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VOICE-OVER: 71 Ruysdaelstraat.
Office of Keesing, printer and publisher of magazines.
Jacob Keesing, his wife Esperance
and sisters Suzanne and Marianne
took their own lives in IJmuiden harbour on the 15th of May 1940,
the day the Dutch army surrendered.
Many Jews had hoped to escape to England from there
but most could not find a boat willing to take them.
The director of the company, Jacob's brother Isaac Keesing,
managed to escape to the United States in 1942.
He transferred the company to his employee Peter Diesveld.
He had to work under a "Verwalter",
a supervisor the Germans installed
at all Jewish owned businesses.
Diesveld secretly continued to pay fired Jewish staff.
He moved into Isaac Keesing's home
and let people hide both there and at the office.
One man hid for days on top of the elevator.
Prins Bernhardplein.
The German authorities forbade the naming of streets
after living members of the Dutch Royal family.
This square was renamed Gooiplein,
after a rural area near Amsterdam.
7 Schagerlaan.
In December 1942,
the Bergsma family told the police
that a four-month-old baby was left in front of their house.
Throughout 1942, newspapers reported a "flood of foundlings".
In this way, Jewish children could be taken in legally by helpers,
while their real identity remained concealed.
To stop this practice,
the Germans announced in January 1943
that all foundlings would be regarded as Jewish.
Baby David Kurk survived the war
as Rudolf Bergsma.
His mother Carolina Kurk-à Cohen
was murdered in Auschwitz killing centre in 1944,
his father Jacob Kurk in Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945.
Demolished.
Rembrandtplein.
Many bars and cafés around this square close to the old Jewish Quarter
were frequented by Germans
and members of the Dutch Nazi party, the NSB
and their paramilitary unit, the WA Blackshirts.
In June 1940, these anti-Semitic thugs,
smashed up the interior of De Kroon
and other places perceived as Jewish.
Half a year later, they smashed the windows of bars
that did not hang "Jews prohibited" signs
and trashed a bar that still let Jewish artists perform.
In February 1941, numerous street fights broke out on this square
between Dutch Nazis, helped by German Order Police,
and Jews, who started to organise their defence
against the brutal attacks.
The Dutch police were not allowed to interfere.
From the 15th of September 1941,
Jews were officially banned from visiting cafés, bars and restaurants.
One city councillor commented
that lost revenues were "at least made up for" by German soldiers.
Later in the war, the square became a centre for black market activities.
VOICE-OVER: Zeedijk.
The red-light district was officially off-limits
to the Wehrmacht, the German army.
Later in the war, it became a centre for the black market.
74 Oudezijds Achterburgwal, ground floor.
Home of Betje Fuld.
According to her arrest report from the Police Department for Jewish Affairs,
dated the 10th of July 1942,
she was "formerly a seamstress, now a prostitute.
She was outdoors without a Jewish star
and she prostituted herself.
She also stated that she charged for carnal intercourse
with Aryan persons."
Fuld was murdered in Auschwitz in September 1942.
Kalverstraat.
A fight broke out in this street on the 31st of August 1941,
the birthday of Queen Wilhelmina.
The Dutch Queen rallied against the Germans from London.
Resistance worker Cor Snijders recalled after the war:
"We celebrated by walking along Kalverstraat
with flowers in our buttonholes.
Dutch Nazi thugs started pulling them off,
so we decided to attach razor blades behind the corsages.
The next time one of the blackshirts tried to rip out a flower,
it got very bloody.
This caused quite a scrap,
and in the end they cordoned off part of the street.
Everyone wearing a flower was arrested."
62, Max Euw Square, then Leidsekade.
Lido Restaurant.
"Leidseplein completely cleansed,"
was the headline of an article in the newspaper of the Dutch Nazi party,
in January 1941.
It continued: "One can scarcely believe one's own eyes.
No Jews allowed at the prestigious Américain hotel,
no Jews allowed at the Lido, which until recently
was the gathering place for Jews on Leidseplein,
no Jews allowed at Amsterdam's largest picture house, the City cinema.
In short, no Jews allowed anywhere!
It is almost too wonderful to be true:
there are no Jews to disturb Christians in their leisure time."
In March 1943,
after losing the battle of Stalingrad,
the Germans closed all luxury restaurants and stores.
The staff were sent to work in Germany.
After liberation, in May 1945,
the Lido became a Canadian officer's club.
One of the resident musicians
was the Surinamese saxophone player Kid Dynamite.
Demolished.
123 Apollolaan.
Apollo House.
Guesthouse, owned by the Josephs family,
who were all murdered in Auschwitz in 1942,
as were many of their guests.
It subsequently became a guesthouse for Germans.
The German security service, the SD, requisitioned the hotel
following the bombing of its headquarters in November 1944.
The house was partly furnished
with items taken from the home of the Ruys family.
Resistance worker Gerrit Ruys
was a solicitor with offices on Keizersgracht,
where he was arrested in January 1945
after his son Hugo was picked up
while distributing the underground newspaper The Parole.
Gerrit Ruys's other son Herman
had already been arrested two years earlier.
Both sons were executed.
Gerrit Ruys died at Sandbostel concentration camp.
His wife, Johanna Ruys-Bavinck, was also arrested
and released from prison in April 1945.
Amsterdam, the 15th of May 1940.
German troops approached Amsterdam from the east
and drove further into town over the Berlage bridge on Amstel River,
where German citizens and Dutch sympathisers
were orchestrated to welcome them.
The Dutch army had capitulated after the Germans bombarded Rotterdam
and threatened to destroy more cities.
The Netherlands initially had tried to stay neutral,
like it was during the First World War,
but the country was attacked by the German army
at the same time as Belgium and France.
The Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, and her cabinet fled to London.
In 1940 around 800,000 people lived in Amsterdam,
not much less than now. 10% of them were Jewish.
The Nazis considered most other Dutch people
fellow members of the Aryan race
and some hoped to eventually incorporate the Netherlands
into the Greater Germanic Empire.
They found a substantial group of supporters in the capital.
The Dutch Nazi party, the NSB, got almost 30,000 votes
in the municipal elections in Amsterdam
a year before the war.
One of the first measures the Germans took
was putting the clock an hour and 40 minutes forward,
so it was the same time in Amsterdam as in Berlin.
The weather report disappeared from the newspapers.
The weather was considered a military secret.
From the Berlage bridge
a part of the German troops made their way to City Hall.
The city had to provide housing for all Germans,
starting with the soldiers.
Soon a civic administration was installed in the Netherlands.
The Germans began to replace all Dutch organisations
like worker's unions and charity organisations
with national socialist ones.
he press was brought under German control
and even the boy scouts would be nazified.
On that first day of the occupation of Amsterdam,
an alderman informed
the German lieutenant-general Karl von Tiedemann
in the name of the city council that he hoped the Germans
would leave the Jewish citizens of Amsterdam undisturbed.
Tiedemann answered cryptically:
"If the Jews don't want to see us,
we will not see the Jews."
Museumplein, then called the grounds of the Ice-Skating Club.
Venue for major events.
This was where the NSB blackshirts marched,
where the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, inspected troops,
and where the Dutch Nazi leader Anton Mussert
and Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart
spoke at large rallies.
The villas on the east side of the square became the headquarters
of the German military and civil administration.
Next to the Concertgebouw
were the headquarters of the Dutch Nazi Party, the NSB.
In 1943,
the Germans started building defence works on the square,
including barbed wire fencing
and bunkers known popularly as the "three peaks".
A few streets were also cordoned off.
After D-Day, the allied invasion in Normandy in June 1944,
Adolf Hitler gave orders to defend "the Rotterdam and Amsterdam area
for as long as possible."
This square became one of the Stützpunkte,
or "bastions", for the German defence of Amsterdam.
It wasn't until 1953 that the German bunkers were blown up.
1 Museumstraat, then 42 Stadhouderskade.
The Rijksmuseum.
In 1939, prior to the German invasion,
the museum transferred the most important artworks in its collection
to churches and other buildings in North Holland province,
while construction work on state storage bunkers
in the coastal dunes near Castricum was completed.
Rembrandt's "The Night Watch"
was stored in a castle in North Holland,
before being transferred to the underground vaults
in Mount St Peter near Maastricht.
During the occupation, the Nazis tried to turn Rembrandt
into a Germanic Hero,
with big celebrations on his birthday, July the 15th,
now called Rembrandt Day.
German Nazi director Hans Steinhoff
shot a feature film about the painter in a studio in Amsterdam.
Members of the German Army could enter the museum free of charge.
The occupying authorities banned the display of works by Jewish artists,
or that depicted Jewish people.
The museum expanded its holdings in and after the war with Jewish owned art works.
The museum had dealings with the Liro Bank which looted Jewish assets.
Some artworks were only returned recently to their rightful owners.
The Rijksmuseum had to house several propaganda exhibitions,
including "The Art of the War Front",
and "Amber: Blond Gold of the Germanic People".
Children's toys made by the German Order Police
were also put on display.
The Rijksmuseum mounted its own exhibitions as well.
The exhibition Spirit of Christ was closed down
because it included too many abstract works,
which the Nazis saw as degenerate.
In 1944, the museum staged an exhibition
of wrought iron and cast-iron objects,
primarily because of the material's bombproof qualities.
The museum closed after Dolle Dinsdag, or Mad Tuesday,
the Tuesday in September 1944
when public celebrations erupted
after rumours that the Netherlands was about to be liberated.
Shortly after liberation,
the "Night Watch" was returned to the Rijksmuseum by inland barge.
In October 1945, the first 26 looted paintings
to be returned from Germany were welcomed in the Rijksmuseum.
VOICE-OVER: 4 and 6 Concertgebouwplein,
formerly Jan Willem Brouwersplein, The Concertgebouw.
Many national-socialist events were held in this building.
In 1942, for example,
it was here that Dutch nazi Anton Mussert
was declared leader of the Dutch people.
Shows were often performed for the German army,
ranging from operas to "Eleven Maidens dance and sing".
Reich Commissioner Seyss-Inquart,
the highest German authority in the Netherlands,
enjoyed visiting the Concertgebouw.
He planned the building of a private box for himself in the theatre.
The conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Willem Mengelberg,
performed for German organisations in the Netherlands,
and travelled with the orchestra for concerts in Germany and Austria.
The last time that Jewish members of the Concertgebouw Orchestra played
was in June 1941.
The programme included Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony",
the "Ode to Joy" with the famous line
"Alle Menschen werden Brüder",
or "all people become brothers".
The audience applauded and waved their handkerchiefs
to the fired musicians.
Music by Jewish composers could no longer be played.
In 1942, sheets of fabric were used to hide the cartouches
containing the names of the Jewish composers
Mahler, Rubinstein and Mendelssohn.
Conductor Willem Mengelberg
appealed to keep the Jewish members of the orchestra.
Many musicians ended up in Barneveld,
an internment camp set up for privileged Jews
who initially weren't to be deported.
Ultimately, most were sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Mengelberg continued to advocate for Jewish artists,
to such an extent that the leader of the German Culture Department said:
"A declaration from Mengelberg has lost its meaning for us.
He has already helped too many Jews."
During the last winter of the war, known as the Hunger Winter,
the cold and lack of electricity led to the cancellation of many concerts.
A Christmas concert did take place in 1944:
"Candles were only lit at the music stands,
and the atmosphere this created was less fairy-tale than ghostly,"
wrote Nel Bakker in her memoirs.
"We sat, cold, deep in our coats.
The customary murmur of voices was absent.
The musicians who remained played like angels.
So, this other world did still exist.
Scattered around the audience
were German officers, they too were alone.
Afterwards, everyone left silently and invisibly in the dark,
as if we had attended a secret, forbidden sermon.
Now I was able to face the remainder of the winter.
The worst time was still to come."
At the orchestra's first performance after liberation,
the Dutch Military Authority
forbade the playing of the Dutch national anthem, the Wilhelmus,
"due to the dubious attitude of the orchestra during the occupation".
Mengelberg was banned from conducting for life,
a punishment that was later commuted to six years.
Anti-riot squad, go on.
VOICE-OVER: 28 P.C. Hoofstraat. Vineta Bar.
In 1940, this café was one of the first in Amsterdam
to hang up signs saying, "Jews not welcome"
or "No Jews allowed".
Portraits of Adolf Hitler, Herman Göring
and Anton Mussert, the Dutch Nazi party leader,
decorated the walls.
The German police often organised parties in the bar.
39 and 41 P.C. Hoofstraat.
Simons, a shop selling office supplies and souvenirs.
The partly Jewish family running the shop lived upstairs,
where they sheltered three people in hiding.
When roundups of Jews were taking place,
Eva Broessler-Weissman would hide in the cellar.
In her memoirs she tells
that a heavy table was placed on the hatch.
Eva was afraid that if the Simons family were taken by the Germans,
she would be stuck there.
The shopkeeper's daughter, Eka Simons, was arrested at a deserted house
where she wanted to pick up valuables belonging to people who had gone into hiding.
When a senior German officer visited the shop,
Eka's mother came up with a ploy for getting Eka out of prison.
The officer in question had his eye on a large doll in the shop window.
She claimed that it was for display only, and wasn't for sale.
