By chance, historian Johannes Houwink ten Cate found GVB invoices to the Nazis
Johannes Houwink ten Cate, Professor Emeritus of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam, found invoices that the Amsterdam public transport company sent to the Nazis for the guarded transportation of Jews in streetcars during his work for the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD). “It’s truly reprehensible that the top people were allowed to keep their positions.”
They were “prisons on wheels” and were driven right across the city. During the Second World War, the Amsterdam streetcars of the GVB (then called Amsterdam Municipal Tram) served as a guarded means of transport almost 900 times, taking Jews to the Central or Muiderpoort station, from where trains departed to the Westerbork transit camp.
The GVB billed the Nazis for the costs of these transports. This is evident from invoices that Johannes Houwink ten Cate, Professor Emeritus of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam, came across by chance while writing a research report on the Hollandsche Schouwburg in 1994. At the time, he was working for NIOD, the Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, which decided to offer the invoices confidentially for inspection only to anyone who asked. As a result, they remained out of sight of the general public for a long time.
Until now, years later. Filmmaker Willy Lindwer recently knocked on Houwink ten Cate's door for a new documentary film and book entitled Verdwenen Stad (Vanished City). For this, he wanted to use the GVB invoices that Houwink ten Cate had found. Houwink ten Cate agreed. “After all, they were already more or less in the public domain for a limited number of interested parties.”
The renewed attention to the invoices shines a spotlight on the role of the Amsterdam GVB during World War II. From the Jewish community there are calls for apologies and reparations, Het Parool noted. Mayor Femke Halsema, however, wants to first wait for an investigation by the NIOD, according to the Amsterdam daily.
How does Houwink ten Cate, Professor Emeritus for the past eight years following a 15-year UvA professorship at the Faculty of Humanities, view the role of the GVB in the war?
What was your reaction when you first encountered the bills?
“Actually, none. In all honesty, historically we were dealing with a completely different question at the time. We were not asking how the Holocaust could have happened, but why. If you only ask why, then you are only talking about Adolf Hitler and his cronies. But if you ask how, which only happened later, then you are also talking about the role of the train and streetcar conductors, the officials who did the registration work, and the people who got away with the Jews’ money.”
What effect has it had to ask “how”?
“It expanded the circle of perpetrators. So much so, that one can wonder if our current understanding of culpability and complicity is still valid. If official collaboration was so widespread and the last word has not yet been spoken, you start to wonder whether you shouldn't start talking about the possible co-responsibility of the Jewish Council. Especially since we consider anyone who did not take in Jews to be complicit.”
Is that so?
“Yes, actually yes. Besides the people in the resistance and the victims, of course. Everything else we consider essentially to be not good enough. The complicated thing about this is that these discussions about the war are not about the facts at all, but about the moral appreciation of the facts. They are not just about the past but also about ourselves. About what we should expect of others. About notions of responsibility, solidarity, and help for fellow human beings in peril. The lauded Jewish jurist and literary writer Abel Herzberg used to say, ‘People don't like people who are doing badly at all.’ I think many people would disagree with that today. I think we tend to expect more from each other now.”
Are you thereby also suggesting that it should come as no surprise that many people had little or no concern for the fate of the Jewish population during the war?
“Well, look, I can best illustrate that by quoting something my British colleague Richard Overy said while I was in the audience during one of his lectures. He looked at me sternly as he said this: ‘If ordinary people found it easy to say ‘no’ to authority, they would have said ‘no’ more often.’ Apparently, then, it is not easy.”
What do you think of the GVB’s conduct?
“What I find reprehensible is that the top people at the GVB, who knowingly gave illegal orders, namely driving prisons, were allowed to stay in office after the war. A contributing factor to this was that civil servants lost their pensions if they were purged. What also played a role is that the high-ranking police officers who illegally ordered Amsterdam policemen to round up Jews were not removed, either.”
The way municipal departments operated during World War II was kept under wraps for years. How do you explain that?
“Yes, that's because the municipal services tended to hand over archive documents to the City Archive at a very late stage if they thought there would be trouble. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ was their motto. The municipal departments themselves and their political leaders, i.e., successive mayors and aldermen, were primarily responsible for this.”
What should the CFPB do now, in your opinion? Apologize and start making reparations without delay, as is heard within the Jewish community?
“The complicated thing is that we can no longer trace who was transported by the GVB and who was not. Some Jews were forced to walk to Muiderpoort station, and some were transported by ambulance because they were too sick. If you no longer know exactly who to pay out, then a contribution to a fund for war victims is the best solution.”
And placing information signs at streetcar stops, as former Cidi chairman Ronny Naftaniel advocates in Het Parool, how do you feel about that?
“I think that's a great idea, too. Of course, we've had the stumble stones in front of residential houses for a while now, indicating who was deported from that house during the war. At the Barlaeus Gymnasium, where I went to school, they have now also placed a trip barrier which says what happened there. (It is a tribute to students who died as resistance fighters, and to the 42 Jewish students and five Jewish teachers who were also murdered, ed.) I don’t think it would be a bad idea at all to ask the artist of this trip barrier to also provide the streetcar stops with information. Then you would show, for example, that from the Beethovenstraat streetcar stop between 1942 and 1944 an estimated 18,000 Jews were deported. You have to find a solution that does justice to the social dimension of the problem, in which case you quickly go in the direction of Holocaust education.
Do you find that knowledge about the Holocaust is declining in society?
“I think that almost a quarter of Dutch young people believe that the Holocaust did not happen. That’s a frightening number. There are also a lot of teachers who are scratching their heads and thinking: You know what, now with the Middle East conflict, too, this is too complicated a topic for the classroom.”
Does that happen a lot?
“Well, yes, there are teachers who shy away from this topic. At schools in Amsterdam-West, for example, where young Muslim children are taught at home that the Holocaust is a fabrication of Jews. So that makes it all the more important as a society to facilitate good Holocaust education.”
