will free up a fair chunk of Wodney’s day.

Two reasons for this, firstly, it will, I hope, relieve the site from processes that may be slowing it down

An embargo on Armstrong spam might also help.

Kevin M

Think of it like vote harvesting 🙂

US justice hasn’t come too far since Salem.

The colonial judicature righted itself after that episode.

Little hope of that now, the rot runs so deep.

Senator John Kennedy’s (LA) senate c’tee exposés of Biden’s judicial nominees are worth watching.

JC at 11:47.
I think collaborators fell into two categories.
Firstly, those who did it out of fear and self-preservation.
Secondly, those who enthusiastically embraced Nazism to the full.
I’ll leave it up to others to judge where the Cloggers sat on that spectrum.

Australia had more sectarian issues than anything else.
What an embarrassing state of affairs that used to be.

I don’t know what pertained in Victoria but in NSW & QLD the sectarian battles were largely fought on the rugby field on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday people went to their church and on Monday everyone was back to mingling at work.

The Bulletin.
Kerry Packers fav.

Yes, but they’d tidied themselves up considerably by that time.

A different publication entirely, really.

Feckin’ churlish Oirish.
They went on to lose 57-87.

My fear is that he has stopped the garnishee for his rental

Since when did it become possible to garnishee CentreLink Payments ..?
To the best of my knowledge the only money that can be deducted by garnishee from CL payments is money owed to CL for whatever reason (and even then by, agreed amount, instalments) … any other deductions are voluntary and thru agreement between the benefit recipient and the receiving party …….
Also any deductions have to be limited to NOT placing the CL recipient in dire straights .. in other words surpassing 1/4 of fortnightly benefit (excluding voluntary weekly rental deductions) ……

I’ll leave it up to others to judge where the Cloggers sat on that spectrum.

Mme Zulu’s parents survived the Nazi occupation – her father, interrogation by the Gestapo, her mother the “Hunger winter.” They maintained all their days that no-one knew how they would cope, until it all actually happened.

I just popped into Netflix, to check the program I was waiting on had actually arrived, and saw also that Netflix had stumbled serendipitously upon a topic they could produce without completely changing it to suit their woke agenda.

Alexander the Great!

They can legitimately depict him as gay. And openly so. Not a big shock – Alexander was a fan of Athens and Athenian society viewed homosexuality as a higher form of attachment: lots of youths canoodling in the shadow of pending battle, and lots of corpulent men lolling about at banquets fondling their calamities so they can’t even pour their wine straight – for this last part just read Plato. (Plato would laugh at what we now call ‘platonic’ love.)

So they can have a gay man ramping all across the ancient world waving his iron sword by day and his flesh one by night. (Stories about his relationship with his horse, Bucephalus, rightly belong on HBO who will give it requisite grinding graphic representation.)

But yes, the battle scenes, the blood spurting, the hacked limbs flying through the air spinning weirdly around invisible axes, the spit skulls, the frozen astonished faces above the impaled chests, the groaning pleadings to gods, the chaos, the mayhem, wantonly destructive when done by heterosexual men will be softened into the arc of a divine but tragic poem when a faggot.

Only bummer is that they could not make him black. Not that they did not want to, but after the Cleopatra thing coupled with the fact he was actually born in Macedon, such a lie overtaxed the dishonesty of even the most diversity obsessed writers. The additional fact that Alexander was widely remembered as blond – and indeed he is depicted by a blond actor – would have been incidental. And, apparently, only one of Alexander’s eyes was blue –heterochromia iridium doncha know.

I would not be surprised if they make the Egyptians black so Egyptians who join his army are black, and they will prove to be the most valiant of his troops. I base that purely upon the racial stone in Netflix’ show that always demands the most pressing attention, but I have not seen it.

Nevertheless they may overall generate a fair depiction of the old fudge-packer because they have found someone they don’t as a matter of woke mental-programming dislike.

The alleged quantum of people in the French resistance is pure myth.

True .. the, real, French resistance against the Nazis never exceeded 3000 most of those “classified’ resistance were in the communist faction who spent more time opposing the, actual, restance than the Germans .. their main purpose in opposing the Nazis was to be the predominant faction once the occupation was over .. not to be part of a concerted effort to free France …… This was the main reason England was very reluctant to supply arms to the French underground as they didn’t wan to arm the communists ..
There is also the “myth” of the French gummin-in-exile .. 75% of, in France, French folk had no idea who general De Gaulle was yet he was touted as their “leader” ….

Dover.

I’m posting this and I think you should read the substack piece.

The US promised not to expand NATO one inch further to the east after the breakup of the Eastern Bloc

This is actually incorrect although those words were used in a different context. What was discussed at the time was regarding the reunification of Germany and the agreement was that NATO troops would not be deployed into East Germany.

“NATO will not move one inch further east” was launched by Putin in 2007 in his speech at the 43rd Munich Security Conference and he’s been repeating it ever since. The fact that James Baker and others did actually say something to that extent is true, but it was not referring to NATO expansion.

But don’t take my word for it. This is what Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview.

RBTH: One of the key issues that has arisen in connection with the events in Ukraine is NATO expansion into the East. Do you get the feeling that your Western partners lied to you when they were developing their future plans in Eastern Europe? Why didn’t you insist that the promises made to you – particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East – be legally encoded? I will quote Baker: “NATO will not move one inch further east.”

M.G.: The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a singe Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either. Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement, mentioned in your question, was made in that context. Kohl and [German Vice Chancellor Hans-Dietrich] Genscher talked about it.

Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled. The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been observed all these years. So don’t portray Gorbachev and the then-Soviet authorities as naïve people who were wrapped around the West’s finger. If there was naïveté, it was later, when the issue arose. Russia at first did not object.

The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990. With regards to Germany, they were legally enshrined and are being observed.

Gorbachev who was at those meetings had this to say when asked specifically about “NATO will not move one inch further east”:

“The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all”

“NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification”

“The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed”

All these things were captured in a treaty that was signed because that’s how diplomacy works. You don’t just make verbal promises.

On the other hand, I would point out that it was Russia that broke the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances whereby Russia provided security guarantees to Ukraine upon agreeing to relinquish nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union. That was a signed treaty…not words spoken decades earlier that were taken out of context.

And oh yeah, the US and UK were also signatories of the Budapest Memorandum and were supposed to be guarantors of Ukrainian security.

https://www.gummibear737.com/p/deep-dive-why-tucker-carlson-is-wrong?utm_source=twitter

Someone on Discord recently commented on how exactly these putrid varmints (like those I mentioned) earlier are “frauding” the system.

I think the day that Thought Leader scored 130-ish upticks on some typically half-arsed banality was what made me suspect it was gamed.

I shall join you, ML. Solidarity!

Bless you, Megan.

This event has been wicked. If you are not into motorsports, don’t click.

Producing DRAG Racing History! The Build up To Clay Millican vs Cleetus

Keating tried to get rid of negtative gearing — didn’t last long

IIRC, eighteen months?

Whistleblower told to expect jail term for leaking of alleged war crime documents
David Crowe
By David Crowe
February 9, 2024 — 8.47am

Listen to this article
5 min

Defence whistleblower David McBride is being told to expect a jail term for leaking information about alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, sparking new warnings that his case is being used to silence others who could expose wrongdoing.

The former military lawyer pleaded guilty to the leaks last November and is due to be sentenced next month, with his legal team hoping he would avoid jail because he had exposed problems in the national interest.

But his lawyer, Mark Davis, said prosecutors had indicated they would seek a custodial sentence on March 12.

“David McBride has got his critics, but there’d be very few people who would deny that the spark he lit has set off a chain of events that revealed grossly inappropriate behaviour done in the name of Australia,” he said.

“He’s a brave man. People see the bravery in McBride, they see that he’s a man who was not motivated by personal interest or personal aggravations.

“I think Australians ultimately respect the type of figure he is and would feel some pride to think he’s in the Australian military.”

Davis said he was left in no doubt from recent discussions with prosecutors that they would ask the court to jail McBride. “The message to us from the prosecution was unequivocal – that they were seeking a custodial sentence,” he said.

McBride was a major in the Australian Army in 2014 after service in Afghanistan and other posts when he gathered top-secret files from Department of Defence computers to compile a dossier of problems within the military.

The ABC reported the central revelations in The Afghan Files in July 2017 by using documents that showed cases were being investigated as possible unlawful killings.

Crossbench MPs including Helen Haines, Andrew Wilkie, Rebekha Sharkie and Kate Chaney called last October for the government to drop the charges against McBride, but Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus chose not to intervene.

Human Rights Law Centre senior lawyer Kieran Pender said there was no public interest in prosecuting or jailing those who revealed information in the national interest.

“Whistleblowers make Australia a better place, they’re vital parts of our systems of accountability, transparency and integrity,” Pender said. “And if we lock up whistleblowers we send a message to all Australians that if they speak up, they could go to jail.”

In an earlier case, the Commonwealth sought a conviction against a former spy known as Witness K for revealing that Australian spies had bugged the cabinet office in Timor-Leste. Witness K was given a suspended sentence in 2021.

Pender said the move to seek a jail term for McBride was at odds with government assurances about shielding people who expose wrongdoing. “We’ve now had four cases where whistleblowing laws have been of no help to whistleblowers,” he said.

“In David McBride’s case, he was forced to withdraw his whistleblowing defence after the government made a public interest immunity claim.

“The laws aren’t working and the government has promised to fix them. That’s a very welcome pledge, but these cases send a message that undermines that good work.”

Davis did not suggest the federal government could influence the judge’s decision at the sentencing.

Critics of McBride have pointed to his own statements to note that his original intent was not to reveal war crimes allegations but to show that Australia’s special forces were being treated unfairly by politicians and Defence leaders.

But former senator Rex Patrick, who has set up the Whistleblower Justice Fund since leaving parliament, said Dreyfus should have intervened to stop the prosecution because it would harm the future oversight of the government.

Dreyfus has declined to express an opinion about McBride because the matter is before the courts, telling parliament last year it would be “wholly inappropriate” to comment.

Ninety nine years, with the first forty years served in solitary, in chains..

We are living in a false economy. One where GDP is growing at snail’s pace, but GDP per capita has started to click into reverse…while the Government ramps up its low-skill, low-wage immigration regime.

Australia? It’s actually about the UK.

Don’t fkn “Champ” me, champ.
Given there is intensive tick-grieving going on, do you think you need to re-open JC’s Suicide Hotline?
I’ve already reserved a number with Telstra … 1800 TICKETYBOOHOO.

I hadn’t thought of that. Good idea. We can even hear the squealing from Mud Island and from a migrant hostel in inner Sydney.

The concern trolling is very funny coming from some quarters.

Top Men

‘Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.’

Nothing much has changed since 1964, although arguably our leaders (in all fields) are now third raters or much worse.