The officer persisted that he wanted the doll for his little daughter,
whereupon Eka's mother told him
that her own daughter had been wrongly imprisoned.
"If she is released, I'll take the doll from the display," she promised.
Eka returned the following day.
157 Churchilllaan, third floor.
Photo studio run by Helmuth and Annemie Wolff-Koller,
who fled Germany in 1933.
Helmuth was Jewish.
The couple attempted to take their own life together
on the day of the Dutch capitulation.
Helmuth succeeded, but Annemie was alive when the housekeeper arrived,
and she survived.
In 2008, a box was found containing portraits
shot by Annemie in 1943.
In most cases, the photos appear to have been made
for fake IDs.
Many people in the photos are wearing a yellow star badge on their clothing.
Families also had portraits made as a keepsake
for in case they were separated from each other,
in hiding or after deportation.
VOICE-OVER: 89 Linnaeusstraat.
Hospital.
VOICE-OVER: Dutch soldiers wounded in battle
were treated here in May 1940.
VOICE-OVER: On the 14th of May, Jewish sergeant Helmut Hirschfeld
shot himself in the head and died.
In 1943, nurse Esmée van Eeghen
met physician Henk Kluvers here.
She started to help him smuggle Jewish children
to the northern province of Friesland.
In 1944 she was betrayed.
The Germans shot her and threw her body in a canal.
VOICE-OVER: 1 Victorieplein.
In 1941 ice cream parlour Delphi was designated as a "Jewish premises".
Jews could only enter shops bearing this sign,
as Anne Frank often did, according to her diary.
A reader's letter published in June 1942
in the anti-Semitic magazine The Foghorn, read,
"As if the sight of all those stars slurping ice cream
wasn't already unpleasant enough,
the most scandalous thing is that all the wrappers and spoons
get thrown onto the street.
I know this is a Jewish habit,
and that they would feel at home in any pigsty,
but there is still the occasional Goy living in the South District."
32 Dijkstraat.
Home of Friedrich Steinbach and family since 1943,
when living in caravans was forbidden by the Germans,
who persecuted all people they called gypsies.
Some Sinti people moved into deserted houses in the Jewish quarter.
The Sinti registered here were captured in May 1944
during the nationwide roundup of "gypsies".
They were deported to transit camp Westerbork
and from there to Auschwitz, where they were all murdered.
Demolished.
VOICE-OVER: 6 Havenstraat.
Detention Centre II, better known as Amstelveenseweg Prison.
Jewish prisoners were forced to clean the corridors with toothbrushes.
The women's section held resistance fighters
such as students Reina Prinsen Geerligs and Hannie Schaft,
who both carried out attacks on Dutch collaborators.
Prinsen Geerligs was executed in Sachsenhausen concentration camp
near Berlin in 1943.
Schaft was shot in the dunes near Amsterdam
a few weeks before the war ended.
Other people held here included Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler,
who helped the Frank family hiding in the "secret annex".
In 1943 resistance worker Johan Benders, a teacher,
leapt to his death from the third floor of the prison
out of fear that when he was interrogated,
he would reveal the addresses of people in hiding.
Immediately after liberation,
the Canadian army requisitioned the prison to lock up war criminals.
A newspaper wrote in May 1945:
"It is reassuring that all leadership of the German security service in Amsterdam
was arrested.
They wore German army uniforms,
hoping they wouldn't be noticed among the troops being sent to camps."
A few weeks later one of them,
head of the Gestapo, Julius Dettmann,
died by hanging himself in the prison.
151 Koninginneweg, or Queen's Road,
ground floor.
Home of writer Ed. de Nève.
He set up an escape route for downed British pilots.
Members of the British Royal Air Force received instructions
that if they crashed in the Netherlands they should go to the "Queen's Road".
The house number, 151, was sewn into their collar,
to resemble a laundry number.
De Nève, who had contact with British military intelligence
before the war,
managed to get 13 pilots across the border.
He also helped Dutch people escape the country,
like the Jewish writer Jacques Gans.
De Nève took over the illegal newspaper Vrij Nederland
or Free Netherlands
after almost all staff were arrested in 1941.
He was himself caught a few months later.
Using insanity as a defence at his trial, he was not sentenced to death
but imprisoned at Eickelborn mental institution.
He returned to Amsterdam shortly after liberation.
Cornelis Krusemanstraat.
In her memoir "The Year of Hunger",
Nel Bakker wrote:
"In the middle of Krusemanstraat in Amsterdam,
I suddenly saw a potato...
I picked it up and carried on walking,
stooped over, there was no traffic anyway.
There was another one five metres further along,
and then another.
All in all, I picked up seven potatoes in the street.
In a state of euphoria, we carefully chose a book
that would burn long and well enough to boil them."
The famine known as the Hunger Winter
started in the autumn of 1944.
The south of the Netherlands had just been liberated
and neither food nor fuel could reach Amsterdam,
even less so after Dutch railway personnel went on strike
to help the allied war effort.
The Germans responded with a blockade of transport by boat.
The famine was worsened by the harsh winter.
All public life shut down.
The trams stopped, gas and electricity were cut off,
garbage was not collected, the telephones did not work,
children hardly went to school and women stopped menstruating.
There was a shortage of food, coal, petrol,
soap, medicine, even coffins.
Many people went to farms in the countryside
to trade their belongings for food.
399 Singel.
Local offices of the LO,
one of the largest national organisations of resistance, in 1945.
This protestant group assisted those hiding from the Nazis.
In Amsterdam, they managed to help 25,000 people.
The group printed a list of 10 commandments.
"1: You are a guest. Behave as such,
and fulfil your responsibilities,
not only in the first week but at all times.
Your presence means that,
to some degree at least, you will be a burden to your host family.
Act accordingly."
VOICE-OVER: "3: Always try to be of service to your host and hostess.
Take heavy household chores off their hands.
Having an additional member is a major imposition for the housewife.
Lighten her load by helping the children with their homework.
Always adapt to the ways and routines of the household you're in,
particularly when it comes to eating and sleeping.
You must say goodbye to your personal domestic routines.
Do not disrupt the established patterns of family life,
do not try to become part of the family.
This would cause too great a strain, certainly in the long term.
Behave as a lodger would. Retreat to your private area,
to your own room if you have one.
Be sure to do this when the family gathers in the evening or weekend.
Do not hang around the living room or kitchen.
Even if the host and the hostess repeatedly invite you.
Be firm.
Only ever stay on very rare occasions or on specific evenings or afternoons.
Being in close personal contact for long periods
generally causes annoyance to one of the two parties involved.
Living in hiding requires strength of character and self-discipline.
It demands willpower, understanding
and the ability to adapt to your surroundings.
You will not get along well without regular pursuits
and a daily routine.
As well as carrying out your tasks around the house,
you should either learn additional household skills or start studying,
preferably a correspondence course in your own professional field.
Or else commit to a long-term hobby.
When it comes to going outdoors, receiving visitors,
sending letters and any related matters,
always consult your host and hostess first.
They have the final say.
Even if the authorities are not actively searching for you,
if for example you are hiding to avoid forced labour in Germany,
do your best to keep the neighbours unaware of your presence.
Learn these ten commands by heart and live by them.
Apply them in practice every day!"
The LO mostly helped men
who tried to evade forced labour in Germany.
Only a few percent of the people they helped were Jewish.
VOICE-OVER: "It was very difficult to find places for Jews",
said a member of the group after the war.
"Almost nobody wanted to take them."
It is estimated that 12,000 Jewish Amsterdammers went into hiding,
mostly outside of the city.
A third of them were caught before the war ended.
Koenenkade.
Amsterdam's forest, or "Forest Plan",
a park started during the economic crisis in the '30s
to fight unemployment.
In August 1941,
German air defence brought down an RAF plane,
which crashed in the park. Three crew members died.
The Germans set up work camps
at various places in the new park,
often making use of existing job creation projects.
In early 1942, a camp was set up next to the Ringvaart canal
for non-Jewish political prisoners.
There was a camp for Jewish prisoners near the Bosbaan rowing course.
In 1944, there was an additional work camp for Jewish men over 45
in "mixed marriages",
meaning they were protected from deportation
by their marriage to a non-Jewish spouse.
Two hundred people worked there.
It was a so-called "to and fro camp",
with workers being allowed to return home in the evening.
Every morning a special tram would take them to their workplace.
"We are digging there on the rowing course,"
Sal Santen wrote in his memoirs.
A pond they had to dig was locally known as the "Jew Pit".
As a child, Philo Bregstein once went to the site to visit his father
Marcel Bregstein, fired as professor of law at Amsterdam university
for being Jewish.
Philo wrote of his pride at his father "wearing boots and working trousers,
pushing wheelbarrows like a real labourer."
The violinist Paul Godwin and other musicians from the camp
formed the Forest Plan Quartet,
which gave house concerts on Sunday afternoons.
On Dolle Dinsdag, Mad Tuesday, the 5th of September 1944,
when many people mistakenly believed
that Amsterdam was about to be liberated by the Allies,
the German supervisors set fire to all workers accommodation,
and vanished.
48 Van Spilbergenstraat.
Laundry business and home of the Vermeulen family.
In 1943, there were 21 Jews hiding here,
each of them paying 45 guilders for their expenses.
They earned this money in various ways, including
making woodcarvings of Jesus Christ,
the Westerkerk church and other views of the city.
VOICE-OVER: After the war, Sjaak de Wolf, who sheltered, remembered,
"There was no question of privacy, of course.
We slept on the bare floor, side-by-side on a threadbare blanket.
We were young and not sexually inactive.
Even simply sharing this kind of intimate moment
could often lead to situations that upset people.
But necessity knows no law."
One of the people hiding here became pregnant.
When there was nothing to eat anymore in the Hunger Winter,
the resistance found other hiding places.
321 Prinsengracht.
Medicinal rationing office.
After the liberation of the Netherlands,
people suffering from famine oedema
could exchange their coupons for rations here.
One coupon entitled the holder to a two-week ration
of four tins of condensed milk, 500 grams of sugar,
and 600 grams of biscuits.
384 Prinsengracht,
first floor.
Home of Johanna van Hal-Veltstra, or "Auntie Hallie".
She offered shelter to people in her guest house.
Resistance fighters stayed for short periods in the front room,
and more long-term Jewish residents lived in the rear annex.
Van Hal installed an alarm,
and if she spotted a possible threat through one of the peeping mirrors in the window,
she would set it off.
385 to 395 Prinsengracht.
The new Suykerhofje,
known to its residents as the "Princes' Cloister".
Many of the occupants around the courtyard were students,
several of whom were members of resistance groups.
They helped people living in hiding, here and elsewhere,
and set up an escape route to Switzerland.
In April 1943,
the German security service raided the building and arrested 15 people.
One of them was Bram Kuiper,
a biology student and member of the CS6 resistance group.
He was released after a month,
but rearrested in Belgium the following summer
while checking an escape route.
In October 1943 Bram was executed in the dunes,
three weeks after his brother Sape, a fellow CS6 member.
The Jewish artist Bob Hanf lived in hiding here.
He was also arrested in April '44.
Hanf died in September that year
in or on the way to Auschwitz.
763 Keizersgracht.
Jewish artist and writer Eduard Veterman
ran the "Falsification Bureau"
from this address.
In 1942 he became head of the drama department
of the Hollandsche Schouwburg or Dutch theatre,
when only Jews were allowed to perform and visit the theatre.
One of the last plays to be performed, in June 1942,
was written by Veterman.
Its title was "Things Won't Turn out the Way You Expect".
Veterman forged around 2,000 blank ID cards
for resistance groups.
He also made his own versions of unknown documents.
Resistance worker Guusje Rübsaam said after the war:
"Veterman made Brazilian birth certificates
even though he'd never seen a real one.
Nobody knew what a Brazilian birth certificate looked like!"
Some of these "unknown documents" were used by people
in their contact with the German lawyer Hans Calmeyer,
who processed petitions from Dutch people
who contested their registration as "Jewish".
Veterman himself was exempt from deportation for a time
because he worked for the Jewish Council.
In October 1943, Veterman was betrayed and arrested.
He was sentenced to death in 1944,
but survived the war in various German prisons.
In 1946, Veterman and his wife Katy van Witsen
were killed in a car accident,
in what some people believed were suspicious circumstances.
Veterman was vocal about the corruption and collaboration of people in high places,
and exasperated by the amateurish performance
of the Dutch secret services in London during the war.
470 Sarphatistraat.
Cavalry barracks.
During the German invasion of the Netherlands,
the Dutch army used these barracks to lock up German nationals
and members of the Dutch Nazi party.
During the occupation,
it was requisitioned by the German army
where they prepared for "Operation Sea Lion",
the codename for the planned invasion of the United Kingdom in 1940.
The Commander Felix Steiner
was also tasked with forming a Waffen SS division
made up of Western European volunteers.
This later became the "Wiking",
an SS Panzer Division that was first deployed
during Operation Barbarossa,
the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
VOICE-OVER: 45 Rapenburgerstraat, third floor.
Home of the Tak family.
In February 1941, the Germans arrested Isaac Tak, a coalman,
during the first raid on Jews
and detained him in Camp Schoorl in the Netherlands.
From there he was deported to Mauthausen, where he died in September.
