Eighty years since the end of World War II, mayor Femke Halsema of Amsterdam apologised on Thursday for the city’s role in the persecution of its Jewish residents during the Holocaust, in a rare acknowledgment of a collective moral failure by a city leader.

“Amsterdam’s government was, when it mattered, not heroic, not determined and not merciful,” she said. “And it horribly abandoned its Jewish residents.”

Halsema issued the apology in a speech at a Holocaust commemoration at the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theatre that the Nazis turned into a major deportation centre from which many of Amsterdam’s Jews were sent to concentration camps in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe.

Before the Holocaust, Amsterdam, the Dutch capital, had 80,000 Jewish residents. The Nazis, with help from local officials, deported and killed more than 60,000 of them.

“Administrators and officials were not only cold and formalistic, but even willing to cooperate with the occupier,” Halsema said. “That was an indispensable step in the isolation, humiliation, deportation, dehumanisation and murdering of 60,000 Amsterdam Jews.”

The city government collaborated with the Nazis on multiple levels; municipal officials mapped out where Jews were living and local police officers helped in the deportation of their fellow citizens.

“Antisemitism wasn’t brought to the Netherlands by the German occupier,” Halsema said, “and it didn’t disappear after the liberation. There has always been hatred against Jews — also in this town — and there still is.”

Halsema announced that the city would invest $28.5 million to promote Jewish life and the visibility of Judaism in the city. A new six-person committee will decide how to spend those funds.

“I hadn’t expected that,” Keren Hirsch, an Amsterdam councilwoman, said of the investment. Hirsch, who is Jewish, added, “A lot is unknown about Judaism and Amsterdam’s history.”

Across the Netherlands, the Nazis deported 75 per cent of the country’s Jewish population to concentration camps during World War II, the highest percentage in Western Europe. A majority of them lived in Amsterdam. The city’s transit authority and other agencies played a role in the removal of Jews and Romani people, also known as Roma and Sinti, from Dutch society.

“You can’t turn back time, you can’t undo what the municipality did,” Hirsch said. But, she added, “getting an apology is important to me. In that sense, words do matter to me.”

The city’s official apology comes five years after the former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte apologised on behalf of the government for not protecting the country’s Jewish citizens during World War II.

“With the last remaining survivors among us, I apologise on behalf of the government for the actions of the government at the time,” Rutte said at a memorial in 2020.

The country as a whole has spent the last few years reckoning with the dark chapters of its past.

In 2023, King Willem-Alexander apologised for his country’s role in the slave trade, a rare direct apology for a historical injustice by a sitting European monarch. Rutte apologised on behalf of the government months earlier.

New York Times News Service