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Richard Chesnoff

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The Netherlands:
Loot Thy Neighbor

(Page 2)

An excerpt from the highly acclaimed new book"Pack of Thieves"

On April 29, 1942, the Jewish Council was advised that as of May 1, all Dutch Jews over the age of six would have to wear the yellow Jodenster on their clothing, a move that was intended not only to isolate and further humiliate them but to make it harder for them to hide. A shipment of 570,000 stars was distributed across the Netherlands. For years it was presumed the Jodensterren had been printed in Poland's Lodz Ghetto. In fact, researcher Daniel Swetschinski recently discovered, they had been secretly prepared in advance in the Netherlands, at De Nijverheid, a small textile factory expropriated from Dutch Jews.

Roundups of Jewish "volunteer workers'' began to be part of an almost daily pattern first to camps within the Netherlands and then to Eastern work camps, the Nazi euphemism for death camps. Anne Frank described what she saw happening from her attic window: "Night after night, green and gray military vehicles cruise the streets.... They often go around with lists, knocking only on those doors where they know there's a big haul to be made.''

For Dutch Jews, the Holocaust had begun in earnest.The coffers at the Liro grew heavier each day. By the end of its first year, some 6,540 depositors had established 7,458 accounts totaling 25 million guilders (about $130 million in today's equivalent). It was far less cash than the Reichsbank had expected. But the shortfall was made up by the forced deposit of stocks and other securities. By the end of 1942, Lippmann-Rosenthal had soaked up Jewish-owned securities nominally valued at 213 million guilders - about $1 billion today.

Cash, stocks, and bullion constituted only a part of the booty. In the spring of 1942, another decree (VO58/42) ordered Dutch Jews to deliver anything they had of value - jewels, bonds, gold coins, stamp collections, antiques, paintings, etc. The items, they were told by the bank's Dutch staff, would be placed in "storage'' in the safety-deposit vaults of Lippmann-Rosenthal Bank. Deposit stations were set up across Amsterdam as well as in Rotterdam and the Hague. Long lines of obliging Dutch Jews tramped through the streets to stand before the redbrick Liro headquarters, their family treasures clutched in their arms. After Lippmann-Rosenthal's clerks efficiently relieved them of their parcels, they then carefully issued worthless receipts.

Each painting, each piece of jewelry taken from the Jews was painstakingly itemized on catalog cards that also noted the object's value. The cards would eventually also carry the names of those to whom the plundered items were sold or transferred by the Liro.

Even real property became part of the Liro booty. Some 19,000 Jewish-owned buildings, with a value of 200 million guilders, were confiscated by the Nazis and their Dutch helpers between 1940 and 1943. Moreover, says Lipchits, "Once turned over to Liro, a Jewish-owned house would be mortgaged to the hilt and the money given to Liro, which of course then turned it over to the Germans.'' In this way alone, the Germans "raised'' another 26 million guilders for their war effort.

Liquidated Jewish-owned businesses and real estate were then placed under Verwaltung (administration) or sold for bargain prices to "friendly'' third parties, some of them German, many of them Dutch. The Jews had nothing to worry about, the Germans solemnly proclaimed through their Dutch puppets. The received purchase price, the Germans announced with a straight face, would be paid to former Jewish owners in twenty-five yearly installments. In point of fact, most of the owners were soon deported and no payments were ever made to anyone, nor had they been intended.

While property and businesses were distributed to a wide variety of people and organizations within the Netherlands and to Germany, most of the tons of gold and silver that the Liro confiscated was sold at preferential prices to the Deutsche Gold- und Silberscheideanstalt (DEGUSSA), a German smelting and precious-metals firm that exists to this day. However, exact records and invoices of the wartime Dutch gold sales were either lost, never kept, or more likely destroyed when it became clear in 1944 that the Nazis and their helpers were losing the war.

The Germans and their Dutch collaborators had little trouble disposing of looted stocks and other securities. They went on sale in 1942 on direct orders of Seyss-Inquart. And despite warnings broadcast over the Dutch government-in-exile's London-based Radio Oranje that anyone buying stolen property could be held criminally responsible, the Beurs, Amsterdam's stock exchange, was filled with eager bidders and buyers. Indeed, the Nazis and their collaborators found an easy answer to charges that they were fencing. Securities, they said, would be sold with special (and largely fictional) declarations that they were "bona fide''in other words, that they had been "voluntarily'' sold by their previous, and in most cases, Jewish owners. With time, the Nazis didn't even bother issuing what some Dutch Jews now refer to sarcastically as "phony kosher certificates.'' Nor did Dutch buyers ask for them.