A German official mockingly recorded the cause of death as ulcus molle,
a venereal disease primarily encountered in the tropics.
Isaac Tak's wife Bloeme Tak-Philips and their four children
were transported to Westerbork in May 1943.
The Germans allowed one of the boys, Nico, to leave the camp
because he was Bloeme's son from a marriage to a non-Jewish man,
and was therefore regarded as half-Jewish.
Nico went back to Amsterdam to live with an uncle.
Bloeme, Nathan, Suzanna and Mozes Tak were murdered in Auschwitz
in August 1943.
Demolished.
25 Amstel.
Department of the Jewish Council for Travel and Relocation Permits.
In the spring of 1942 this was one of the 14 locations
where Jews had to buy yellow badges
in the shape of a star of David with the word "Jew" printed on it.
For non-Jews, wearing this badge was a punishable offence.
Demolished.
In front of 170 Nieuwe Achtergracht.
Dutch Nazi party member Gerrit Kaldenberg
had been arrested after the liberation.
On the 9th of November 1945,
just released from prison and now free on parole,
he was hit by a bullet in the larynx here.
During the war, Kaldenberg had ran a guesthouse
where he lured Jews to come live in hiding
and then betrayed them.
Corner of Weesperstraat and Nieuwe Keizersgracht.
On the 13th of July 1942, just before the first train
to transit camp Westerbork would depart,
fish and fruit trader Eliazar Moffie
was arrested, standing in the queue for the headquarters of the Jewish Council,
for inciting an anti-German rally.
A Dutch police report recorded Moffie's words:
"We must refuse to go to Germany.
They pick up our women and children at night
because they don't dare to do so in the daytime.
There will be a revolt. I hope it starts today."
Moffie was handed over to the German security police
and murdered in Auschwitz in September 1942.
His wife and daughters were murdered there a year later.
VOICE-OVER: Weesperstraat.
Before the war, the Weesperstraat was a narrow shopping street
with the nickname "Jewish Street".
70% of the people in this neighbourhood were Jewish,
the highest percentage in Amsterdam.
In February 1941
this area, together with the old Jewish Quarter, was cordoned off.
The Germans wanted to create a sealed ghetto,
like they had done in Eastern Europe.
The plan was not carried out after the city administration objected.
According to the mayor,
a ghetto would be too disruptive to the infrastructure of the city.
Moreover, a lot of "Christian families" would have to relocate.
VOICE-OVER: In May 1941 the Germans did establish a so-called "optical ghetto"
by placing signs with the words "Jewish area", "Jewish Street"
and "Jewish canal" around it.
In 1942
this area became one of the three areas of Amsterdam
and the rest of the country where Jews were still permitted to live.
There were five butchers, five hairdressers and two cafés
designated here as "Jewish premises".
The street signs were removed at the end of 1943,
when the deportations had ended,
and the Germans declared Amsterdam "Judenrein",
or "free of Jews".
During the Hunger Winter,
Amsterdammers stripped all vacant houses
of wood and other materials.
After the war, the city authorities decided not to rebuild the area.
They said there were already too many social and traffic-related issues
before the war.
All the buildings were demolished, and the street was widened.
VOICE-OVER: In 1950 a monument was erected at this spot,
the monument of Jewish gratitude.
It was founded by Jewish survivors and dedicated to non-Jewish helpers.
Over the years, this monument was more and more seen as wry,
especially because there was no monument that commemorated
Jewish, Sinti and Roma victims individually.
In 2021 the monument of Jewish gratitude
made way for the National Holocaust Names Memorial.
The Gratitude monument was moved to a spot nearby.
VOICE-OVER: Ceintuurbaan.
On the day Germany capitulated,
the 4th of May 1945,
a German patrol started shooting at people celebrating out on the streets
after the start of curfew at 7pm.
A bullet struck Sigi Mendels,
a Jewish boy who had ventured outside for the first time
after hiding for years.
Eight months later he died of his injuries.
The Germans had imposed a curfew at the start of the occupation.
No one could be out between midnight and 4am.
Only members of the air raid service were allowed outside.
From September 1944
the curfew started at 8pm, sometimes 7pm as a punishment.
The Germans hung up placards
stating that anybody out in the street could be shot.
VOICE-OVER: 9 Pijnackerstraat. Vredeskerk, or 'Peace Church'.
In 1940, young parishioners set up a resistance group
known as the 'Dutch Orange Army'.
They planned acts of sabotage, and an escape to England.
Someone betrayed them, however, and several members were arrested.
Frank and Jan Fontaine, Jan Kootwijk and Jaap Besters
did not return from the concentration camps.
Catholic priests were not allowed to perform the sacraments
for members of the Dutch Nazi party, the NSB.
In July 1942 in all Catholic
and most protestant churches in the Netherlands
a letter was read out loud
condemning forced labour and the deportation of Jews.
The Nazi's retaliated by arresting and deporting more than 200 Jews
who had converted to Catholicism.
The church bell was removed in 1942.
Prior to the German invasion,
the Dutch authorities registered all church bells in the Netherlands
with an eye to melting them down if necessary in the event of war.
It was partly thanks to this register
that in just six months the Germans were able to remove
almost 7,000 of the country's 9,000 bells from church towers.
Two thirds of those bells were melted down and turned into armaments.
There was a saying that 'When the bells are gone, the war is done',
meaning that if the Germans needed to melt down church bells for metal,
their chances of winning the war couldn't be good.
Hekelveld.
On the night of the 4th of May 1945,
a patrol of the German Order Police shot dead nurse Annick van Hardeveld.
Van Hardeveld, 21, was a messenger for the resistance.
She was cycling to the north of Amsterdam to pass on a message
about the impending surrender of the Germans.
Van Hardeveld was wearing a Red Cross uniform
so she could be outside during curfew.
Over her uniform, she had thrown a Dutch flag.
56 Stadhouderskade.
Headquarters of the 2000 resistance group in 1945,
in the home of the Verwoerd family.
After the couple's son Leo was caught with forged identity documents,
the German security service, the SD,
raided the building on the 9th of March 1945.
The Verwoerds quickly took Rob Waaker, a young Jewish boy
living in hiding with them to their neighbours.
Each member of the 2000 group had their own code number
recorded in a register.
The "key" for the register was hidden beneath the entrance to the office.
It was imperative that this key didn't fall into the hands of the SD,
so on the 10th of March
several members of the group forced their way into the building.
In the ensuing gunfight, SS Hauptscharführer Ernst Wehner,
a criminal investigator with the SD, was killed.
The SD retaliated by executing 30 prisoners
from Weteringschans prison in the Eerste Weteringplantsoen.
They included Leo and Henk Verwoerd.
The Germans gathered passers-by and people who lived around the park
and forced them to watch the executions.
Anyone who averted their eyes
was "kicked into the right direction,
or worked over with a rifle butt".
The bodies fell onto the mountain of rubbish
that had built up in front of an air raid shelter in the preceding weeks
because it wasn't being collected.
A few days later,
unknown people draped a Dutch flag over this spot.
VOICE-OVER: Jacoba van Tongeren, the leader of the 2000 group,
watched the executions from her hiding place
in a first-aid post beneath a nearby bridge.
"I cry like I've never cried before,"
she wrote in her memoirs.
After, she entered the headquarters via a neighbouring building
and took away the key to the code register.
5 Spinozastraat. Ground floor.
Home of the renowned cancer researcher Nathaniël Waterman.
The Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital had to fire him in 1941.
VOICE-OVER: In September 1943,
Waterman was part of the last large-scale deportation of Jews
to Westerbork.
In November, however, the Germans sent him back to Amsterdam
to set up a laboratory in his home
to pursue his research into the carcinogenic effects of dyes.
He kept his laboratory mice in a special enclosure in the garden.
Waterman's wife Mien Waterman-Rippe
had to remain in the transit camp as a hostage.
Both she and her husband survived the war.
Two of their children were murdered,
Elizabeth Fischer-Waterman in September 1942 in Auschwitz,
Dolf Waterman in November 1942 in Mauthausen.
Their son Léon Waterman, an architect, survived.
In 1962 he designed the first Holocaust memorial
in the Hollandsche Schouwburg or Dutch theatre,
the main deportation centre in Amsterdam.
Nieuwmarkt.
This square became a hub for black market activities.
In August 1942 a man was arrested here
for selling ration coupons,
necessary for buying food staples
like bread and milk.
A police officer recognised him as Jan Catoen, a notorious burglar
who had escaped from Amersfoort concentration camp.
After a show trial,
a German court sentenced Catoen and two accomplices to death
for robbing a rationing office.
They were executed in September 1942.
Over the course of the occupation,
four children were shot dead on Nieuwmarkt.
Four-year-old Annie Meijer was gunned down during a raid
by the German Order Police in September 1944.
Teenagers Bari Baars and Israël Deegen died in March 1945,
when Germans started shooting dumdum bullets at black marketeers.
On the 12th of April 1945,
16-year-old Alex Evers was walking across Nieuwmarkt on his way home.
It was two minutes past 8pm, two minutes past curfew.
The German Order Police started shooting.
A bullet hit Alex in the hand,
and he made his way into the air raid shelter in the middle of the square.
When he came out on the other side, the Order Police shot at him again.
Alex died in an ambulance cart on the way to the hospital.
Europaplein, formerly Westerscheldeplein.
On the 11th of November 1940,
a small Italian Air Force plane
that had been part of an air raid over England
landed on this square with engine trouble.
From July 1942,
the square was used as an assembly point
during roundups of Jews.
People were transported by tram from here to Amsterdam's Central Station,
from where the train to transit camp Westerbork departed.
Young people aged 16 and over had to walk.
VOICE-OVER: 8 to 10 Haarlemmerweg.
Wester Gas Factory.
This gasworks was one of the three locations
where Amsterdammers had to hand in their bicycles in July 1942.
Before the war there were around 300,000 bicycles in Amsterdam.
After, there were 160,000.
During the Hunger Winter
people tried to steal coal from the factory.
Police would shoot at the thieves, sometimes with fatal consequences.
♪ no more fascism now ♪
♪ no more fascism now no more fascism now ♪
Next stop, Amsterdam Muiderpoort.
VOICE-OVER: Oosterspoorplein.
Muiderpoort train station.
Starting in October 1942,
at least 11,000 people were deported from this station,
mostly to transit camp Westerbork
in the north-east of the Netherlands
and from there to the killing centres Auschwitz and Sobibor
in occupied Poland.
Staff from the Jewish Council were posted in the hall of the station
to register the "departers",
who were required to hand over the keys to their homes.
Their houses would be sealed
until the furniture and other belongings were registered,
taken away and often transported to Germany.
VOICE-OVER: Wibaustraat.
Renamed Weesperpoortstraat.
In 1942 the Germans changed the names of 18 streets
named after Jews.
They also changed the name of a street named after a socialist,
alderman of Amsterdam Floor Wibaut.
He had been a prominent member of the Dutch Labour Party.
VOICE-OVER: 36 and 38 Plantage Kerklaan.
Civil Registry Office.
The German occupiers decreed that all citizens
had to carry their identity card with them at all times.
Cards of Jewish citizens were marked with a large black letter J.
This new Dutch-made card, with a photo and two fingerprints,
was extremely hard to forge
and it could always be compared against the records in the Registry.
In 1942, the PBC,
a group of artists who specialised in forged documents,
started to plan an attack on the Registry Office.
On the 27th of March 1943,
resistance fighters disguised as police officers
entered the office and "neutralised" eight guards
from the Amsterdam Police Battalion.
They injected them with a sedative
and laid them out in the garden of Artis Zoo.
The attackers doused the filing cards with benzene
and set TNT charges.
At 11pm, loud explosions were heard, and a fire broke out.
"Amsterdam enjoyed the bonfire",
wrote the underground paper The Parole.
The attack became one of the best-known acts of resistance
and boosted morale.
"One good little piece of news",
Anne Frank wrote in her diary in the secret annex.
The fire however did not destroy all the cards,
neither did the overzealous actions of the fire brigade.
Ultimately, only 15% of the records were permanently destroyed.
Moreover, the Germans kept separate sets of records elsewhere.
Willy Lages, the head of the German security services,
offered a reward of 10,000 guilders
for information leading to the capture of the attackers.
24 Vondelstraat, ground floor.
In a telex message to SS leader Heinrich Himmler
dated the 2nd of April 1943,
Hanns Albin Rauter, the SS and police leader in the Netherlands, stated:
"Over the course of the night,
several arrests were made in Amsterdam and Utrecht.
As a result, it is certain
that three perpetrators of the sabotage arson attack
on the Civil Registry of Amsterdam are in custody."
One of those arrested was Sjoerd Bakker,
a fashion designer and tailor.
He made the replica Dutch police uniforms
worn by the attackers here in his studio.
He and 11 others involved in the attack were executed
in the dunes on the 1st of July 1943
and thrown into a mass grave.
At his own request, Bakker wore a pink shirt for his execution.
When the grave was discovered after the war,
the pink shirt helped identify the group.
225 Kerkstraat, ground floor.
Home of Henry van Adelsbergen, a Jewish man in a "mixed" marriage.
While being held at camp Westerbork,
he was forced to choose between being deported or being sterilised.
