Richard Chesnoff

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The Netherlands:
Loot Thy Neighbor

(Page 3)

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

Just how much cash and gold ended up in the Liro coffers as the result of the plundering of the Dutch-Jewish community? The most extensive postwar studies of this nagging question were carried out first by A. J. Van Schie, an official of the Netherlands National Archives and more recently by historian Gerard Aalders from the NIOD department of research. Both academics and neither of them Jews reached similar conclusions. Van Schie's figures, which he first presented in a paper delivered at a conference on Dutch-Jewish history held in 1984 at Tel Aviv University, were based on Dutch government statistics and records. "I estimate,'' Van Schie told the Tel Aviv assembly, "that the Jewish section of the population as a whole was deprived of about 650 to 700 million guilders, judged by the sales figures during the occupation.'' He added, "On the basis of the replacement value after liberation in 1945, this amount must have been considerably higher.''

Aalders's figures varied only slightly from Van Schie's. "During the years 1940-45,'' wrote Aalders in a report on the plundering of Jewish assets, "the Jewish community in Holland was robbed of approximately 700 million guilders. Around half of this total (350 million guilders) consisted of securities of which about 250 million guilders was eventually traded.''

To convert these sums into current values, Aalders used the basic ten-times formula (1 1945 DG = 10 1998 DG). Accordingly, the 110,000 Jews of Holland had been robbed of a monumental 7 billion guilders - or $3.5 billion. A 1946 American intelligence document described the Nazi plunder operation in the Netherlands as the "most ruthless large-scale robbery modern Holland had ever seen.''

As Lipchits points out, while much of that capital was transferred to Germany, large amounts remained in Holland and were drained from the Liro to finance the train-transport costs for the 100,000 Dutch Jews the Nazis and their helpers shipped to their deaths. Lippmann-Rosenthal was also the owner of record of the transit-cum-concentration camps at Westerbork and Vught in south Holland. More than 26 million guilders were "appropriated'' for the running costs of the two camps. After the war, the Dutch government transformed the two camps into internment centers for captured Germans and Dutch collaborators and paid Liro a coincidentally macabre figure of 6 million guilders. That notwithstanding, "in spite of moral and political pressure,'' wrote Van Schie, the Dutch government persisted in its refusal to compensate Liro for the other 20 million guilders that the Nazis had stolen to pay for the wartime camps. Once again, the Jews had paid for their own deportation.

By the end of the war, more than 90 percent of Dutch Jewry had perished. The remnant of 15,000 Dutch Jews who'd successfully hidden from the Nazi net - or managed to survive the savagery of the concentration camps - began to return home ill at heart and in body. Most found little to return to -and little official succor. During five years of occupation, the Nazis had drained the Netherlands, and during the last harsh winter of the war, the Dutch population had been reduced to chopping up furniture for firewood to heat their houses and in more than a few instances to eating tulip bulbs to forestall starvation. Moreover, during the battle for liberation, Holland had been among the heaviest-hit nations in Europe. German artillery and Allied bombings had destroyed much of what remained of the nation's industry, ports, and infrastructure.

To the leaders of the financially bereft and economically hobbled Netherlands, its surviving Jews were of no special interest. They were received with ambivalence, often open coolness. Officially, this noninterest reflected democratic Dutch policy. "We will not be like the Nazis,'' said a proud government-in-exile official even before the war ended. "We will not differentiate between our Jewish and non-Jewish citizens.''

Indeed, that "no special treatment'' concept became official policy even while the Dutch government was still working out of its London exile base. But whether the hands-off policy was an honest expression of Dutch egalitarianism or merely the expression of a polite form of anti-Semitism, its practical result was a reverse discrimination that would scar Holland's already heavily wounded survivors. "Our government did not treat us especially well before the war, did not protect us during the war, and did little to help us after the war,'' says Dutch-Jewish banker Joop Krant.

In fact, Dutch Jews, who had suffered far more than any other of Queen Wilhelmina's subjects, were given no special considerations, no government rehabilitation services geared to handle their specific needs. The handful of Jews returning from Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen or from Westerbork transit camp found no government-welfare committees to greet them at Amsterdam's Central Station - with the exception of some limited assistance from the American Joint Distribution Committee. "You got off the train and basically you were on your own,'' says Lipchits. "Survivors did not receive special rights; you were equal before the bureaucracy and its taxes.'' As Victor Halberstadt puts it, "I remember no welcome-home banners.''

Most other Dutch survivors of Nazi labor and concentration camps returned to prewar homes and families and were quickly able to pick up the pieces of their lives. True, there had been widespread suffering and losses. But in most instances there were families waiting for them, jobs ready. It was a far cry from the situation of most of the surviving Jews who found themselves starting from scratch, often with as many as fifty or a hundred relatives now dead. "We were homeless, furnitureless, clothesless, and moneyless,'' says Halberstadt.

Worse yet, some of Amsterdam's press was openly anti-Semitic. "They were hard times, and right-wingers made it clear that we Jews had no special rights. If anything,'' says Lipchits, "they told us we were lucky to be alive at all - and to be in the Netherlands.''

It did not make the task of trying to regain stolen assets any easier. Nor was that the first concern of most survivors. "What you really wanted to know was who else had survived,'' says Lipchits. "Were you totally alone. So you searched lists and went to the railroad station, you looked, and more often than not you did not find anyone.''

