During the »February strike« in 1941, Dutch workers protested against the arrest of Jews. The »Dock Worker Monument«, which is located in the old Jewish quarter, commemorates this event.
History
On May 10, 1940, the German Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands. After a short campaign, they occupied the country. Despite the Germans\' efforts to win over the local population, the new regime was met with little enthusiasm; especially the anti-Jewish measures they introduced caused widespread discontent. When »Reichsführer-SS« Heinrich Himmler demanded reprisal measures for actions supposedly committed by Jewish resistance fighters in the Netherlands, the German order police organised an anti-Jewish raid in Amsterdam. On the night of February 22/23, 1941, the police arrested hundreds of Jewish men and rounded them up on a square in the Jewish quarter. 427 of them were taken to the Schoorl police transit camp, from where they were first deported to the Buchenwald, and later to the Mauthausen concentration camp.
The Germans\' brutal conduct shocked many in the Netherlands. The underground communist party called for a general strike. On February 25 and 26, workers in Amsterdam and in a few other cities went on strike. The strike was suppressed by the occupying forces, during which nine people died and hundreds were arrested. The Dutch municipal administration had to pay a high financial penalty to the occupiers. The general strike led to an aggravation of the situation in the Netherlands: the occupation authorities were from now on much tougher on the Dutch population. Nevertheless, the February strike was an unprecedented expression of protest against the National Socialist regime in occupied Europe and remained a symbol of Dutch resistance after the war.
Victims
Only one of the 427 arrested and deported Jewish men survived the concentration camp. Nine people were killed in the course of the suppression of the February strike, hundreds were arrested.
When the Germans invaded the Kingdom of the Netherlands in May 1940 there were around 120,000 Jews living in the country, 75,000 of whom were in Amsterdam. An SS-led civil administration quickly began to implement anti-Jewish measures and organised acts of violence. A »Central Office for Jewish Emigration« was established by the SS in Amsterdam by the end of March 1941. On June 22 the following year Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962), head of the department for Jewish affairs in the SS Reich Security Main Office, informed the Foreign Office in Berlin that an agreement had been concluded with the German Reich Railways (Reichsbahn), one of the provisions of which was the deportation of 40,000 Jews from the Netherlands. These Jews were firstly detained in the Westerbork transit camp, where lists of names for deportation were produced. The first trains left here for Eastern Europe in the middle of July 1942. There were repeated raids to get hold of the Jews earmarked for deportation. By September 1944 around one hundred deportation transports had left Westerbork for the Auschwitz and Sobibor extermination camps, the Theresienstadt ghetto or the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The SS deported over 100,000 people; mainly Jews but also Roma. Jews with Dutch nationality were also deported to their deaths from France and Belgium. The total number of Dutch Jews murdered between May 1940 and the end of 1944 lies at around 102,000, or 75 percent of the pre-war Jewish population of the country. Over 110,000 Jewish civilians also died during the war and occupation.
There are countless monuments, museums, memorial sites, plaques and small sites of memory related to the Second World War in the Netherlands, along with research institutes and archives. The 22 metre high »Nationaal Monument op de Dam« (National Monument on Dam Square) was inaugurated in Amsterdam as early as 1947. Dedicated to all Dutch »victims of the Second World War«, the monument’s current design dates from 1956. The Anne Frank House was opened in 1960. There are national sites of memory at the former National Socialist concentration or transit camps. For example, a memorial site was established in Westerbork in 1983 comprising the historic grounds, a national monument and a modern museum. In 1987, the »Joods Historisch Museum« (Jewish Historical Museum) was inaugurated in the Great Synagogue in Amsterdam. This museum also charts the persecution and murder of the Jews. In 2021, the Durch Holocaust Memorial of Names was inaugurated in Amsterdam that lists the names of 102.000 murdered Jews and Sinti and Roma on its walls.
After the war, the Dutch culture of memory was characterised above all by its emphasis on the resistance against the German occupation. From the 1980s, increasing attention was paid to the question of how the majority of the population adapted themselves to the occupation, as opposed to those who consciously collaborated. A further feature of Dutch memory is its focus on the present. This approach is especially clear in memorials to the persecuted Sinti and Roma as well as in one of the best known monuments in the world to the homosexual victims of National Socialism, located in Amsterdam.
Remembrance
The first commemorative ceremonies in honour of the February strike took place in 1946. On December 19, 1952, the »Dock Worker Monument« by artist Mari Andriessen was unveiled. It is located on Jonas Daniël Meijerplein, the square on which the German order police rounded up the arrested Jews in February 1941. The statue depicts a simple dock worker as a symbol of the indignation and resistance of the Dutch population in the face of the persecution of Jews. A remembrance ceremony is held annually on February 25.