He opted for sterilisation and returned to Amsterdam.
In March 1943, Van Adelsbergen divorced his wife
and moved elsewhere.
In 1944, he was summoned to the headquarters of the German police.
There he accidently ran into the occupant
of the apartment above him on Kerkstraat,
Branca Simons, a Jewish informer
who betrayed people to save herself.
Simons reported that since her former neighbour was divorced,
he was no longer exempt from deportation.
Van Adelsbergen was arrested at once.
He died in March 1945
in Vaihingen concentration camp in Germany.
After the war Simons was sentenced to death
but was freed in 1959.
Demolished.
26 Vegastraat, ground floor.
Dina Gobitz-Wagenaar and four of her children
lived in hiding here in their own home
following their escape from the Dutch theatre deportation centre.
After the war, Dina's daughter Carla Kaplan-Gobitz remembered:
"Resistance people had created all sorts of hiding places in our house,
and they worked so well
that more and more people came there to hide.
Some of them had been previously hiding in a sewage pipe.
I found living in hiding awful.
Everyone was scared, and I wasn't able to play.
You weren't allowed to open the curtains.
We had to be really quiet,
because it had to look like nobody was living in the house."
Kaplan-Gobitz and her sister claimed
that a German guard named Alfons Zündler
had helped them escape from the deportation centre.
But when they and several others
put Zündler forward for a Yad Vashem award in 1993,
which would have him honoured in Israel
as "Righteous among the Nations",
it sparked a storm of protest.
The opponents said that this member of the SS
only helped others in exchange for alcohol or sex.
It did turn out that Zündler and two other guards
had been arrested in 1943
for having sexual relations with Jewish women,
and given a ten-year jail sentence by a German court.
In a 2012 interview, resistance worker Harry Cohen,
a courier for the Jewish council, said about Zündler,
"Yes, he did save people,
but when he was up for being honoured with the Yad Vashem award,
I protested.
That was a step too far.
Come off it,
I mean he was in the SS and he got to make life and death decisions!"
VOICE-OVER: 201 and 203 Van Ostadestraat.
Herman Elte School.
In September 1941 the Germans decreed
Jewish children had to go to separate schools.
The Amsterdam city administration obliged
by creating more than 40 new schools,
mostly in existing school buildings,
for around 7,500 pupils.
Jewish schools that existed already before the war,
also became part of the system.
After the deportations began, the classes got smaller each day.
In September 1943, all Jewish schools had closed.
VOICE-OVER: 44 Albrecht Dürerstraat, first floor.
In 1943, Sonja van Hesteren
moved into what she described as a "luxurious room"
in an apartment formerly occupied by a Jewish family.
She worked at the Hausraterfassungstelle,
the department that registered the contents
of the homes of deported Jews.
After the war, Van Hesteren claimed that to keep on living there,
she had to join the staff of the German security police.
There she helped to entrap resistance workers.
In April 1944 she made a phone call to Henk Dienske,
a leader of the LO resistance group,
pretending to be the daughter of a communist leader.
She said she had a message for him from her father.
Dienske agreed to meet her and was immediately arrested.
Dienske died in 1945 in Beendorf,
a subcamp of Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany.
After the war, Van Hesteren was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
154 Beethovenstraat, third floor.
Home of physician Johan Strak.
He was a member of the Dutch Nazi party, the NSB,
and of the SS, and a confidant of SD chief Willy Lages.
In 1942 he became Amsterdam's alderman
for public health.
As a physician, Strak carried out assessments
of women who wanted to marry members of the SS,
to determine whether they were of "pure Germanic race".
In 1942 it was his task
to determine whether foundlings might be Jewish.
He decided a baby known as "Remi van Duinwijck",
named after the address he was found at,
was Jewish, although he was not circumcised.
Strak, however, said the boy had "Jewish ears".
Remi was murdered in 1943 in Sobibor.
His real name, Koen Gezang, was only discovered in 2002.
After the war, Strak was sentenced to six years in prison.
Witnesses on the front row.
VOICE-OVER: 3 Amstel, ground floor.
Bookshop owned by Louis Lamm,
one of the largest Jewish antiquarian bookshops in Europe.
- Do I have Bruna Dos Santos Vieira? - Yes.
- And Magteld Elsemiek Jakobs? - Yes.
Well, please rise.
Give each other your right hand.
Look each other in the eyes.
And listen to the questions I'm going to pose to you.
Do you, Bruna...
VOICE-OVER: When the deportations began,
Lamm's upstairs neighbour, resistance worker Cas Oorthuys,
found a safe address for him,
but Lamm, who had fled Germany in 1933, declined the offer.
Lamm and his daughter Ruth
were murdered in Auschwitz in November 1943.
Then I declare as a register of the Amsterdam Records Office
that you are hereby joined in registered partnership.
VOICE-OVER: The bookshop was "purged" by the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce,
a Nazi organisation that looted Jewish cultural property.
After the war, Lydia Oorthuys-Krienen remembered:
"Once they'd been taken away,
there were suddenly ladders leaning against the front of the building,
and a long wooden chute ran from the window,
over the quayside, to a flat barge."
VOICE-OVER: "They spent days using the chute
to chuck all those valuable books onto the barge."
Demolished.
Van Woustraat.
In September 1942,
a police officer arrested journalist Philip Mechanicus
for not wearing a yellow star badge.
Two members of the Dutch Nazi party had recognised him
and pointed him out in a tram or on a tram stop.
Mechanicus was sent to Amersfoort concentration camp
and from there to Westerbork.
Mechanicus kept a diary that was smuggled out of the transit camp
and published after the war as "Waiting for Death".
"I feel as if I'm live reporting from a shipwreck", he wrote from the camp.
In October 1944, Mechanicus was shot dead in Auschwitz.
149 Van Woustraat.
Koco, one of two ice cream parlours run by German Jewish refugees
Ernst Cahn and Alfred Kohn.
The windows of their other parlour on Rijnstraat
were smashed in February 1941,
so the owners got together a group of regular customers
to protect the shops.
A couple of days later,
a gang of Dutch Nazis passed the parlour, singing as they went,
so the owners closed the shop.
Someone started pounding at the door,
and the defenders of the parlour sprayed ammonia gas at them
using a cylinder kept in the shop to cool ice cream.
But instead of the expected Blackshirts,
they were German Order Police officers.
For the Nazis this event was one of the grounds
for the first roundup in the old Jewish Quarter,
on the 22nd and 23rd of February.
Ernst Cahn was condemned to death by a Nazi court.
On the 3rd of March 1941,
he became the first resistance fighter in the Netherlands
to die in front of a firing squad.
Alfred Kohn died in 1945,
probably on a death march from Auschwitz.
9 De Mirandalaan, formerly Burgemeester van Leeuwenweg.
Amstel Park swimming pool.
From the 21st of May 1941,
the Germans banned Jews from all municipal swimming pools.
The only pool at which they were allowed to swim was this one,
on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Less than a month later, they were also banned from this last pool.
All swimming pools closed in the autumn of 1944
due to the lack of gas and electricity.
During the Hunger Winter,
people chopped down trees and bushes around the outdoor pools
for firewood.
The wooden diving board was chopped up as well.
In the 1930s,
the pool had become known as the De Miranda Pool,
after its instigator,
socialist alderman Monne de Miranda.
He was arrested in July 1942
and taken to Amersfoort concentration camp,
where he was subjected to such severe physical abuse
by other Dutch captives that he died ten days later.
In 1946 this pool was officially named
De Miranda Pool.
A few years later the street was also named after him.
Demolished.
Binnen Bantammerstraat,
known since the 1920s as Tong Yan Kai,
or "Street of the Chinese".
Several hundred Chinese sailors who were unable to leave Amsterdam
due to the war, managed to scrape a living
by running small businesses.
Unemployed men had to work for the Germans.
Forty Chinese-Dutch weddings
were held in Amsterdam during the war.
In 1943, Storm, a magazine for the Dutch SS, wrote:
"How can it be that the Dutch women do not hang their heads in shame,
that they throw themselves into the arms of an easterner,
who is, furthermore, little more than a beggar."
Amsterdam's oldest Chinese restaurant,
Kong Hing at number 11, closed during the Hunger Winter.
After the capitulation of Japan,
the Chinese in Amsterdam held a grand victory party
on Nieuwmarkt and Dam Square.
26 Molenbeekstraat, second floor.
Home of Philip van der Kar, Sophia van der Kar-Polak
and their children Sieg and Mary.
Sophia Polak managed to obtain a so-called "Calmeyer Stamp",
which indicated that she was only "partly" Jewish.
She and her sister gained this status
on the basis that their biological father
was not Samson Polak,
but the deceased Albertus Demmenie,
a non-Jewish man her mother would have had an affair with.
Demmenie's son agreed to tell this lie.
To be granted their stamps, Sophia and her sister Stella
had to undergo a "physical racial verification procedure"
at Amsterdam's Zentralstelle,
the Central Office for Jewish Emigration.
The two middle-aged sisters were instructed to lift up their skirts
for Ferdinand Aus der Fünten, the head of the Zentralstelle.
With their skirts raised, they had to walk up and down on stockinged feet
so that the SS-Hauptsturmführer could determine
whether they had "Jewish legs".
The Van der Kar-Polak family produced forgeries of ID documents,
and always had people hiding with them, crowding the rooms.
"I spent at least three years sharing a bed with my parents",
Mary said after the war.
Once the "houseguests" had been there for a few days,
Sophia and Mary would take them out of the city
to hide in the countryside.
On the four occasions that the authorities raided the house,
the guests hid on the roof, behind the chimney.
VOICE-OVER: 29 Niersstraat, first floor.
Home of Simon de la Bella, a Jewish senator for the socialist party.
When he was arrested in July 1940,
he tried to kill himself by taking poison,
but he did not succeed.
He died in 1942
in Dachau concentration camp in Germany.
VOICE-OVER: De la Bella's daughter Carla joined the resistance,
spreading illegal papers and transporting weapons.
She later said:
"Before the war my parents had authority over me,
and I wasn't allowed to do anything.
I realise now I was thrown into total adulthood.
There were no boundaries anymore. You could do what you wanted.
Compared with before the war it was mayhem.
Everybody was living with everybody else,
and you slept with everybody.
If you had a bottle of drink it was party time.
It was a madhouse.
It was also our way to respond to the tension of resistance work."
Valentijnkade, Zeeburg Jewish cemetery.
The cemetery was full in 1914
and was only used sporadically thereafter.
Around 100,000 people are buried here.
In 1942, the German army
repurposed part of the cemetery as a training ground.
Illegal burials were performed at the Jewish cemeteries
in nearby Diemen and Ouderkerk,
but it has not been proved that such burials took place here.
After the war, a story went around that during the Hunger Winter
a German man let a cow graze here.
According to this tale,
people from the neighbourhood stole it and slaughtered it.
In 1956, the local authorities acquired a part of the cemetery
to build a road.
Under rabbinical supervision, the graves in this part were exhumed
and the remains moved to the cemetery in Diemen,
along with what few headstones were left.
58 Nieuwe Keizersgracht,
Headquarters of the Jewish Council,
the organisation the Nazi's forced upon Jewish people in 1941
to enact their policies.
The Council remains controversial to this day.
Was the organisation collaborating
or did it just try to prevent the worst?
The public entrance was at basement level,
and the queues sometimes stretched all the way to Weesperstraat.
Everyone wanted to work for the Jewish Council because initially,
Council personnel and their families
were exempt from deportation.
The organisation created numerous departments all over the city,
from Travel Permits to the Distribution of Vegetables.
In its decisions, the Council tended to favour the elite.
Chairman David Cohen defended this policy in his memoirs:
"Of course one should value every life equally,
but a life that has value for other people as well
must remain more protected in times of war
than the life of a person that is only important to himself."
Some reports about what was happening in the camps in occupied Poland
did reach the Jewish Council, but they were not believed.
In 1947, a Special Court of Justice
placed David Cohen and Abraham Asscher,
the two chairmen, in pre-trial detention.
They were released a month later.
That same year, a Jewish Community Tribunal
found that Cohen and Asscher
"had failed in a world that had itself been at fault".
You're welcome.
VOICE-OVER: 15 Valeriusplein.
Amsterdam's Lyceum.
In 1940, Jewish teachers were fired,
as were all civil servants,
in one of the first measures to isolate the Jews.
In 1941,
an official farewell ceremony was held in the assembly hall
for the 72 Jewish pupils.
The headmaster, Piet Gunning,
had previously taken them away for a week to Cloud Land,
the school's place in the country.
Gunning was fired in 1942
and interned for the crime of "Judenbegünstigung",
doing favours for Jews.
After the liberation he was reinstated.
VOICE-OVER: Various German organisations requisitioned the school,
including the Order Police and the Air Force.
The soldiers were billeted to the classrooms,
while the officers lived at the director's residence.
The Germans bred pigs in the basement,
and built a dog kennel on the grounds.
Barbed wire fences protected the building.
Lessons for the pupils continued elsewhere.
VOICE-OVER: Several of the school's teachers and students
were involved in the resistance.
In December 1942,
two students from the school travelled to Camp Westerbork
with a microscope for their biology teacher Jacob Heimans,
because he missed it so much.