To add to the tragedy, some Dutch Jews who sought to claim children of relatives who'd been hidden by Christians found that some foster families refused to return them. The result was a series of bitter court cases over "what was best for the children.''

In this atmosphere, when restitution did begin, the process was slow and racked with bureaucracy. For those Dutch Jews who had direct claims against the Liro, it was a particularly painful procedure. Many of the people dealing with their claims proved to be the very same Liro employees who had dutifully helped confiscate their assets.

Other Dutch Jews found their homes occupied by strangers - or even former neighbors. And those who had turned over belongings to "Aryan guards'' found that it had been easier to entrust them than to collect them. "My father and his non-Jewish partner owned a successful men's-clothing factory in northern Holland,'' recalls Shimon Cohen, sixty-six. "So before we went into hiding, Father turned his share of the factory over to him. We were lucky; we survived the war. But when we returned alive to Amsterdam, it was as if the partner didn't know who we were.''

The elder Cohen went to court and eventually won back his share of the business. Nonetheless, says Cohen, now an oil engineer living in Houston, "the aggravation and the disappointment were too much for my father, and he died in 1951.''

Other Jews returned to find that their property had been looted and their shops and businesses emptied of their stock and machinery. "My father's butcher shop was emptied of everything - all his equipment, everything. It was his competitors,'' says Cohen's wife, Fina.

The late Dutch sociologist and writer Gerald Durlacher, the only survivor of his entire family, returned to the family's prewar home in Arnhem to find strangers living in it. Embarrassed and bewildered, Durlacher later reported, he knocked on a former neighbor's door and asked if he knew what had happened to his family's belongings. "I know nothing,'' said the neighbor, whom Durlacher quickly noticed was now wearing a suit of clothing that had once belonged to his father.

In some cases, non-Jewish neighbors and friends proved honorable. Veteran Dutch-Jewish journalist Henriette Boas recalls with Dutch pride that most of a large collection of rare books belonging to her father, a renowned classics scholar, as well as a portrait of him that now hangs on the wall of her archive-crowded Amsterdam apartment, had been carefully hidden by her father's friends and colleagues at the University library[cad124]and quickly returned by them after the war. "We did less well with our house. Before the war, most Dutch Jews rented their homes and apartments, but we owned ours. In 1942, just before she was shipped to Theresienstadt, my mother "sold' it for a symbolic amount to a close friend and neighbor in order to prevent it from being taken by the Germans. When we returned after the war,'' says Boas, now eighty-five, "the woman claimed that since real-estate prices had soared, she now wanted much more money before she'd 'sell it back' to my mother. We had no money at all, so we lost our home.

"I was angry,'' adds Boas, "but in a way grateful that we did not have to return to our old home. None of our Jewish neighbors had survived; it would have been too painful to move back in.''

Not everyone responded with open anger. Victor Halberstadt, hidden as a child by Dutch-Catholic miners and today one of Holland's leading economic analysts as well as chairman of Europe's prestigious Bilderberg Conference, recalls being reunited with his father, who had also survived in hiding.

Returning to Amsterdam, Halberstadt and his father set out for their old apartment in southern Amsterdam's prewar Jewish quarter. "There was a Dutch family living there with a son who was about my age. We could see they were in our house, and they sat on our furniture and they ate from our plates.''

Halberstadt doesn't remember whether his father even knocked on the door. "Basically my father turned his back and walked away. I'm sure he was angry, but he had other things on his mind - searching for any other surviving relations, starting to build a new life.''

It was not easy. As with many other small entrepreneurs, Louis Halberstadt's prewar jute business had disappeared. "His clients were gone, his stock was gone, he had no money - just debts. The only things we got back from before the war were a few silver spoons and forks which had been buried in the garden of some acquaintances. We dug them up, and I still have them. Otherwise nothing was left - no trinkets, no jewelry, not even photos. Not that we had much; I come from a long line of relatively poor people.''

The Dutch authorities displayed little sympathy for these problems and made scant if any effort to force looters to return stolen property. To this day, some Dutch officials dismiss it in terms of the harsh realities of the war years. "The Jews were away,'' says one member of one of the government commissions currently reinvestigating the war's aftermath. "People had no homes. They took over the homes of Jews. The Jews return and want their houses and apartments back. [But] seven or eight families are living there. Naturally there was a conflict.''

Nor was there much in the way of rapid settlement or restitution. "After the war, it was possible to receive compensation for property taken by the Germans,'' recounts Wilma Stein, former head of Amsterdam's Jewish Welfare Association, "but the compensation was somewhat limited, generally only half of the value of the property. The claimant had to prove what exactly was in his home, and whoever was unable to do so received a minimal payment: enough to purchase a table, four chairs, a bed, and so on.''

According to testimony from Stein, one Auschwitz survivor told of asking for the return of the Amsterdam apartment where his family, of which he was the only survivor, had lived before their deportation. "After a dispute with the bureaucracy, he received permission to enter the home. He received the apartment without gas or electricity - but with a bill for three years of unpaid consumption left behind by the previous lodgers. He went to the Town Hall, threw the bills on the table, and demanded that they furnish him with gas, saying, "I didn't give you a gas account for the murder of my family!' The clerks called the police, who threw him out.''

C O N T I N U E D _ .