The Beurs did a thriving business selling Liro's offerings of Jewish stocks. "To obtain a parcel of paper for a client,'' writes historian Raul Hilberg, "the interested bank had only to request an official in the Kommissariat to direct Liro to free the securities for sale.''

Dutch banks participated in the trading, but it was the German Handelstrust West (a subsidiary of the Dresdener Bank) that did the lion's share of business. Given the large quantities put on the market, most of the looted securities were sold at prices well below their actual value. "It was a buying spree,'' says one Amsterdam stockbroker."The stolen stocks went like fresh herrings on a sunny day.''

Most Dutch buyers would later claim that they hadn't known that the confiscated stocks had been stolen or extorted from their Jewish co-citizens. But Gerard Aalders, of the Nederlands Instituutvoor Oorlogsdocumentatie (NIOD),the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation,and other experts say that such denials were hardly credible. "It was well known,'' says Aalders, "that any stock offerings from Liro were "tainted.'''

In the immediate aftermath of the war, many Amsterdam stockbrokers would try to claim that it was one of their colleagues, Otto Rebholz, a German who'd acquired Dutch citizenship in 1932,who was "the worst collaborator among the collaborating stockbrokers.'' But Aalders and other experts believe that the German-born Rebholz was singled out as a scapegoat for the sins of other stockbrokers who, while possibly not operating on the same scale as Rebholz, nonetheless grew wealthy on the sale and transfer of stocks stolen from Jews.

Stolen Dutch stocks were also sold on the exchanges of many of Europe's neutral countries. And it is clear that it was Rebholz's Rebholz Bankierskantoor that handled the bulk of these foreign sales. Rebholz was also given responsibility for the conversion of foreign stocks into cash, especially Swiss and Portuguese stocks, whose disposal offered the Reich the possibility to acquire usable and badly needed neutral currency. As elsewhere in occupied Europe, it was that foreign exchange that helped greatly to defray the cost of the raw materials and goods the Reich required for its continued war effort, particularly the minerals and other goods it imported from Portugal.

At the suggestion of Adolf Buhler, the German commissioner appointed to run the Nederlandsche Bank (Central Bank of the Netherlands), Rebholz actually set up shop in Switzerland in early spring 1942 and began to unload stolen stocks there. He found a willing market.

The neutral Alpine nation was already a beehive of espionage and counterespionage. And word of Rebholz's shady Swiss operations quickly reached the British and American embassies. Both warned Swiss banks they would be placed on an Allied "blacklist'' if they continued dealing with Rebholz. Some complied; others found ways to camouflage the sales, or did them via willing bankers in Liechtenstein. Another part of the stolen Dutch-Jewish stocks were traded in Spain. The profits from all these millions in sales, says Aalders, were put at the disposal of those Reich agencies and war industries that had special need for foreign currency.

In September 1944, with the Allies in advance, Buhler had the balance of unsold foreign stocks shipped to Berlin - about 12 million guilders' worth, according to Aalders. Some were sold; the rest, Aalders surmises, were probably taken by the Soviets when they captured Berlin less than a year later.

According to researchers, a total of 350 million guilders in stocks expropriated from Jews were sold in the Netherlands by Liro. At least 100 million guilders of that amount were used by the Nazis to pay off outstanding debts of the stockholders (to non-Jews, of course) and for the "maintenance'' of the now captive and impoverished Jewish population of Holland. At least 25 million guilders of the stock money, says Aalders, was allocated to pay for the construction and operation of the concentration and transit camps at Westerbork and Vught, where Dutch Jews were held prior to their shipment to Auschwitz and other death camps. The Liro itself skimmed from the profits to pay its administrative costs.