They also passed on a forged baptism certificate
to the mother of a classmate,
in the hope she could be "Aryanised".
Pay attention.
Yes, go on.
Stay triumphant. - Yeah.
VOICE-OVER: Corner of Apollolaan and Beethovenstraat.
From September 1944, there was an unspoken truce
between the German security police
and the Dutch armed resistance:
if there were no violent attacks against the occupying forces,
then they wouldn't carry out any executions.
The KP resistance militia weren't intending
to kill Herbert Oelschlägel:
they were going to kidnap him.
This infamous SD detective spoke Dutch
and controlled a network of informers.
The KP wanted him to reveal his informers and then release him.
They shadowed the detective for four weeks
and made a plan to seize him.
But on the 23rd of October 1944
he didn't appear at the expected time.
The KP found him at a café in the city centre.
They tailed him back to the South District,
but then their target realised he was being followed,
so, at the corner of Apollolaan and Beethovenstraat,
they pounced on him.
In the ensuing struggle in the dark,
the bottle of chloroform the KP intended to use
to sedate the detective fell to the ground and broke.
One of the attackers shot Oelschlägel in the head.
His body remained where it lay,
in front of the tobacconist at number 6 Beethovenstraat.
Retaliation for killing a German
was always greater than for killing a Dutchman.
So early the next morning,
the SD took 29 captives from Weteringschans prison to Apollolaan.
Not all of them were on the list of "death candidates".
One was a thief.
The SD ordered local residents to come out of their houses and watch,
and shot the prisoners dead in rows of ten
in front of the air-raid shelter in the public garden.
The Germans also set fire to two townhouses on the corner,
one of which had belonged to the Jewish couple Mina and Louis Stibbe,
who had taken their own lives in 1942.
Unbeknownst to the SD,
the villa was now occupied by a Dutch collaborator.
He tried to get compensated for the loss,
but SD leader Willy Lages said:
"what we destroy, the city of Amsterdam has to pay for".
VOICE-OVER: On Monday the 7th of May 1945,
Amsterdammers flocked to Dam Square
to celebrate the liberation of the Netherlands.
But in Amsterdam the German army was still present and had not yet been disarmed.
That afternoon, a reconnaissance unit of the British army
arrived at Dam Square,
where bystanders climbed onto their cars.
According to some eyewitnesses, once the British unit departed,
a cart arrived on the square carrying women who had had German lovers.
After the war, Karel Marquenie remembered,
"The women were shaved and tarred.
This was carried out in a none too gentle manner,
blood was streaming over their faces.
The women screamed and called out for help
as the Germans looked on."
It is not known what the exact cause was,
but the German Navy troops in Paleisstraat
who had witnessed everything from the windows and the roof
started to shoot at the crowd, a gunfight with the Dutch resistance followed.
Bystanders sought refuge wherever they could,
even behind lamp posts and behind a street organ.
More than 30 people were killed.
VOICE-OVER: Dam Square.
In June 1945, a three-day party was organised
by "The committee for the celebration of the liberation
of the capital from German oppression".
On the last day, Queen Wilhelmina appeared
on the balcony of the Royal Palace,
and looked at a parade of Allied troops
and Domestic Armed Forces,
followed by a procession of floats.
On one of the floats Indonesians stood in traditional costume
holding up the sign "Indonesia oppressed".
During the war, Indonesians that studied in the Netherlands
had joined the resistance, under the motto,
"First free the Netherlands and then Indonesia".
The so-called "Dutch Indies" had been occupied by Japan in 1942,
but the freedom asked by the Perhimpoenan Indonesia
was freedom from the Dutch coloniser as well.
VOICE-OVER: 41 Ringweg,
formerly the rural part of Sloten village.
On the 15th of July 1943, CS6 resistance group members
Sape Kuiper and Johan Kalshoven
shot policeman Hendrik Blonk and his wife Johanna Blonk-Martens,
at their home.
They both survived the attack.
Blonk was a notorious detective
at the Amsterdam Police Department for Jewish Affairs.
He claimed to have arrested at least 100 Jews living in hiding.
After the war, Blonk was sentenced to eight years in prison.
He was released in 1949.
Kalshoven and Kuiper were caught and executed in October 1943.
Demolished.
7 Gabriël Metsustraat.
In 1944 this Christian school for girls
was claimed as a training facility
for drivers of the NSKK,
the National Socialist Motor Corps,
a paramilitary organisation that supported the German army
and transported German officials.
Around 10,000 Dutch men enlisted,
often after they were found unfit for service
in the Waffen or Armed SS.
VOICE-OVER: Polderweg.
Base of the Dutch military police
taken over by the Germans.
It was used as an assembly point during mass roundups.
On the night of the 2nd of October 1942,
the occupiers detained Jewish men here
from work camps in and around Amsterdam.
The next day these men and their families,
who were taken from their homes,
were sent to Westerbork transit camp.
All Jews living in Amsterdam who didn’t have a "Sperre",
an exemption from deportation,
were ordered to report here on Thursday the 20th of May 1943
and hand in their house keys.
From that day onwards
no Jews were permitted to reside in Amsterdam,
unless they had explicit permission from the Zentralstelle,
the Central Office for Jewish Emigration.
Only a thousand people turned up that day.
Ferdinand Aus der Fünten, the head of the Zentralstelle,
responded by ordering the Jewish Council
to select 7,000 people from its own ranks,
amounting to half of the Council’s staff.
They had to report here on the 25th of May.
This time, around 1,600 people showed up.
The German authorities had expected this
and had already made plans for a mass roundup
in the old Jewish Quarter.
At two in the morning the next day
they started rounding people up.
They gathered them in the synagogue,
and used trams to transport around 3,000 people
to this base
or straight to nearby Muiderpoort station,
where trains were waiting to take them to Westerbork.
Some people managed to escape
with the help of Jewish council staff.
Sam de Hond pretended he had to take a group of people
to the Dutch theatre deportation centre.
When they got there he told them to flee.
After liberation, this building became Camp East,
an internment camp for "political delinquents".
In May 1946,
Wietze Zootjes, a notorious member of the Landwacht,
a police force made up of Dutch Nazis,
managed to escape through a hole he made
in the floor of his room.
In August the same year, ten members of the NSB escaped
by using stolen pliers to bend the window bars of the camp.
Demolished.
I can see you're very busy.
VOICE-OVER: 321 Keizersgracht.
"The Red House" was bought by artist Han van Meegeren
in 1943.
He sold his versions of paintings by old masters
to Dutch museums and to high-ranking Nazi customers
like Reich Marshall Hermann Göring.
His studio was situated further along the canal,
and the artist held wild parties there.
Shortly after liberation,
Van Meegeren was arrested for collaboration.
To convince the court he did not collaborate,
the artist revealed his paintings were forgeries.
To prove this, during his trial
he painted a new work in the style of Vermeer.
The artist was given one year in prison,
but died before he could begin his sentence.
VOICE-OVER: 120 Westerstraat, ground floor.
Fish shop run by Isaäc Gerritse.
From June 1942 only Jews could shop here.
A year later, Gerritse was deported to Westerbork.
He was murdered in Auschwitz in August 1943.
Following his deportation, the local authorities
bricked up the property to protect it from looters.
After the war,
the municipality presented an invoice for this work
to Isaäc’s only surviving son Maurits,
who had to pay 1,100 guilders.
In 1943, the city put aside 70,000 guilders
for measures preventing people from removing timber
from unoccupied buildings.
These included building walls around houses,
but an official report pointed out
that this was in fact counter-productive,
because once the looters were behind the walls,
they could go about their business undisturbed.
Vliegen Woods, formerly IJ-Woods.
On the 2nd of July 1942,
Abraham Prins, a physiotherapist,
cycled through this park, which, like all parks,
Jews were forbidden to enter from September 1941.
The Amsterdam Police Battalion was on drill exercise in the park,
and an officer arrested him.
Prins claimed he had forgotten that he was not allowed to be in the park.
He was deported to Westerbork.
On the way to Auschwitz, he threw a note from the train
that reached his non-Jewish wife.
It said: "Better let sister drown herself."
Prins was murdered in Auschwitz in September 1942.
In February 1945 the Order Police were looking for men
for forced labour in Germany.
During the roundup,
Willem Schreuder fled into the park and was shot.
Schreuder died within minutes.
Many trees in the park were chopped down during the Hunger Winter.
92 Jacob Obrechstraat, Central Jewish Hospital.
On the night of the 28th of September 1943,
the hospital was cleared of patients.
The Germans then ordered that it be used
for the sterilisation of Jewish women in mixed marriages.
Some members of the hospital staff
who had already been deported to Westerbork
were brought back to carry out this work.
The operations were led by a Dutch Nazi surgeon.
Later in the war,
the Nazi-run welfare organisation, the NVD,
used the building as a maternity clinic
for women who had become pregnant by German soldiers.
After the war, it opened again as a Jewish hospital
and took in concentration camp survivors.
Demolished.
1 Adama van Scheltemaplein.
In June 1942, this vacant school
became the "Zentralstelle für Jüdische Auswanderung",
the Central Office for Jewish Emigration,
the German office that organised the deportations.
Jews could only enter it through the backdoor.
The first 4,000 people were called up to report
for so-called labour service in Germany,
mostly Jews who had fled Germany, on the 5th of July 1942.
When fewer and fewer people responded to such calls to report,
the Germans introduced a new approach.
In the evening regular Amsterdam police officers
now took people directly from their homes,
without prior warning.
For this task, supervised by the German Order Police
also men from the new Amsterdam Police Battalion were used.
This unit became especially known for its brutality and corruption.
Around 18,000 Jewish people were deported from the Zentralstelle,
where they were held in the gymnasium or in the courtyard.
Journalist Heinz Wielek, who had worked for the Jewish Council,
wrote shortly after the war
about the sinister, SS-like atmosphere in the building:
"How many times a frightened, silent mass of people
stood in the courtyard throughout the night,
packed so tightly nobody could move."
When the Dutch theatre became the main deportation centre,
the Zentralstelle remained the bureaucratic core
of the Holocaust in Amsterdam.
The theft of Jewish belongings
was also orchestrated from the Zentralstelle.
In November 1944,
the building was destroyed during an Allied air raid
on the German security service headquarters across the street.
Mosveld.
The grounds of Volewijckers football club,
which owes its reputation as a "resistance club"
to Douwe and Gerben Wagenaar.
Douwe chaired the club,
Gerben was an important figure in the communist resistance.
In July 1943,
the grounds were hit during an allied bombardment.
A month later,
the Volewijckers played a match against a club from The Hague
wearing orange shirts
rather than their usual green and white kit.
The authorities arrested Douwe Wagenaar immediately after the match
and held him for three days.
The club won the national championship in 1944.
176 P.C. Hoofstraat, ground floor.
The socialist Professor of criminology Willem Bonger
and his wife Maria Bonger-van Heteren
attempted to take their own lives here on the 15th of May 1940.
He wrote in a note: "I see no future for me anymore,
and will not bow down to those thugs who are going to be in control now."
Maria Bonger-van Heteren survived.
Demolished.
108 Gerrit van der Veenstraat, formerly Euterpestraat.
Second floor.
Home of the Klingensteins,
a Jewish family who had fled Germany in the '30s.
On the 15th of May 1940,
six members of the family ended their lives by gas asphyxiation.
Their housemaid Karoline Falk also chose death.
128 Willemsparkweg, ground floor.
Studio Larette.
Sales Centre for Conjuring Tricks
belonging to the Hungarian magician Cornel Hauer.
Hauer was a baptised Catholic in a "mixed marriage",
which protected him from deportation.
In May 1943,
two German soldiers rang at the door,
whereupon Hauer used a pistol to kill himself.
There had been German soldiers before,
but they came to buy magic tricks.
Now the officers came because Hauer, who was deaf,
had been loudly listening to English radio, which was forbidden.
The men had heard it from outside.
6 Deurloostraat, ground floor.
Home of the Jewish family Wolfsbergen.
Ellie, Willy, their son Fred, who was 17,
and his grandmother Rika
ended their lives by gas asphyxiation
on the 14th of May 1940.
In a suicide note addressed to their neighbours,
Ellie Wolfsbergen wrote:
"Before we depart, I send you a final greeting.
It is impossible for us to live as outcasts.
Fred agrees with us,
otherwise we would have not done it.
Any of you who wish to do so,
may take a keepsake from a drawer or wherever else,
be it silver or anything at all.
Take what you like."
104 Eerste Helmersstraat, Wilhelmina Hospital.
In 1942, the Germans changed the name to West hospital.
Just after the Dutch capitulation,
a lot of people were brought here following failed suicide attempts.
156 suicides were recorded in 1940 in Amsterdam,
most of them in the south of the city.
128 of these cases concerned Jewish people.
Often, entire families died, including children.
The cause of death was usually gas asphyxiation,
sometimes a sedative or poison was used.
Several people drowned themselves in the river Amstel.
The Germans installed an Air Force military hospital here,
with around 800 beds and its own German personnel.
An auxiliary hospital was opened elsewhere in the city
for Amsterdammers.
Almost done.
VOICE-OVER: Captured resistance fighters who were injured
were also treated in this hospital.
The resistance managed to free some of them.
