“When we started this research, we already knew the disconcerting stories from Amsterdam and The Hague, for example, where city governments made relatives pay taxes on the homes of their murdered Jewish families after the war,” said project leader Wim van Meurs. “So we were prepared for anything. But our research showed that abuses of this order actually hardly occurred in medium-sized and small municipalities.”
That is not to say that those municipalities treated their Jewish residents well, the historian emphasizes. “In none of the municipalities did boards want to make exceptions for Jewish victims after the war, for example by giving them priority in the allocation of housing. In doing so, they ignored the fact that this group suffered much more than other groups.” Many Jewish homes were looted by the German occupiers during the war. Some Dutch municipalities even bought these kinds of properties during the war years when the occupiers offered them. Van Meurs: “Here administrators don't seem to have been really opposed to anything fundamentally.”
House for next of kin
Most expropriated houses (over ninety percent) did eventually get returned to owners or their relatives in the first ten years after the war. 'But for Jewish families who wanted somewhere to live after their return, every month that took was, of course, one too many.'
The researchers saw in archives that it was not always clear who was entitled to the expropriated property. Van Meurs: “A long bureaucratic road had to be followed. Sometimes someone claimed a right to a certain house years after the war, but the municipality had already given it back to another branch of a deceased person's family. Moreover, there were no death certificates of people who had died in camps, which were needed to pass on a house.' Thanks to the Red Cross, those certificates did arrive at the end of the 1940s.
For relatives, the research is often very valuable, van Meurs says. 'Especially because this piece of injustice done to Jewish Dutch people is now well documented. Although in some cases it is also painful when the research does not match the story told in the family for years, such as when it turns out that a house was already returned in the 1940s, but to a different branch of the family.'
Van Baarstraat
Several municipalities took measures in response to the survey to accommodate the Jewish community, such as investing in Jewish life in their town. In Volendam, the investigation led to a new street name for the Burgemeester van Baarstraat. That street was named after a wartime mayor. Van Meurs: “He was not a member of the NSB, but was actually like ninety percent of wartime administrators: he did little or nothing to protect Jewish citizens. The city council of Edam-Volendam was forced to cooperate with the persecution of Jews. From Edam, 22 Jewish residents were deported.'
Many mayors acted like Van Baar. 'If you did not cooperate with such a request for deportation you were often fired,' Van Meurs said. 'But in any case, with this mayor there is little reason for a tribute in the form of a street name.' Also because he personally had a financial interest in companies that produced for the occupying forces and was one of the few wartime mayors charged with economic collaboration.
The journalistic research platform Pointer has researched various municipalities in the Netherlands since 2020 to determine where Jewish property has been expropriated and resold. According to the platform, after five years there are still six municipalities left that have not had a survey done, but where more than 10 properties have been expropriated. In one of these municipalities, Hengelo, Van Meurs and his colleagues are still conducting the investigation.
This large, multi-year research project will soon end, but Radboud historians remain available for research around social questions with a historical dimension such as World War II or slavery. On assignment, the Advice and Current Affairs team not only investigates issues of dealing with a more distant past, but also does reconstructions of current policy questions for the past 10-20 years.