Germany's Extermination Laboratory

Nazi parade in Amsterdam, early in Germany’s occupation of the Netherlands. ‘The Beehive’ department store, Jewish-owned before the occupation, is seen in the background. (public domain)

"The Dutch armed forces surrendered on May 14, 1940, the fifth day of the German invasion. The Netherlands securely in the hands of the German army, the Nazi regime appointed Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Reich Commissar for the country. His most important subordinate and rival was Hanns Albin Rauter, the General Commissar for Security, a Higher SS and Police Leader dispatched by Heinrich Himmler. These two Austrians, both executed as war criminals after the Third Reich’s defeat, could rely on the National Socialist Movement, an indigenous fascist party led by Anton Mussert, for enthusiastic support."

"The 140,000 Jews residing in the Netherlands thus had good reason to be afraid. Among them were 25,000 foreign, mostly German Jews, who had sought refuge there, including Anne Frank and her family. Over the next several months, the expected anti-Semitic measures came. Seyss-Inquart and Rauter passed legislation barring Jews from holding public office. In October, all Dutch civil servants had to complete forms—one specifically designed for Jews, the other for Aryans. At the same time, Jewish businesses were also forced to register with the government. The process of removing Jews from the civil service then ensued in early November. In January 1941, the Nazis demanded registration of all Jews, as well as people of mixed ancestry. This insidious process, gradually and methodically implemented, of identifying and separating Jews from everyone else, relegated them to pariah status in their own country."

"Following this wave of reactionary legislation, two incidents in February 1941 demonstrated that the Jewish population in Amsterdam would not hesitate to protect themselves. Feeling emboldened, the Defense Division, the paramilitary arm of Mussert’s organization, openly attacked Jews in Amsterdam. Young Jewish men fought back fiercely and, in one confrontation, killed a Dutch National Socialist." "On February 19, German police entered a popular ice cream parlor in South Amsterdam owned by Erich Cahn, a German Jew and refugee. Mistaken for Dutch Nazis, this patrol was sprayed by ammonium gas from an improvised device in the parlor. In retaliation, the Germans arrested, tortured, and sentenced Cahn to death by firing squad."

"Ever mindful to send a message, Seyss-Inquart’s government additionally seized 425 Jews, literally grabbing them from Amsterdam’s streets, and deported them to Buchenwald.  Of them, 389 were sent from there to Mauthausen. Only a few survived. The brutality displayed in these roundups not only shocked people but stirred them to act."

Opposition took shape around the radical Left. The Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN), banned by the German authorities, gave voice and organization to these stirrings. A meeting organized by the Communists and attended by trade-union representatives happened on the 24th. Two CPN militants, Piet Nak and Willem Kraan, called for a general strike. Leaflets were distributed, emblazoned with the words: 'Strike! Strike! Strike! Shut down all of Amsterdam for a day'!" 

Dr. Jason Dawsey, research H\historian, The Institute for the Study of War and Democracy, The National WWII Museum, New Orleans

‘February Strike’ in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1941 (public domain)

 "We always thought the first deportation train departed in July 1942. These razziamen were already deported on 27 February 1941, so that's much earlier."

"It was a kind of laboratory [for the Nazis] to improve their knowledge of everything that we see at Auschwitz on a much, much bigger scale."

"[Those in command at Mauthausen, where the Dutch Jewish men were temporarily incarcerated could select whether to gas people] during the bus ride, halfway to the castle -- and then at Hartheim, there was a kind of place where no one could see what was going on."

Historian Wally de Lang

Dutch Jews board the train that is to take them to Auschwitz. Photograph from 1942 or 1943. Photographer: Rudolf Breslauer. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Rechten: Public domain

Hundreds of Dutch Jews wee rounded up in a razzia in early 1941, taken off the streets of Amsterdam, marking the first Nazi raids on Jews in Western Europe. This was the beginning of an operation and transport to a killing site that became a training camp for German military personnel who would specialize in the exacting necessity of exterminating European Jews. The fine points of gassing people to death in large numbers on an experimental basis to fine-tune and expedite the process needed a living laboratory for success, and the Netherlands was chosen as the initial round-up site.

This roundup (razzia) was occasioned in particular by the death of a Dutch Nazi collaborator who had been killed in a violent confrontation between Dutch fascists in alliance with the German military which had entered the Netherlands the spring before, and young Jewish Dutchmen who had determined to defend themselves. Aboard a deportation train on 27 February 1941 the men disembarked at the site of a 17th century castle-cum-'hospital' in upper Austria, Hartheim Castle.

The castle had, a year earlier, been transformed into a killing centre with the installation of a gas chamber retrofitted in a room especially adapted for the purpose. According to writer-historian Wally de Lang in her newly published book, the castle was destined to become a training camp preparatory to large-scale gas chamber operations to handle an anticipated expulsion of Jews from all points in German-occupied Europe to the Final Solution death camps.

 

In Amsterdam's Jodenbuurt, Jewish men are rounded up and arrested by German soldiers in February 1941. (Public domain)

These experimental test chambers for gassing prisoners of war at Hartheim pre-dated the creation of the Final Solutio,n in January 1942. Of the group of 340 Jews who had been transported from Amsterdam, 108 were murdered at Hartheim in a three-day period in August 1941. Efficiency was a German byword. The families of these men were sent notices of death, attributed to fictional causes. This, at a time when the full agenda of the extermination of Europe's Jews was not yet openly being carried out.

 

The castle was not meant to be the venue of such a ignominiously horrendous rehearsal for genocide. It had been donated by heirs to the local welfare society decades earlier, to be dedicated to the care of mentally and physically afflicted people, but by 1940, 30,000 of those individuals became afflicted in a eugenics network of annihilation courtesy of the Third Reich, to rid the world of the mentally unstable and physically disabled.

 

German pogrom on Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter in February 1941 (public domain)

And although the Nazi Eugenics program came to a halt when the public became aware of the situation and reacted with outrage in 1940, the castle went on to lend its premises to the deaths of 12,000 prisoners of war from 1941 to 1944, in accordance with Action 14f13, an ordinance to eliminate concentration camp prisoners no longer capable of performing slave labour. Poles and Spaniards were among the national and ethnic groups that were targeted for elimination by gassing, though Jews remained the primary target.

Mauthausen, Dachau and Gusen concentration camps, all associated with Hartheim, saw their staff handle logistics and administration. Mauthausen qualified as one of the most brutal of Nazi concentration camps, its complex including some 100 sub-camps spaced throughout Austria, holding a total of 85,000 people by 1945. When researching her book The Raids of 22 and 23 February 1941 in Amsterdam, Ms.De Lang discovered that the Dutch Jews were taken frist from Amsterdam to Camp Schoorl, a prison camp in the Dutch dunes.

Of the 525 men originally seized 388 were dispatched to Buchenwald where many died, and 350 were sent on from there to Mauthausen where many others perished. Three months on, 108 of the original group were gassed at Hartheim. As a percentage of their Jewish population that died in the Holocaust, the Netherlands had a higher rate than other Western European countries, partially attributed to the aid given the Nazi occupiers (which was by no means unique to the Netherlands) by fascist Netherlanders.

Organizing the ‘February Strike’ in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1941 (public domain