In November 1944
there was not enough German personnel left
to treat wounded soldiers,
so Dutch nurses were assigned to the task.
Nurses who refused to do this work were suspended or fired.
The soldiers were not allowed to return to their units,
but would be deployed in the defence of Amsterdam.
213 Nieuwe Herengracht,
framing shop of Benjamin de Vries.
He was murdered in Sobibor in 1943.
The house became a temporary refuge
for people who escaped from the Dutch theatre deportation centre
but didn’t have a place to hide.
After the war, De Vries’ son-in-law Jac van de Kar,
a bicycle courier for the Jewish Council, said:
"During the day the escapees would either leave of their own accord
or we would telephone their relations, who came to collect them.
As a rule, the freed people had no luggage,
and their clothes, which stank and were crumpled,
had to be cleaned."
Demolished.
VOICE-OVER: 65 Singel, ground floor.
Home of Willem Arondéus,
an artist and the writer of the Brandarisletter,
one of the first illegal publications.
Arondéus became a leader of the PBC resistance group,
which started with forging identity papers.
He also took part in the attack on the Civil Registry.
The authorities arrested him the month after the attack,
and on the 1st of July 1943
he was executed in the dunes together with 11 others.
The day before the execution,
Arondéus urged his lawyer, resistance worker Lau Mazirel,
to let people know after the war that
"homosexuals are no less courageous than other people."
31 Roelof Hartstraat, third floor.
Home of nurse Antje Roos.
In 1942, Bernardine Bloemgarten-Hertog
started hiding here.
After the war, her son Salvador described what he saw from the window
on the 14th of July that year,
during a roundup by the German Order Police:
"What struck me most was the pride and dignity
with which our people went to meet their fate,
straight-backed and, as it were,
negating the presence of the uniformed guards.
It all became too much for Roos.
She yelled out 'Murderers, murderers',
and we had to pull her away from the window
because the guards adopted a menacing stance."
The Germans carried out this "razzia"
because not enough Jewish people had reported
for forced labour in Germany.
800 people were arrested
and threatened to be sent to Mauthausen in Austria,
a concentration camp that was already known and feared.
In the end, enough people appeared
to fill the first train to Westerbork,
and most hostages were released.
Roos was involved in the attack on the Civil Registry.
She was arrested and sentenced to a year of labour
in Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Upon her return she resumed her resistance.
Bernardine Bloemgarten-Hertog was caught elsewhere.
In May 1943 she was murdered at Sobibor.
45 and 47 Victorieplein.
The 12-storey house, known as the "Skyscraper".
The tenants in the 24 apartments included...
number 45, eighth floor.
Home of Stefan Schlesinger, a graphic designer,
and his wife Anna Kerdijk, a translator.
They were both murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.
From early 1943 onwards,
Viennese refugee Irene Hellmann-Redlich
hid in this apartment.
Hellmann moved again in 1944,
but went back to the apartment to pick something up
and got arrested.
Hellmann was also murdered in Auschwitz.
Number 45, fourth floor.
Home of Anthonie Donker,
a writer who urged all writers and other artists
to resist joining the Nazi-run Chamber of Culture.
Only members of this organisation could perform,
exhibit or publish their work.
Donker wrote in a manifesto
that art should not be subordinated to political principles.
After it was published in February 1943,
Donker was fired as professor of literature
at the University of Amsterdam
and interned at a hostage camp.
He was released by mistake.
Hiding here was the Surinamese writer and resistance worker
Albert Helman.
He was a well-known anti-fascist.
Just before the war he had published the book
"The Suffering of Millions: The Tragedy of Jewish Refugees".
Number 47, fifth floor.
Famous singer Julia Culp and her sister, pianist Betsy Rijkens-Culp,
went into hiding in 1942.
An intervention by Willem Mengelberg,
the conductor of the Concertgebouw orchestra,
and Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic,
meant they were able to return to the "Skyscraper".
Under the name Cabaret Flore, they would give occasional concerts
on Sunday afternoons in the bicycle shelter.
Number 47, seventh floor.
Home of dentist Davy Schaap, Debora Schaap-Ossedrijver,
and their children Franz and Josephina.
They were murdered in Auschwitz,
Sobibor and Oberlangen concentration camps.
Number 45, tenth floor.
Home of Gerben Sonderman, a pilot.
During the German invasion in May 1940,
he shot down three German planes.
Sonderman was the right-hand man of Piet Six,
the leader of the OD resistance group.
In 1944 he installed a radio transmitter
in a vacant apartment in this building
to send messages to London.
During transmissions there would be a British radio operator
in a Royal Air Force reconnaissance plane
circling Amsterdam.
On the day the country was liberated,
Sonderman flew a celebratory round
over Amsterdam in a small sport plane.
609 and 611 Keizersgracht.
Home of the Fodor art collection.
Prior to the German invasion,
the artworks were stored at other museums.
The building became the head office
of Amsterdam’s Air Raid Defence Service,
set up to help civilians after a bombardment.
In every quarter of the city the Service built shelters
and installed a small office,
where first aid could be given.
Volunteers made their rounds every night.
Resistance workers often took this job,
because it meant they could be legally outside during curfew.
At headquarters compulsory courses in self-protection were given,
and the organisation placed sand buckets all around the city
for extinguishing fires.
They announced in the newspapers:
"Citizens must ensure the sand is not used
for other purposes or spread around by children at play."
During the war,
the air raid sirens went off around a hundred times each year,
but Amsterdam was not bombed often.
The largest air raid took place in July 1943.
The allied bombs were meant for the Fokker aircraft factory,
which the Germans had taken over, in the north of the city.
But due to low visibility
and possibly the inexperience of the American crew,
all bombs fell on a residential area
near the factory.
Around 200 people died.
a church, a police station
and a few hundred houses were destroyed.
The municipality relocated the homeless
in the houses that stood empty
after the deportation of their Jewish inhabitants.
A week later planes of the RAF
did manage to hit the target
and destroyed most of the Fokker factory.
After the war this building housed the Evacuation Department,
which was tasked with finding homes
for people that had been living in hiding.
14 Kleine-Gartman Plantsoen.
Detention Centre I,
better known as Weteringschans Prison.
In the German section of the jail
political prisoners and resistance members were detained.
The "Jewish barrack", a shelter without any sanitary facilities,
stood in the prison yard.
A single cell could contain up to 16 inmates.
Jewish prisoners were forced to walk around the yard
for hours at a time chanting
"I am a Jew. Beat me to death. It’s my own fault."
The German police detective Kurt Döring
kicked a pregnant woman so ferociously
that she suffered a miscarriage.
Resistance fighters were held in "hunger cells"
to force confessions.
After the war, Anton Beekman wrote:
"There was a constant smell of food
rising up from a grate in my cell. It drove me crazy."
Prisoners would communicate with the outside world
through letters smuggled out in the laundry,
which their families had to clean at home.
Prisoners designated as "Todeskandidaten",
or "death candidates",
could be executed in retaliation
for attacks on Germans by the resistance.
If that happened, the wives of the executed men
could collect their wedding rings here the next day.
The resistance made two attempts to free comrades from the prison.
The first, on the night of the 1st of May 1944,
led by Gerrit van der Veen,
failed when he had to shoot an unexpected watchdog,
and the sound alerted the guards.
In the second raid in July, a Dutch prison guard
was supposed to help a group led by Johannes Post,
but he informed his superiors of the plan,
and the group was ambushed.
Around 25,000 people
were incarcerated at the prison over the course of the war
most of them, including Anne Frank and her family,
were held here for just a few days.
In September 1944 the rumour
went around that the Allies were about to liberate Amsterdam.
This prompted panic among the occupiers.
The prison director had most documents burned,
and the portrait of Hitler taken down.
In September and November 1944,
many inmates held on minor charges were dismissed.
A day after liberation, all the prisoners were released.
The Dutch Domestic Armed Forces
immediately brought new captives to the prison,
like mover Abraham Puls,
whose company had taken belongings from the houses of deported Jews.
So-called "moffenhoeren", or "Kraut whores",
women suspected of having had sexual relations with German men,
had their heads shaved in front of the prison gates.
Partly demolished.
Jonas Daniël Meijerplein.
This square between the Sephardic and the Ashkenazi synagogues
was named after the first Jewish lawyer in the Netherlands.
The German authorities changed the name to "Houtmarkt",
or Wood market.
The first mass roundup of Jews in Amsterdam
took place in this area,
the heart of the old Jewish Quarter,
on the 22nd and 23rd of February 1941.
The German Order Police arrested more than 400 Jewish men
in the streets.
They forced them to sit hunched on the ground,
and beat and kicked them.
The men were later transported
to the concentration camps Buchenwald and Mauthausen,
where most of them would perish soon after.
This first "razzia" was one of the causes for the February Strike.
The underground Communist Party
initiated the protest against the German treatment of Jews.
VOICE-OVER: On the 25th of February most tram drivers refused to depart
and many workers in public services, factories
and shops joined demonstrations.
The next day almost 300,000 people were on strike.
This massive protest took the occupiers by surprise.
The second day the strike was harshly suppressed
by the German Order Police,
who opened fire at people gathered in the streets.
Nine people died.
The Germans later executed four of the strikers,
and imprisoned many.
They fired the mayor and the head of police
and replaced them with Nazi sympathisers.
VOICE-OVER: Oosterpark.
In March 1944, the Germans closed the park
and started using it for their vehicle fleet.
VOICE-OVER: On the 4th of May 1945,
the German Order Police started shooting from the park
at people stealing wooden blocks from between the tram rails,
to use in their stoves at home.
Johan van Es, who was cycling past, was fatally wounded.
VOICE-OVER: 296 Amsteldijk and DR. C.W. Ittmannpad,
Rozenoord plant nursery.
In 1944
the Germans started carrying out executions
on this plot.
As a rule, the Germans executed people
at the site of an attack by the resistance,
but late in the war a lack of fuel and cars
sometimes made this impossible.
Approximately 140 men were executed at Rozenoord.
The identities of a hundred men are known.
Most were prisoners from Weteringschans prison.
The largest group, 53 men, were shot here on the 8th of March 1945,
as a retaliation for an attack on SS leader Hanns Rauter.
Executions were generally carried out early in the morning,
with the members of the firing squad selected the night before.
To refuse was to risk one’s own execution.
The German Order Police officer Jupp Henneböhl
refused to participate on three occasions.
In his memoirs,
this "good German", as he was described,
recalled that
"I would sometimes question what I was doing:
by refusing I wouldn’t save any lives,
but I would run the risk of being shot,
depriving the resistance of their contact man."
Frans Hendrikx, the director of the adjacent tennis park
Amstel View,
witnessed several executions.
After the war he wrote:
"From my hiding place close by,
I could observe the grim, ashen faces.
I could see the tangled hair on their bare heads,
and their terrified eyes staring in glaring fear into the distance."
Demolished.
5 Beursplein. The stock exchange.
The Liro Bank, a Jewish owned bank,
was taken over by the occupiers and used as a "looting bank".
Jews had to hand over all their money and other valuables
like stocks, art and jewels to this bank,
with which the Germans then financed their deportation.
The bank traded the Jewish shares on the stock market.
The chairman of the Stockbroking Association agreed to this.
Jewish-owned securities were offered
at reduced prices on special "discount days".
Trade at the stock market
pretty much came to a standstill in September 1944.
The brokers played dominoes until liberation.
99 Gerrit Van Der Veenstraat, formerly Euterpestraat.
In 1941 this school for girls became the Amsterdam headquarters
of the "Sicherheitspolizei" and the "Sicherheitsdienst",
the German security police and security service.
This was one of the most feared buildings in Amsterdam.
The SiPO and the SD focused on tracking down
all enemies of national socialism,
including communists, Freemasons
and Jehovah’s witnesses.
They were all interrogated in this building.
The cells were in the basement.
A former captive wrote after the war:
"First put him for a few days in a low-ceilinged cell
half-filled with water,
where it is impossible to sit, or lie, or lean,
in the pitch dark, without food or drink.
Then, at the most unexpected of moments,
take him from this filthy open sewer,
deal him a few vicious blows to the head with a length of chain
and, if necessary,
give him a good kicking in the belly.
Then truly this 'filthy dog' will talk."
On the 26th of November 1944
the school was bombed by the British Airforce
at the request of the Dutch resistance.
The RAF opposed the bombing of a target
in a residential area,
but carried it out at the insistence of Prince Bernhard,
the supreme commander of the Dutch Domestic Armed Forces.
More than 50 people were killed,
including several people in hiding,
and four German policemen.
Forty buildings were destroyed.
According to an eyewitness the citizens of Amsterdam
nonetheless rejoiced at the sight.
Shortly after liberation,
this street was named after executed artist
Gerrit van der Veen,
one of the best known members of the resistance.
1 Paleisstraat.
De Grote Club, a gentlemen’s club.
Before the war it refused Jewish members.
The German navy confiscated the building
and in 1943 it became one of the strongholds
in the German defence of Amsterdam.
It was from this building that, on the 7th of May 1945,
German soldiers started to shoot at the crowd
that had gathered on the square to celebrate their liberation.
72 Middenweg.
Frankendael estate, city plant nursery.