Liro's mechanisms were as malevolent as they were relentless. Like some evil sorcerer's apprentices, its clerks even followed Jews on their final road to extermination. A team of Liro officials was assigned to the bleak Westerbork internment camp. There the Liro clerks established a campsite office in a frantic attempt to collect whatever anyone had failed to turn in – even wedding rings. Survivors recount that Liro officials would try to convince arrested Jews that depositing their last valuables with Liro was the "safest'' thing they could do before they left for "the work camps in the East.'' When that argument failed to convince people to part with a precious family heirloom or keepsake, they were cajoled or threatened. Many were simply told their knapsacks were too big for the train trip: "You won't need that much clothing in the Eastern work camps.'' It might have been the only truth the Liro clerks uttered.

Some of the Liro clerks used their work there to protect their own families. "My mother was Jewish,'' says famed Dutch writer Harry Mulisch, whose Christian father was among the Liro's senior employees. "His work at Liro saved her life.'' But for most of the Dutch employees of Liro, it was just a job. A period photo, now in the collection of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam, shows a team of Westerbork Liro clerks in shirts and ties sitting around playing cards to while away the time between departures of the death-camp trains.

By the end of 1942, the monthly withdrawal allowances from Liro that many Jews used to survive had been completely halted. In any case, as per the German master plan, the Nazi noose had tightened, and there were simply fewer and fewer Jews to make withdrawals. "Labor camps'' in the Netherlands had been opened as early as 1941 for "unemployed'' Jews who, according to Dutch authorities, would be sent there to be "employed by the Dutch police.'' At the beginning of 1942, the Nazis began centralizing Jews in a ghetto-like area they established in Amsterdam as well as in a new camp near Vught in the south of Holland. Stateless Jews and those who'd failed to observe the Nazis' strict rules were shipped directly to Westerbork.

By 1943, the Nazis had begun wholesale roundups. Rewards were offered for information leading to the arrest of Jews in hiding, and the Germans together with units of Dutch collaborators carried out "Jew hunts'' through the narrow, canaled streets of Amsterdam, in The Hague, in Rotterdam, and into the most obscure villages of the Netherlands. Two groups of Dutch collaborators were particularly active in rounding up Jews: the Groene Politie or Green Police, so named for the color of their uniforms, and the Vrijwillige Hulp-Politie, the Volunteer Auxiliary Police,a body formed in May 1942 with a subdivision that specialized in ferreting out hidden Jews. Jews were dragged from attics and basements, or simply picked up on the street when they dared venture forth in a search for food.

For months on end, entire families were shipped first to Westerbork, then crammed into trains for the horrific trip to Sobibor and Auschwitz. At Auschwitz, many of the deported Dutchwomen became special prey for the medical savagery of Dr. Josef Mengele and his team of "experimenters.''

Even in cases where wealthy Jews managed to bribe officials to delay their deportations, it was only a question of time.

Eventually, with but rare exceptions, all Dutch Jews were destined for deportation. The most the wealthier and best-connected could hope for was to be shipped to Theresienstadt, the Czech town near Prague, where the Nazis maintained their so-called model Jewish City - a cruel hoax that in effect was actually a ghetto and transfer camp for Auschwitz and the gas chambers.

"The removal of entire families,'' wrote Michman, "left no doubt that the term "employed by the police' was no more than an effort to camouflage what was really the [total] deportation of Dutch Jewry.''

There were some protests about the mass arrests and forced deportations of the Jews, notably from the Dutch Catholic Church. But next to nothing was heard from either the Dutch government-in-exile or from Queen Wilhelmina herself. Certainly there was never any definitive call for her subjects to help their Jewish countrymen. Worse yet, as elsewhere in Europe, the German plot to exterminate and plunderDutch Jewry was, as Michman later wrote, "facilitated by the willingness of Dutch agencies to cooperate.'' Specifically, Dutch municipal administrations, railway workers, and the collaborating Dutch police.

Clearly aware that most of their clientele would never return from the destinations to which they had been deported, Liro quietly canceled all private accounts and consolidated all the deposits it had into one central "Jewish account.''

The Liro also continued a process it had begun in 1942: cashing in Jewish-owned life-insurance policies. Local companies willingly obliged. The take was sizable. Though most of the Dutch-Jewish population was far from wealthy and most rented, not owned, their homes, "every poor Jew,'' says Lipchits, "had some sort of insurance policy.''

C O N T I N U E D _ .