Tuesday, September 24, 2013

In May 1940, what happens to the Jewish population of Amsterdam?

On May 10, Germany invaded the Netherlands (as well as Belgium and France), and everything changed for the Jews of Amsterdam. This was a couple of years before Anne Frank started her diary, so we do not know exactly how she and her family experienced this event from her point of view.
For the Jews in Amsterdam, this invasion ushered in a period of fear and uncertainty. At the time, there were as many as 80,000 Jews in the city, including a number of refugees from other parts of Europe. Soon after the Nazi occupation, the Germans began concentrating the city's Jewish population into certain neighborhoods in order to facilitate their inevitable deportation to the death camps. Around this time, many Dutch Jews attempted to flee the country or go into hiding. Most, however, could not believe that the coming atrocities would ever come to pass and attempted to lead their lives as normally as possible. Jews were forced to register with the Nazi authorities and wear identifiable stars on their outer garments when out in public.
While mass arrests of Jews did not begin until 1942, there was a strong but ultimately futile general strike by the residents of Amsterdam in protest of this. In the end, though, as much as 80 percent of Amsterdam's Jewish population was deported and murdered by the war's end.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/annefrank/timeline.shtml

https://jewishhistoryamsterdam.com/the-jewish-history-of-amsterdam/

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