The open-air theatre in the garden was used by Jeugdstorm,
the youth wing of the NSB,
for events such as summer Solstice celebrations.
Demolished.
Haarlemmerweg near Coronelstraat.
Following a resistance attack
on the railway near Sloterdijk,
on the 15th of December 1944
the occupiers retaliated by executing three resisters:
Pieter Elias, a police officer,
Matthijs Verkuijl, the leader of a BS resistance group
and his son Henk Verkuijl.
Their bodies were left on the ground for two days
to intimidate all Amsterdammers.
The SD gave local police the following instructions:
"These three corpses lying here
belong to terrorists who we shot dead.
Your task is to ensure
no one comes near them or takes them away.
Only staff from Bleekemolen funeral services
are allowed to remove the corpses."
Saint Nicholas!
VOICE-OVER: 876 Prinsengracht, ground floor.
House of Tom Koreman and Yara Koreman-Wainschtok.
Hiding place of Dio Remiëns and Nel Hissink,
who worked for the CS6 and PBC resistance groups.
In March 1943,
this house was the base for the attack on the Civil Registry.
Hissink and Remiëns were arrested after they were betrayed
in the summer of 1943.
Remiëns was executed on the 1st of October 1943 in the dunes.
Hissink was executed in November 1943 in Sachsenhausen.
The SD arrested Tom Koreman
after they found a pistol in his office.
Remiëns had given it to him after the attack on the registry.
Koreman was also executed.
The Germans arrested Yara Koreman as well,
but she was released again.
Yara took her own life a few weeks later.
She was pregnant with their first child.
In 1940 the Germans commanded
all streetlights and buildings be blacked out,
to make it difficult for allied planes
to use the light of the city for navigation.
Shops sold special paper and curtains
to make sure no light shone out.
The police imposed heavy fines.
In the ensuing dark,
a lot of people got lost or fell in the water,
the most in 1940, when 55 people died of drowning.
Books on astronomy were popular at lending libraries during the war.
The blackout meant the stars were clearly visible at night.
Lindengracht.
On the 4th of February 1945, a patrol squad from the Dutch police
started shooting at a group of men who were sawing down trees.
They needed the wood for cooking and heating.
A police report states that Johannes Eijkelboom,
a warehouse clerk,
suffered gunshot wounds to the head and chest, and died.
Jeroenensteeg.
The body of an unidentified woman
was found here on the 18th of December 1944.
A police report states:
"Probably a Jewess, age 60 to 65,
broad cheekbones, grey hair.
The fact that the streets were wet and the soles of her slippers dry
suggests that the body was placed here."
The woman was Judith de Hond-Walvisch.
She had been living in hiding around the corner.
She died of blood poisoning resulting from a head injury.
Her sons laid her body in the alley without identity papers.
VOICE-OVER: 7 Bloedstraat, ground floor.
Brothel room of sex worker Catherina van Heerden.
On the 10th of July 1942,
the 19-year-old Jewish bicycle repairer Leendert van West
was arrested because he had paid two guilders here
for "carnal intercourse with an Aryan woman".
Marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews
were forbidden in the Netherlands in March 1942
by the Blood Protection Law, one of the Nuremberg Laws.
In May 1943, Van West was murdered in Sobibor.
218 and 220 Keizersgracht.
Church and monastery of the Redemptorists.
Base for the Donia Department,
an investigative unit set up by resistance leader
Walraven van Hall
and run by police officer S. van der Wind,
who had gone underground.
His job was to assess the trustworthiness
of resistance members.
From September 1944,
they hid the administration of the National Support Fund here,
the underground institution led by banker Van Hall
that organised and distributed money for the resistance.
Sarphatipark.
The park was named after Samuel Sarphati,
a Jewish physician and city planner.
In 1942 it was renamed Bollandpark,
after an antisemitic philosopher.
The statue of Sarphati was removed.
Artists Else Berg and Mommie Schwarz
both had a studio overlooking the park.
Some of the last paintings they made, in 1942,
were landscapes of the park in the snow.
Berg and Schwarz were arrested in their home in November 1942,
and murdered a week later in Auschwitz.
The park was an assembly point
at one of the last large roundups.
Early in the morning of the 20th of June 1943,
loudspeaker cars drove around the south and east of Amsterdam
ordering Jews to leave their houses.
More than 5,000 people were captured that day.
344 Kinkerstraat, second floor.
Home of Jan Bogaard,
a guard at Weteringschans prison,
and his mother Johanna Bogaard-van Klingeren.
Jan Bogaard promised to help the KP resistance group
led by Johannes Post
to attack the prison on Friday the 14th of July 1944.
To ensure his compliance,
the plan was that Bogaard’s mother would be brought to a safehouse by Post
on Friday morning.
She was to be killed if her son betrayed them.
But Mrs Bogaard said she was only willing to go the next day.
Despite this, the attack went ahead.
And Bogaard indeed betrayed them.
The next morning, Johannes Post,
not knowing about the betrayal yet,
was waiting in the Kinkerstraat for the car
to collect Bogaard’s mother when he was arrested.
Post was executed the following day in the dunes
together with other members of his group.
Johannes Post’s brother Marinus
monitored Bogaard’s apartment after the arrest,
but the German security police
had already found Bogaard a safe address in Utrecht.
After the war, Bogaard was sentenced to death.
He was executed in 1947.
VOICE-OVER: 78 Spaarndammerstraat.
Roman Catholic Association clubhouse.
The building housed a famine clinic in the summer of 1945.
Corpses were often found floating in the water in this neighbourhood
during the Hunger Winter.
Not all of these people had drowned.
People sometimes threw the bodies of deceased family members
into the water,
either because there was no possibility
of transport to the cemetery,
or to be able to continue claiming ration coupons
for the deceased person.
Demolished.
44 Agamemnonstraat.
De Blauwe Reiger nursery school.
After liberation, this was the base of the Auxiliary Police,
a group of volunteers who helped guard detainees,
buildings, and food transport.
They also dealt with Canadian soldiers,
who came to Amsterdam on leave from Germany.
The Canadians were not allowed to mingle
with the population in Germany.
The Leave Centre was located in the Olympic Stadium.
A volunteer wrote in his report:
"The neighbourhood around the stadium is the setting for repugnant scenes
involving soldiers.
The soldiers have no hesitation in taking girls
of 18 or 19 years old with them
for the entire night and keeping them with them.
The girls are very often found in an intoxicated state.
On one of these occasions, even the Canadian Military Police
felt compelled to intervene,
and to subject the cars parked here to an investigation.
The results were astonishing.
From each car there appeared two to four girls."
188 Hoogte Kadijk.
In 1941 the second Municipal Central Kitchen
opened in this power station.
In October 1944
the gas supply for individual households was cut off,
and suddenly 440,000 Amsterdammers became users of the kitchens,
whose number rose to more than 15.
To distribute the food,
schools and other public buildings were used.
The menu in October 1944:
Monday cabbage with potatoes, Tuesday porridge,
Wednesday carrots with potatoes, Thursday beets with potatoes,
Friday cabbage with potatoes,
Saturday pea soup, Sunday porridge.
When there were no potatoes left in 1945,
the kitchens served sugar beets and tulip bulbs.
Partially demolished.
552 Herengracht.
Fired Jewish radio presenter Gustav Czopp
started to produce and sell boardgames.
The shop, Variété,
became a cover for resistance activities.
Czopp was betrayed and in 1944 perished in Dachau.
Action!
VOICE-OVER: 38 Camperstraat, third floor.
In late 1943, a baby named Charles Viskoop
was hiding here.
His mother had placed him in the care of Adrie Bijmoer
soon after he was born.
They were betrayed by Roza Busnach,
a Jewish woman who had become an informer for the SD.
On the 6th of December 1943
the Henneicke Column carried out a raid at this address.
Bijmoer brought the baby to the Police Department for Jewish Affairs.
From there, Charles was taken to Weteringschans Prison,
where Janny Moffie-Bolle, a nurse
who had been arrested a few days earlier,
had to look after him in her cell.
On the 24th of December, baby Charles was put on transport to Westerbork.
He died in January 1944 in Auschwitz.
His mother Veronica Viskoop-de Brave
had already been killed there in November 1943.
His father Sem Viskoop
was murdered in the same camp in February 1944.
After the war, Busnach was sentenced to two years in prison.
Demolished.
VOICE-OVER: The Krugerplein lay in the middle of the Transvaalbuurt,
a neighbourhood with a large Jewish population before the war.
In 1942, this area became "Jewish area II",
the last place where Jews were allowed to live in the Netherlands.
The square was an assembly point during roundups.
After the war, Greetje Papegaaij-van der Meer remembered:
"The day came when it was our turn.
My mother was expecting with my little brother.
She was heavily pregnant.
We were already sitting in the trucks
when we saw the German officers discussing something.
They were scared that my mother was going to give birth in the truck,
and that it would cause trouble.
Then they threw all three of us off."
VOICE-OVER: 28 Krugerplein, ground floor.
On the night of the 31st of January 1945,
a group of some 50 people
forced open the door of the bakery here.
A police report records that
"Approximately 300 loaves and a bag of flour were taken."
31 Plantage Middenlaan. The crèche.
A day care centre, from September 1941
only for Jewish children and Jewish staff.
In October 1942 children under twelve
whose parents were detained in the crowded
Dutch theatre deportation centre across the road were kept here.
The director of the crèche, Henriette Pimentel, and her staff
worked with employees of the Jewish Council in the Dutch theatre
and several resistance groups to save around 600 of these children
once the parents of the children had given their permission
and they were secretly stricken from the records.
Some children were smuggled from the crèche
in washing baskets or rucksacks.
Others escaped in the arms of a carer while she hopped onto a tram,
or while taking a fresh air break,
others disappeared through the gardens into the building next door,
the Reformed Teachers' Training College.
It was easiest to find homes for babies.
Blond children, known as "tea substitutes",
were sent to the northern Dutch province of Friesland,
dark-haired children, or "coffee substitutes",
went southwards, to the province of Limburg.
All 70 children who were present on the 23rd of July 1943
were deported,
along with most remaining staff and the director.
The crèche was closed permanently in September 1943.
Demolished.
24 Plantage Middenlaan.
The Hollandsche Schouwburg, or Dutch Theatre.
This theatre was renamed the Jewish theatre in October 1941
and was only open to Jewish performers and Jewish audiences.
The newly formed Jewish Symphony Orchestra
played here for instance,
many of whose members had been part of the Concertgebouw Orchestra
but were fired because they were Jewish.
They could only perform music by Jewish composers.
In July 1942 the theatre was changed into a deportation centre.
It was renamed Umschlagplatz Plantage Middenlaan,
or Plantage Middenlaan Transfer Facility.
The facility's first staff members were the actors from the theatre.
People were detained at the theatre
for anything from a few hours to a few weeks.
The average stay was five days.
Usually, three to four hundred people would be held here at any one time.
But that figure sometimes rose to 1,400.
When evening came, the chairs were stacked up against the walls
and straw mattresses were brought out from the wings,
and arranged on the floor.
When they were deported, the prisoners either walked
or were taken by tram or truck
to one of Amsterdam's train stations.
The guards had their own rooms on the upper floor.
The Jewish manager of the facility, Walter Susskind,
would frequently supply alcohol to the guards
to get them drunk,
and arrange visits by sex workers
to keep them occupied in their rooms.
Several hundred people managed to escape from the theatre,
most of them with the help of Jewish Council staff.
Many of the escapees were recaptured.
A Dutch Jew Hunter would get seven guilders and 50 cents
for every person he brought in.
Wim Henneicke and his group captured more than 8,000 people
before the resistance killed him.
Several people killed themselves in the theatre,
for instance by jumping of the balcony.
In April 1943,
the CS6 resistance group tried to set fire to the theatre,
but the blaze was quickly extinguished.
The deportation centre was in operation for 16 months.
Around 50,000 Jews were deported from here,
usually first to transit camp Westerbork
and from there to concentration camps and killing centres
in occupied Europe,
mainly Auschwitz and Sobibor.
The last time people were deported from the facility
was in November 1943.
After the war the new owner wanted to reopen the theatre,
but some public outrage prevented this.
In 1962 a memorial was installed in the ruined building,
which since 1993 includes a wall
with all the family names of deported Jews.
Vondelpark.
Many of the luxurious townhouses surrounding the park
served as quarters for German officers.
They also confiscated the pavilion in the park.
In 1943 German soldiers exhibited toys there
that they made in their spare time.
The Dutch Nazi party, the NSB,
held midwinter celebrations in the park,
to amplify their Germanic heritage.
In July 1943 The Jewish Weekly announced
in the "You need to know" section that,
"The thoroughfares in Amsterdam's Vondelpark
are considered to be part of the park,
and these roads are therefore off-limits for Jews."
The park was closed in November 1944,
because "trees were being sawn and chopped down everywhere".
Auctions were even held
at which it was possible to place orders for trees.
Following the closure, a German encampment and vehicle park
was set up at the south end of the park,
cordoned off with fences and barbed wire.
The closure of the park benefited the bird population.
Four new species arrived, including the oriole and the cuckoo.
186 Willemsparkweg.
In 1941 men who wanted to join the Dutch SS
underwent a physical assessment here.
