The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(14)

But slowly things changed. On January 10, 1941, Decree no. 6/1941 mandated the registration of all Jews. Local authorities set up offices in every community to ensure compliance. Registration had to be in person at the cost of one guilder a head. Cases in which the definition of “Jew” was challenged were to be referred to the generalkommissar’s office in The Hague and adjudicated by Dr. Hans Georg Calmeyer, a German lawyer and the head of the Nazi-controlled Internal Administration Department, under whose auspices Jews were registering.

The vast majority of Dutch Jews complied, concluding that their names and addresses already existed in local population registers and in the records of synagogues. Nonregistration carried a prison sentence of up to five years.1 Furthermore, they had been deceived into believing that registration with the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für Jüdische Auswanderung; JA) would facilitate their emigration to countries outside Europe.

As Miep Gies described it, “From out of their ratholes appeared Dutch Nazis, who were cheering and waving and welcoming.”2 The Dutch Nazi Party (Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging; NSB), established in 1932, had been banned in 1935, but after the occupation it returned in strength. By 1943, it would have 101,000 members. Under Seyss-Inquart’s directive, the NSB created a paramilitary arm called the Resilience Department (Weerbaarheidsafdeling; WA), which acted as an auxiliary police force.

By February 1941, hatred of the Jews percolated into the streets and NSB gangs roamed the neighborhoods of Amsterdam, spreading terror. Jews were violently removed from trams and windows were smashed. The owner of Café Alcazar was one of the last to refuse to display the sign “Jews not wanted” and continued to allow Jewish cabaret artists to perform in his venue. However, on Sunday, February 9, in midafternoon, a group of about fifty WA men attacked the Alcazar, throwing a bicycle through its front window. They were outraged that the owner had permitted a Jewish singer, Clara de Vries, to perform the previous night. They beat up the customers, Jews and non-Jews alike, and smashed the furniture. Preventing the Dutch police from intervening, the Grüne Polizei stood by and enjoyed the vandalism, which soon spread to other cafés.3

Seyss-Inquart’s velvet-glove approach had seduced the Dutch into thinking that the Germans would be friendly and aloof in their occupation. But that dream ended on February 11, 1941, when a group of about forty Dutch Nazis invaded the Waterlooplein market in the center of Amsterdam, a shopping area run mostly by Jewish shopkeepers, and sang anti-Jewish songs. Breaking into the market storage areas, they armed themselves with heavy objects. A violent confrontation then erupted between the Dutch Nazis and a small commando group of young Jews who had formed to defend themselves. Locals, mostly Communists, responded in solidarity with the Jews. After the fight ended, Hendrik Koot, a WA man, was found unconscious and died three days later. The NSB had found its perfect propaganda tool in the “martyrdom” of Koot. On February 18, more than two thousand uniformed NSB members marched in Koot’s funeral procession through the streets of Amsterdam.

On February 12, 1941, German and Amsterdam police officers closed the access roads and bridges to the Jewish Quarter. No citizens were allowed to enter or leave that part of the city. In a speech to the Dutch section of the NSDAP (the German Nazi Party) at the Concertgebouw on March 12, Commissioner Seyss-Inquart declared, “We will strike the Jews wherever we find them, and anyone who walks alongside them will have to bear the consequences.”4 That June, the Nazis purged the Concertgebouw of all its Jewish musicians. On their final day as members, the orchestra performed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. When the chorus sang the line “Alle Menschen werden Brüder” (All people shall become brothers), it was meant to shame the Nazis. In 1942, the names of Jewish composers carved into the walls of the concert hall were effaced.5

The Germans had already created a brilliant template for how to deceive, control, and slowly destroy a community. In 1939, in the newly occupied countries and in the Jewish ghettos, they established Jewish Councils to act as filters between the occupiers and the Jewish community. The Germans imposed directives, and the Jewish Councils were responsible for implementing them. In the Netherlands the council published its own newspaper, Het Joodsche Weekblad, which listed each new anti-Jewish decree out of the eye of the general public. Had the decrees been published in a newspaper of more general circulation, the Germans would have risked an adverse reaction from non-Jews.

At its first meeting on February 13, 1941, the Jewish Council responded to the violent incident that had just occurred in the Jewish Quarter by insisting that all weapons in the hands of Jews be turned over to police. It was as if it was conceding that the Jews bore some responsibility for the violence initiated by the Nazi thugs when in fact they’d simply been defending themselves.6 The council was clearly acquiescing to German orders, which set a ruinous precedent.

There was much blackmail by the German high command; if the council refused to carry out a measure, the Germans threatened to do it much more brutally. The real force behind the scenes was the Zentralstelle (Central Agency for Jewish Emigration). The name was devious in the extreme, implying that the possibility of emigration for Jews was real. It would seem that at least initially, the leaders of the Jewish Council assumed that the Germans had no intention of removing the entire Jewish community from the Netherlands and that the council’s role was to protect those in the most danger. In the early days, even as they received dire warnings about concentration camps in Poland and Germany, Dutch Jews remained convinced that the Germans would never dare to do in the Netherlands what they were doing in Eastern Europe.