What ratio of the Jews were the Dutch able to save in the Holocaust, 26% or 10%?
Anyhow, it’s the tallest Jewish death rate in Nazi-occupied Western Europe
As an introduction, let’s be clear that what follows will not make anybody happy. It doesn’t contain much new research. It rather recalculates what is known already. What’s new is more empathy for Jews Without Stars (JWS).
When wondering about the success of a fire brigade, you consider how many fires happened and how well they were handled, not how many could have happened. Also, to study how many Dutch Jews survived the Holocaust, I plead for looking at the Jews who were actually saved, for a moment excluding those who escaped or were never persecuted.
Well-Known
It’s well known that a whopping 75% of all Dutch Jews were murdered by the Nazis in broad cooperation with Dutch civil servants and far too little resistance, discouraged by the Queen and government in exile in London.
In neighboring Belgium, ‘only’ 35%-65% were deported. (Yet, Belgium is an incomparable hornet’s nest: Especially Antwerp Jews were decimated, 90% of the Jews had no Belgian nationality, among the Flemish, thrice the percentage (75%) were murdered, far fewer mixed marriages, and some were not killed but the Nazis put them to work in Northern France.) Yet, the Dutch facts may be even worse than the 75% popularized until today …
Most survivors of the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands were intermarried. The Nazis considered these Jews, and all their children, also suitable to be exterminated. However, the occupier did not touch them. They could keep their jobs, did not need to wear a yellow star, etc.
Initially, the Nazis assumed that the Dutch fellow Aryans would welcome the German occupation and quickly warm to the idea that ‘alien elements’ (Jews) should be removed as fast as possible. This was a miscalculation. It wasn’t that most Dutch felt so close and cozy to Jews and Gypsies, but it is a calm People that doesn’t like shouting, violence, or blatant hatred.
The occupier did not want to upset the ‘Aryan’ families the mixed-married Jews had married into, so they secretly planned to persecute the ‘partly-‘ Jewish and intermarried Jews in 1947, after deporting the ‘full’ Jews. (The same treacherous policy was employed inside Nazi Germany itself until the beginning of 1945.) Yet, Liberation caught up with that plan, and the mixed-married Dutch Jews and their offspring ‘were never persecuted’ (read on).
‘Never Persecuted’
Now, the expression ‘were never persecuted’ must be nuanced. Many of the intermarried Jews (and their families) were as scared as all the other Jews. Some of them committed suicide when the Nazis invaded. Many of them were anxiously waiting for the other boot to drop. And they were right. That was the Nazi plan. Living terrified for your life for years on end can’t mean you didn’t go through genocide, just because you survived. When the ‘fully’ Jewish were gone, many of the others went into hiding.
So, many intermarried Jews went into hiding for not believing the Nazis. That was no picnic for them or their hosts and resembles persecution.
Some intermarried Jews agreed to voluntary castration to get the assurance they would not be persecuted. You can’t call that ‘not persecuted.’
When stress or cultural differences translated into more spousal discord, a divorce could kill the Jewish partner. So much for being safe.
They saw their fellow-Jewish family, friends, and communities ransacked by the Nazis and their willing Dutch aides. Can you call that ‘not persecuted’?
Also, intermarried Jews who frustrated the occupation or angered the Nazis were more severely handled than Aryan Resistance men and women. Then, their Aryan in-laws could not say they were innocently persecuted.
Jewish women who married Gentile men still had Jewish children for Jewish Law. It can be assumed that some of those families were still members of Jewish Communities and, as members, in more danger of Nazi persecution.
Some Jewish women married Nazis or Nazi collaborators. Is that safety?
So, let’s not proclaim the lives of intermarried Jews in the Netherlands 1940-1945 easy and worry-free. Let’s call it: they lived on the threshold of death, of being mass murdered, with one foot in the grave.
In some provinces, no Jews were intermarried. ‘You wouldn’t marry the enemy,’ my mother clarified pre-war life in Groningen. They were also very proud when they could declare that they all had four Jewish grandparents. In dirt-poor Amsterdam, many Jews and non-Jews lived and worked side-by-side, were socialists, and married each other. The Amsterdam working-class language was peppered with Hebrew and not considered Jewish. They were jointly looked down on by middle-class Jews and Gentiles alike.
People with one missing Jewish grandparent were counted as ‘full’ Jews. Clearly, the Nazis were not too nervous to upset the non-Jewish family of one grandparent. But those with two Jewish grandparents were also less safe if they were married to someone with three or four Jewish grandparents. At the end of the day, which ‘racial’ Jews to persecute and which ones not was merely a tactical issue. The Nazis hated all of them equally, and anyone irritating them could have them ‘removed.’
However, things weren’t as absolute as the previous paragraphs portray. A number of Dutch JWS certainly were jailed, deported, sterilized, or beaten.