In total around 25,000 Dutch men volunteered
to fight in the Armed SS on the eastern front.
In 1942
this building became the regional headquarters of the Jeugdstorm,
the Nazi youth organisation.
Boys aged 16 to 18
could sign up here for "Germanic defence sport camps" in Germany.
An advertisement promised: "You will return toughened up and strong!"
In 1943 this became the headquarters for girl members only.
The boys went to a bigger building on Keizersgracht,
the headquarters of the now forbidden boy scouts.
Minerva Harbour.
In the early morning of the 6th of May 1941, four men
Mickey Beelaerts van Blokland,
an army officer who had joined the resistance,
Govert Steen, a pilot,
Wijbert Lindeman, an aircraft mechanic,
and aircraft builder Wim Boomsma,
stole a German seaplane from here and flew it to England.
The pilot had never flown a seaplane before.
Beelaerts van Blokland discovered the plane, a Fokker T-VIII,
while on a bicycle trip.
The men used an inflatable mattress
to get to the plane in the dark.
The plane was emblazoned with swastikas,
and when they reached England they were shot at.
The passengers responded by waving a Dutch flag.
Steen landed the plane on the beach at Broadstairs,
in south-east England.
Steen retrained in England as a Royal Air Force pilot.
In 1942 he was shot down in France.
His body was never found.
Blokland became commander of the Prinses Irene Brigade,
a Dutch military unit largely made up of volunteers
who took part in the liberation of Europe.
500 men from Suriname,
then a Dutch colony, volunteered for the Brigade,
but were refused.
Piet Gerbrandy, prime minister of the Dutch government in exile,
said he did not want "n-words" in the Brigade.
They might offend the volunteers from South Africa.
The Dutch government in London did accept the money
brought together by people in Suriname
to buy a Spitfire airplane.
Hembrug.
In September 1944,
the German army placed explosives
in the main support column
of the railway bridge over the North Sea Canal.
The Dutch government in London
asked the resistance in Amsterdam to sabotage this.
On the night of the 27th of September
two members of the Neptune swimming club
smeared themselves with Vaseline and a dark dye,
swam to the column,
and let 400 boxes packed with explosives
sink to the bottom of the canal.
When the Wehrmacht found out,
four German soldiers guarding the bridge
were executed for dereliction of duty.
The Germans set explosives on the bridge again.
Resistance fighter Lies Schouten sprayed water
from the bridge into one of the ducts,
hoping this would cause a short circuit
if the bridge would be blown up.
She received help from a German guard.
Demolished.
West Harbour Way, formerly 201 Hemweg.
The Ford factory produced lorries with caterpillar tracks
and other vehicles for the German army.
In 1944, almost all the machinery
was shipped off to Germany,
as happened with the equipment
of most factories in Amsterdam.
After the liberation,
the factory's directors were arrested for collaboration,
but they were released soon afterwards,
as were most large-scale economical collaborators.
From the 8th of May 1945
the Canadian Army detained German prisoners of war here.
With the permission of the Canadians,
a German court-martial tried marines Bruno Dörfer
and Rainer Beck here.
They were deserters who had reported back to their unit
after liberation.
Beck and Dörfer were sentenced to death,
and on the 13th of May a German firing squad executed them.
Rainer Beck had joined the navy because he was partly Jewish
and thought he would be safer in the army.
He was rehabilitated in 1997.
Demolished.
115 to125 Amstel.
Carré theatre.
In November 1940
the trams stopped running after 7:30pm.
"Without trams, I can't survive," claimed the director of the theatre.
Matinees frequently sold out,
but the evening performances were almost empty,
so the late shows were put on at an earlier time.
Carré continued to be exceptionally busy.
People craved entertainment.
In 1942, comedian Lou Bandy,
one of the stars of the theatre,
was arrested after imitating the walk
of Reich Commissioner Seyss-Inquart, who had a limp.
Bandy was not allowed to perform anymore.
VOICE-OVER: In 1943 the German police raided the theatre
several times during matinees of Circus Strassburger,
searching for men who were evading forced labour in Germany.
When a raid occurred,
staff would take male visitors to the stalls,
where they quickly put on a Circus uniform.
The Jewish owners of circus Strassburger
had fled Germany in 1935.
In 1939 they transferred ownership
to their non-Jewish impresario.
Carré theatre had to close in autumn 1944.
The first big show after the war was called
"The lights are on again".
104 to 114 Nieuwe Keizersgracht.
Dutch-Jewish Hospital.
This was the largest Jewish hospital in Amsterdam,
with almost 300 beds.
In 1942 and '43,
Jewish doctors tried to protect people from deportation
by carrying out fake operations,
putting unbroken legs in plaster,
and administering medication that induced fever.
A few of these "patients" died.
The hospital was closed in August 1943.
Demolished.
88 Vijzelstraat.
HaKo, corset shop of Hendrik Koot.
The shop windows were decorated with portraits of Hitler.
Koot was a member of the NSB blackshirts
and had died following clashes in the Jewish Quarter
in February 1941.
According to the Nazi press Jews had bitten him to death.
The NSB gave Koot a grand funeral.
The procession passed his corset shop.
Demolished.
Rivierenbuurt.
In 1942, the Rivierenbuurt in the south of Amsterdam
was selected as one of the city's three Jewish areas.
The neighbourhood had a large Jewish population before the war.
In the '30s,
many refugees from Germany settled here.
Now "Jewish Quarter III contained three hairdressers,
nine butchers and five cafés"
designated as "Jewish premises",
where only Jews could shop.
Following the introduction in May 1942 of the yellow star badge,
some people called this area "the Milky Way".
In October that year,
the German authorities forced all remaining Jewish residents
of Jewish Quarter III to move to Jewish Quarter II,
the Transvaalbuurt in the east of the city.
34B Reguliersgracht.
Unica fraternity house.
In 1943 students had to sign
a declaration of loyalty to the occupiers.
Those who refused had to report for forced labour in Germany.
A lot of students went into hiding.
After most students had left the house,
resistance worker Ivo Schöffer created shelter
for 12 Jewish refugees on the upstairs floors,
which had a separate entrance.
They included Gideon Kahn and Judica Kahn-Kalker,
the wife of Arnold Kahn,
who had perished in Buchenwald in 1941.
The Kahns had been neighbours of the Schöffer family.
Ivo Schöffer installed an alarm
and built secret hiding places in the house.
The residents would use a stopwatch
to practice reaching their hiding place within two minutes.
They were never found.
In 1945, a gable stone was added
to the façade of the building
depicting St George and the Dragon,
accompanied by the Latin motto
"Submergo ut emergam",
I submerge so I may rise again.
Leidseplein.
Physician Frits Dekking was walking on Leidseplein in 1942
when he witnessed a lifechanging event.
"I saw in front of me," he wrote in his memoirs,
"a detainee being pushed to the ground by a German policeman,
who then kicked him in the face.
Not just once, but continuously,
with his rotten German military boots.
And I was just standing there, and I did not do a thing.
I simply stood there, frozen.
I spent that day wandering around Amsterdam, thinking,
'You just stood there like a schmuck,
and you can't go on like this.'
So, from then on I engaged in all sorts of little activities,
anti-German ones, that is.
Nothing heroic or major or anything.
But it ended up, as you can imagine, with me in custody.
That was in 1943, and I was imprisoned until 1945."
The coronavirus.
VOICE-OVER: 241 Lijnbaansgracht.
Caliënte, an "exotic dance club".
NSB Blackshirts attacked the club in 1941,
when there was already a ban on dancing,
but the authorities were turning a blind eye.
In 1942, the German occupiers
banned any music that had so-called "negroid elements".
Latin American music was still allowed.
VOICE-OVER: 90 Rubensstraat.
Home of SS Hauptsturmführer Ferdinand Aus der Fünten,
leader of the Zentralstelle,
the Central Office for Jewish Emigration.
Aus der Fünten was sentenced to death in 1950,
but Queen Juliana commuted his sentence to life imprisonment.
Aus der Fünten was one of the group of German war criminals
held at a prison in the town of Breda.
They were known as the "Breda Four",
then the "Breda Three" and finally the "Breda Two".
VOICE-OVER: The others were German security chief Willy Lages
who was released in 1966 and died in 1971,
deputy Commander of Amersfoort concentration camp
Joseph Kotalla,
who died in the prison in 1979,
and Franz Fischer, who had deported Jews in The Hague.
Fischer and Aus der Fünten both died shortly after being released in 1989.
Intense public discussions surrounded their releases.
Central Station.
Early in the morning of the 15th of July 1942,
the first two trains departed from Central Station
to transit camp Westerbork.
The following month,
the illegal communist newspaper The Truth issued an appeal:
"Train drivers, consider that each train loaded with slaves
transported by you, is headed to the slaughterhouse!"
Dutch Railways drove around 140 so-called "Jew trains"
from Amsterdam to Westerbork.
It is estimated that a quarter of Amsterdam's Jews
were deported via this station.
On the request of the Dutch government in exile,
train drivers and other personnel
did go on strike in September 1944,
to help the Allied invasion.
The first trains with the camp survivors
arrived in the empty station shortly after liberation.
Rita Boas returned from Ravensbrück via Sweden.
Later she recalled:
"I arrived at Central Station in the evening, in the dark,
and made myself known.
I heard people say we should be glad
we hadn't been here in Amsterdam.
They said they'd been so hungry.
As if we'd just come in from St Moritz."
Of the 107,000 Jews that were deported from the Netherlands
only around 5,000 returned.
75% of Jews did not survive.
This is the highest percentage of occupied Western Europe.
Amsterdam lost more than 60,000 of its 80,000 Jewish inhabitants.
Regular train service resumed on the 21st of June 1945,
to Rotterdam.
Dam Square.
In June 1940,
the German Army Commander of the city
had a bandstand erected in front of the Royal Palace
to stage a concert by the Music Corps of the Order Police.
The stand stayed in place for the remainder of the war,
and was used for performances by German and Dutch Nazis.
The Nazi press wrote in 1941:
"Amsterdam's youth was especially enraptured
by the punchy marches and battle songs."
Sound check, sound check, one...
VOICE-OVER: 1 Dam Square.
The Bijenkorf department store.
In June 1940
members of the National Socialist Dutch Workers Party
smashed eight of the large shopfront windows.
Many of the Bijenkorf's staff were Jewish,
so German soldiers were not allowed to visit the shop.
The lunchroom on the top floor on the other hand
was prohibited for Jews.
The Jewish owners managed to leave the country.
In February 1941
the Germans installed Dutch collaborators as supervisors.
They fired all Jewish staff.
When the yellow star badges were introduced
in the spring of 1942,
resistance group The Spark produced 300,000 paper stars
printed with the slogan "Jews and non-Jews united in battle".
Some of the stars were thrown from the roof of the Bijenkorf,
and fluttered down onto the streets below.
VOICE-OVER: 9 Dam Square,
then 187 to 205 Warmoesstraat.
In August 1940
the Commander of the city set up a German Army Club
at the Polmans House,
a part of Hotel Krasnapolsky.
It welcomed around 1,300 guests on most days.
There were billiard and table tennis tables.
Large maps on the wall
showed the progress of the war on the frontlines.
500 to 750 members of the German army
stayed at the hotel every month,
as they did in other luxurious hotels
like the Amstel and L'Europe.
Over Christmas and other holidays, the Nazi-run charity organisation
Winter Aid would provide meals to children.
Every Friday there was a special screening of films
for the German Air Force.
In 1943, Amsterdam police officers had to come here
to watch propaganda films
about the German police in the Netherlands
and on the eastern front.
Anyone making noise in the auditorium
could expect a cut in his salary.
What do we want? - Climate justice!
- When do we want it? - Now!
- What do we want? - Climate justice!
- When do we want it? - Now!
Right on! Let's go!
VOICE-OVER: Dam Square was the location of many rallies
by the German Police or the Dutch Nazi party.
If they were held elsewhere,
loudspeakers were sometimes set up on this
and other squares in the city.
In June 1941, Reich Commissioner Seyss-Inquarts' words
were sounded over Dam Square:
"For the 2,000-year-old history of Europe to make sense,
Germany has to win, and not only defeat the Soviets,
but also their puritan partners in England
and above all the Jewish mind."
In February 1945
food distribution reached a new low.
The Central Kitchens could only provide a meal
of a few hundred calories per day,
and on the illegal market, food prices had gone through the roof.
A loaf of bread cost 200 times as much as it did a year earlier.
The illegal communist party incited women to protest.
Their newspaper wrote: "Women, fight for our children.
Demand more food.
Don't grumble and complain but take action!"
On the 21st of February a group of 200 women marched to City Hall
and demanded to see the mayor.
One of the women said after the war:
"With this demonstration we wanted to make it clear that the mayor
had to assure that our children would not die of hunger."
The mayor did visit two Central Kitchens,
confirmed the bad quality of the food
and promised improvements. To no avail.
A week later, the women marched again,
this time with their children,
but the mayor did not receive them.
The Germans ordered the Dutch police
to shoot at the women and children,
stating large gatherings were forbidden.
The police did not follow the orders this time.
The Central Kitchens shut down completely at the end of April.
Before liberation,
around 4,000 people in Amsterdam had died from hunger and cold,
mostly old men and young children.