A new exhibition by Dutch historian Wally De Lang has revealed the fate of 400 Jews who disappeared 80 years ago from Amsterdam – a fate which was not known until now.
In February 1941, nine months after the Nazis invaded and occupied the Netherlands, the first pogroms began on Dutch soil. Local Nazi party members posted bills in shop and cafe windows that read “Jews Not Wanted.” Then they went on a rampage in the Jewish Quarter, breaking windows and shouting jeers.
Young Jewish men and boys banded together to protect their neighborhood. When Dutch Nazis returned a few days later, the Jews fought back. Street fights went on for days resulting in many casualties, including the death of one Dutch Nazi, Hendrik Koot.
In retaliation, the Green Police — German Nazi officers in long green coats and high boots — randomly grabbed about 400 Jewish men off the streets during a two-day sweep, ultimately forcing them into trucks and driving away. Most of these men were never heard from again and nobody knew what had happened to them or even precisely how many people had disappeared.
De Lang, a researcher of Dutch Jewish history for several decades, refused to accept that normative people from Amsterdam had just disappeared without a trace and set out to discover their stories.
“It was impossible for me to comprehend that 400 people of this town just disappeared, without anyone knowing who they were,” De Lang told the New York Times.
Her findings, published in a Dutch book last year, are now being presented as a commemorative exhibition, “The Raids of Feb. 22 and 23, 1941,” at Amsterdam’s city archive, the Stadsarchief, until May 8.
The February raids were a prelude to much worse to come. These men were the first of some 102,000 Jews from the Netherlands to be murdered during the Holocaust, some 75% of the local Jewish population.
De Lang found that 151 of the 400 men were among the early Jewish victims of Nazi gassing experiments at Hartheim Castle, in Austria, where National Socialist doctors and administrators tested techniques for killing people on a mass scale.
British historian Mary Fulbrook, a professor of German history at University College London, said that the techniques used at Hartheim and other “euthanasia centers” would later be employed at extermination camps like Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz.
Thus, many of the men seized during the raids in Amsterdam served as guinea pigs in Nazi attempts to develop mass murder techniques.
De Lang could not discover a single list of all of the names of men picked up on Feb. 22 and 23, so she compiled her own from several sources. She was able to put together 390 biographies, each of which has been added to a new database.
The men were apparently simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and were not part of a specific list. One had gone out for groceries, another was returning from a birthday celebration and others had gone to the theater. The Nazis simply targeted them as Jews and they were driven first to a military camp on the Dutch coast and then deported to Buchenwald, where 47 died in the next two months. The rest were taken to the infamous Mauthausen labor camp in Austria where most of them worked in the stone quarries.
151 of those who were too ill or injured to work after the brutal labor of the stone quarries were taken in September 1941 to Schloss Hartheim, an Austrian castle where the Nazis had already instigated euthanasia of disabled and mentally ill people using carbon monoxide.
Of the 390 men that de Lang tracked, only two survived the war.
Most of the men were young – in their 30s or younger and many had recently started families. De Lang discovered that 24 of them left behind pregnant wives, who were not able to obtain information about their loved ones from Dutch or German authorities. When some were eventually informed of the death of their loved ones, they were told that they had died of unlikely causes like ulcerative colitis and general sepsis, and even reproductive system diseases that typically strike women, not men.
Vogelina Kroonenberg, 18 years old at the time, knew only that her husband, Simon Groen, had been sent to Mauthausen. Simon and Vogelina had been married for just three weeks before he was picked up in the February raids, and she was pregnant with their first child, Rosette. The baby was born in August.
“It’s going well with our child,” she wrote to him on Sept. 11. “Every day, we go out walking with either your mother or mine. I hope that you will see your daughter very soon.”
The letter was returned unopened. Groen had been killed at Schloss Hartheim on Sept. 8. Eventually a letter arrived with news that he had died of multiple sclerosis.
Vogelina never learned of his fate. Eager to be reunited with him, she went to Westerbork transit camp when ordered to do so, hoping she’d see him in Mauthausen. Instead, she was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. Baby Rosette had stayed behind with her grandfather, who placed her in hiding with a family in Blaricum.
The baby’s location was betrayed, however, and she was deported to the concentration camps Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt. She survived. After the war she went back to the family in Blaricum, who raised her on a quiet fruit farm. Only her grandfather survived.
“I don’t remember anything about my mother, my father, my grandmother,” said Rosette van Engeland-Groen, 80, in a telephone interview. “I was brought as a baby to my foster parents. I was in concentration camps, but I don’t know anything about it. I think I closed my mind to it.”
Growing up, she learned very little about her family. “I couldn’t ask my grandfather, because when I asked him something, he cried, so I didn’t ask a lot,” she said. “And nobody else could tell me.”
She learned many of the specifics for the first time at the new exhibition, she said, but it was all still very hard to process.
“It’s a very strange feeling,” she said. “You know you belong to them but you have no grip on it. You can’t reach them anymore.”
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