AMSTERDAM — Charlotte van den Berg was a 20-year-old college student working part time in Amsterdam’s city archives when she and other interns came across letters from Jewish Holocaust survivors complaining that the city was forcing them to pay back taxes and late payment fines on property seized after they were deported to Nazi death camps.
How, the survivors asked, could they be on the hook for taxes due while Hitler’s regime was trying to exterminate them?
A typical response was: “The base fees and the fines for late payment must be satisfied, regardless of whether a third party, legally empowered or not, has for some time held the title to the building.”
After her discovery in 2011, van den Berg waged a lonely fight against Amsterdam’s modern bureaucracy to have the travesty publicly recognized.
Now, largely due to her efforts, Amsterdam officials are considering compensating Holocaust survivors for the taxes and possibly other obligations, including gas bills, they were forced to pay for homes that were occupied by Nazis or collaborators while the rightful owners were in hiding or awaiting death in the camps.
“I didn’t expect any of this to happen, though I’m happy it finally did,” van den Berg said in an interview. “I never dreamed that compensation could be the result.”
An unpublished review of those files by the Netherlands’ Institute of War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, or NIOD, found 217 cases in which the city demanded that returning Jews pay the taxes and penalty fees for getting behind in their payments.
Two Dutch newspapers, Het Parool and De Telegraaf, have received leaked copies of the report and published its conclusions. The report found that the city’s top lawyer advised politicians of the time not to enforce the fines, but the recommendation was rejected. Politicians worried that granting one claim might lead to more.
“The city made a conscious decision to reject this advice, which cannot be described otherwise than as a totally needless callousness toward (Jews) who had their property taken during the war,” De Telegraaf quoted the report as saying.
Amsterdam’s official ruling of Sept. 12, 1947, a public document viewed by The Associated Press, was that “the city has the right to full payment of fees and fines” and that most excuses — including that property had been seized by the Nazis — were invalid.
Ronny Nafthaniel — a leader of the Dutch Jewish community who sat on a vetting panel for the NIOD report and has reviewed a copy — said the papers’ reporting is accurate. Spokespeople for NIOD and the city declined to comment on the findings ahead of a statement planned this week.
Nafthaniel said many of the homes were sold to Dutch collaborators who left the bills unpaid and fled at the end of the war.
“Another thing that happened, and this is almost too sad to relate, is that Jews got back from Auschwitz — and then got an invoice for the gas that had been used in their homes,” he said.
The Netherlands deported a relatively high percentage of its Jews during the Nazi occupation of 1940-45 compared with other European countries, in part because of its efficient bureaucracy. An estimated 110,000 Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust, including teenage diarist Anne Frank. About 30,000 survived the war, many later emigrating to Israel.
The Institute report recommends that the city now pay survivors or their families 4.9 million euro, or $6.7 million: 400,000 euro for the fines and 4.5 million euro for the back tax payments on homes they were unable to use while in hiding or incarcerated at German camps.