Having stated clearly how JWS’ lives hanged in the balance, and only the Nazis running out of time saved them, we might still say: Until the end of the War, as a group, they weren’t (yet) picked up, incarcerated, and moved ‘to the East,’ to their untimely deaths for being Jews according to Nazi Law.
The Numbers Broken Down
How many Jews in the Netherlands during WW II were intermarried or had parents who were? This is answered in the ‘Historical Introduction II. Quantitative Data,’ The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, The Netherlands, Volume one (of two), issued 20 years ago by Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel. On pages XXX – XXXIX, we find all the numbers by historian Bert Jan Flim. (The book also describes his family’s leading and diverse resistance work, pages 247-8.)
At the census of 1930, 111,899 persons were registered as Jews. Obviously, before the Nazi ‘racial’ Laws, this referred to their religion or community.
NB: You need to go by Nazi Law, not Halachah, Jewish Law, when you want to calculate how many Jews were targeted and how many were murdered or escaped. Nazi Laws determined who was at risk. If you still want to know how many Halachic Jews were saved or murdered, you have not grasped yet that Halachic and non-Halachic Jews were equally hated.
The term ‘Dutch Jews’ is a bit confusing since part of the Jewish population around 1940 were refugees from greater Nazi Germany (also Anne Frank). The German refugees may have had a better survival chance (Westerbork).
The Nazi decree of January 10, 1941, for all people ‘of Jewish blood’ in the Netherlands to register wrote in 140,001 ‘full Jews,’ 14,895 ‘half-Jews,’ and 5,990 ‘quarter-Jews.’ Someone with four or three Jewish grandparents was considered a ‘full Jew.’ An estimated 989 Jews were not registered in February 1941 because some 300 had died through suicide, some 300 had escaped the country, and 389 were already sent to Mauthausen. The grand total of Jews to be rescued since the beginning of the War was so 139,012.
Flim tallies (page XXXVIII) that of the 140,990 full Jews, including in mixed marriages, only some 36,746 survived, and almost 74% perished, ‘the highest percentage in the whole of [occupied*] Western Europe.’ He adds that 350 ‘half-Jews’ died. Jews surviving in hiding were around 15,196.
* In Germany and Austria, the percentages of those murdered who were not able to flee were much higher.
A New Calculation
But if we exclude the intermarried, ‘half-,’ and ‘quarter-‘ JWS, we get to 161,875 total Jews minus 8,500 in mixed marriages minus 14,895 ‘half-Jews’ minus 5,990 ‘quarter-Jews’ equals 132,490 Jews at acute risk.
Actively saved in hiding were 14,496 star-wearing, not-intermarried Jews with 3 or 4 Jewish grandparents. This is 10.9%, not 26%, of 132,490.
Jewish-German refugees in the Netherlands reportedly had a better chance to survive because they were less naïve and quicker to flee or go into hiding. They were also better at negotiating with the German Nazis because of their common language and cultural background. Then, the percentage of saved Dutch Jews must have been even lower than 10.9%.
So of the Dutch Jews actively persecuted by the Nazis until 1945, almost 90% were slain. Far more than the number 75% regularly mentioned.
Curiously, one category of Jews is missing in the statistics: ‘Full’ Jews who survived in their own homes. My grandmother’s sister in Maastricht lived alone in her small home in poverty. She got financial aid from the Jewish community and the Church. No one took the trouble to round her up.
Also missing are numbers on other assaults on Jewish continuity: Jews who survived but sterilized. Small Jewish orphans raised as non-Jews, with their adoptive parents refusing to return them to Jewish families. Jews returning from betrayal and deportation. Jews who survived by hiding, which seemed to say: You want to survive? Hide! Jews who left the Netherlands because they couldn’t bear to be with a People that failed them. And mixed-married Jews. None are great groups for building a vibrant Jewish community.
Not only the Dutch 75% was way off. It’s claimed that one-third of Jews in Germany survived, but also that two-thirds fled the country. Yet, by 09-1943, 98% of the Jews inside Germany were intermarried. That means almost all targeted Jews who stayed were murdered, not two-thirds. This agrees with a source that claims that of the half a million Jews in Germany in 1933, in the end, only a shocking 1900 Jews survived in hiding, 0.38%.
Saved?
Can we claim not (yet) persecuted Jews were saved? Can we save someone from drowning who’s not in the water? Teaching someone to swim may protect against future drowning, but could we call that saving someone from drowning? Not 26% was saved, but a mere 10% of the Dutch Jews.
The Dutch collectively have a habit of passivity. They don’t value heroism. While the Frisians have a saying, ‘Better dead than slave,’ the rest of the Dutch have as motto, ‘Better shy than dead.’
Just now, some Dutch police personnel have ‘moral objections’ protecting Jews against Antisemitism. The key problem is that no one fired them at all!
The Dutch historians I contacted didn’t want to touch this with a flagpole. I’m used to being seen as an enfant terrible. One gets used to it.
A Dutch short movie from after the Nazi occupation. No mention of Jews: