Terminating Fascist Threats

"We found out at around 2 o'clock on Saturday afternoon. We actually talked to her as well. We basically said: 'Listen, we cannot allow this to happen. We spoke to our lawyers, and we prepared a press release. We could not send out the press release for a few hours, until the lawyers actually sent her a termination letter."

"[The company stands against such] violent and hateful [remarks]. Political views are up to individuals, but things like this? We can't tolerate that."

"Were going to figure out a way to reopen the stores quickly."

Foodtastic (Second Cup) CEO Peter Mammas

"This video is related to a franchisee of Second Cup, one of the private tenants operating within the Jewish General Hospital. We fully support Second Cup's decision to take swift and decisive action in this matter by shutting down the franchisee's cafes and terminating their lease agreement."

"Our CIUSSS [Integrated Health and Social Services Centres] is deeply committed to fostering a culture of inclusion and stands firmly against antisemitism and any other form of discrimination or hate speech."

Carl Theriault, spokesperson, Jewish General Hospital, Montreal

The Jewish General Hospital is seen in Montreal. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

 

On Thursday, in Montreal, a series of pro-Palestinian/hate-Israel groups conducted their usual peaceful marches with the good humour and attention to moral civility that is their hallmark  in Canada with a little different twist. Outside Concordia University a protest took place against the existence of the State of Israel and Jewish existence in particular. A woman, later identified by employees of a Second Cup shop located at the Jewish General Hospital as a franchisee, exercised her hateful spleen by exhibiting her prowess in giving a Nazi salute, aimed at the presence of counter-protesters.

To the Israel supporters and Jews standing there, as the event was being videoed, she addressed another type of salute, this one in reference to the Nazi Germany World War II Final Solution involved in the extermination of European Jewry. "The final solution is coming your way -- the final solution. You know what the final solution is?" A familiar phrase indeed to Jews still reeling from the most horribly despicable descent of humanity into the hellscape of genocide.

The revealing video swiftly made its way onto social media and the outcry was predictably outraged. Eventually, the incident, boiling away on social media, made its introduction to the awareness of Second Cup's corporate headquarters chief executive officer of the parent company. Clearly not very good public relations for the respected coffee chain. According to Foodtastic's Peter Mammas, after he confronted the  woman identified as Mai Abdulhadi over her incendiary remarks she did not deny being the author of the remarks.

 

The now-closed Second Cup cafe at the Jewish General Hospital

 

Following her termination, which includes her family, all of whom are linked to two Second Cup franchises at the Jewish General Hospital, she has busied herself seeking out legal counsel for herself and her family members, listed as Quebec business owners of two coffee counters. With the termination of the franchise leases for the family of Ms. Abdulhadi, the 12 employees in the two shops are set to continue being paid during a transition period when new licensees will take over the now-shuttered two Second Cup counters. 

 Students marched through downtown Montreal on Thursday in their tens of thousands to protest Israel's military activities in Gaza, claiming their universities are complicit with Israel's conflict against the terrorist Hamas group in Gaza. The following day, an anti-Israel, anti-NATO protest became violent when protesters, including 'outside agitators' clashed with police. Cars were torched, and windows were smashed in the Palais de Congres Montreal where the NATO meeting was taking place. Businesses alongside the conference centre also had their windows smashed.

In total three people were arrested. Protest attendees were mostly masked to avoid identification. Montreal Police stated that they anticipate that facial recognition techniques will aid in identifying others who will also be arrested for their violent contributions to 'peaceful' gatherings. They also noted that there are no plans to launch a hate crime investigation over the Nazi salute and other societal disrupting incidents since "we have not received any complaints yet". One can only hope that will soon be remedied.

The CEO of Foodtastic said the company's operations team reviewed footage from last Thursday's pro-Palestinian protest outside Concordia University. He says the person seen making the gesture is Mai Abdulhadi. The company says Abdulhadi owned and operated two of its Second Cup locations inside the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. (thestartupnation.ca/Instagram)

Nazi Germany's 1936 Olympics, Anaesthesizing the World Community of Sports

"In 1924 Adolf Hitler warned "blood desecration" and "defilement of the race" represented "original sin". The deleterious effects of "racial cross-breeding" was condemned in his book Mein Kampf. "Every animal mates only with a member of the same species ... The titmouse seeks the titmouse,the wolf the she-wolf, etc."

"Hitler's race theory was his belief in the biological superiority of the Aryan race and he vowed to end what he believed to be the harmful contamination of Aryan blood and maintain its purity."

"For Hitler, the worst violation of blood occurred in the mating between Jews and Aryans. The 1935 "Law for the Protection of German Blood" made sexual intercourse between Aryan and non-Aryan a crime."
"By 1945 race defilement was punishable by execution."

The Holocaust Chronicle

Games of the XI Olympiad   Getty Images

Back in 1932, the year before Adolf Hitler assumed power as Chancellor of Germany, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1936 Games to Berlin, as the venue for the summer competition. Bavaria would host the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. No one at the IOC appeared to foresee that it would be a Nazi Germany that would host those games. At play was the Olympics; idealism of uniting the world's people through a sport festival. 

An international ideal fundamentally opposed to the racist and antisemitic nationalism of Nazi Germany. 

And while the IOC did consider moving the Games to another venue, Hitler offered concessions to maintain the original invitation for Germany to host the events. He foresaw the Olympics playing out in Germany as a public relations boon for the Third Reich. And indeed, the 1936 Olympics gave a huge assist to Nazi Germany's Final Solution, in the final analysis. 

International attendees to the Games were hugely impressed by the grand Opening Ceremonies and by the release of 20,000 birds soaring skyward, trailing coloured ribbons. The illusion was that the Nazis weren't the villains they were made out to be. Throughout the Olympics antisemitism was soft-pedalled, despite that German Jews, including Jewish athletes had faced severe discrimination.

 

1936 Olympic Games, Berlin, Germany,  Getty Images

 

Banned from sports clubs and athletic facilities where they had once been members, separate and inferior facilities were thought more than enough to serve the interests of inferior Jewish athletes. Gretl Bergmann, world-class high jumper (a Jew), matched the German women's record; five feet, three inches during the training period before the 1936 Summer Olympics. She received a letter from the German Olympic Committee criticizing her performances for being erratic; informing her she had not been chosen as a member of Germany's Olympic track and field team.

It was the summer of 1936; German Jews lost their citizenship rights; their businesses were boycotted,their professional lives restricted. Jews were excluded from public facilities, prohibited from marrying non-Jews. As anti-Jewish policies were expanded, German physical fitness and athletic prowess was recognized as a vehicle for building nationalism, for fostering racial purity and for spurring military preparedness.  Which led to opportunity for Jews to be given places in the 1936 Olympic team eliminated.

The IOC was placated by Reich officials who permitted one Jewish athlete to compete for Germany; Helene Mayer who had competed for Germany in two previous Olympiads. Half Jewish, she was tall and blonde, fitting the prototypical Aryan image. In the women's foil competition she received the Olympic silver medal; film coverage of that day shows her giving the stiff-armed Nazi salute; if a Jew could do that, Germany wasn't such a bad place for them, after all.

 

1936 Olympic Games, Germany, Javelin Throw   Getty Images

 

Prior to the Games' opening, several countries including the United States and Soviet Union urged a boycott of Olympic competition in Germany. The Nazi regime gave image-improving concessions -- some involving taking down vicious anti-Jewish signs proliferating along German highways, towns and city boundaries, on streets and at stores: "Jews are not wanted in this place", and "The Jew is our misfortune".

Antisemitic signs along the highways that led to competition sites were seen by Count Henri Faillet-Latour, the Belgian president of the IOC as he travelled to the Winter Games opening. Demanding to see Hitler, he informed him such practices were unacceptable. Hitler argued Olympic protocol could not override concerns of paramount importance within Germany, but ordered the signs removed when he was threatened with cancellation of the Games.

Forty-nine countries sent teams to the Nazi Olympics including the United States where the boycott movement failed. Leni Riefenstahl and her film crews captured the pageantry and athletic competition; her film Olympia won first prize at the 1938 Venice film festival. Jesse Owens representing the United States won four gold-medal performances, hailed by critics of the Nazi regime who felt the victories refuted Hitler's claim of white superiority.

 

American runner Jesse Owens, Getty Images

 

The German team won more medals than any other nation's teams. Hitler played the part of world statesman and honoured national leader. Foreign visitors were largely persuaded that the Third Reich's intentions were as peaceful as its economic revival was efficient, its goals benign, its culture healthy and vigorous. For after all, ten Jewish athletes won medals at the 1936 Olympics. In reality, Victor Perez, a French Jews, the world's flyweight boxing champion was murdered at Auschwitz.

Lilli Henoch, world record holder in the shot put and discus was murdered and buried in a mass grave near Riga, Latvia. A Hungarian fencer, Attila Petschauer who won a silver medal in the 1928 Olympics, froze to death in a Nazi labour camp. Alfred Flatow, a German Jew and winner of three gold medals and one silver in gymnastics in Athen's 1896 games died in the Theresienstadt camp, Czechoslovakia. 

1936 Olympics, Germany   Getty Images

"If we had killed 10.3 million Jews, I would say with satisfaction, 'Good, we destroyed an enemy'. Then we would have fulfilled our mission [to slaughter all of Europe's Jewish population]."

"Jews who are fit to work should be sent to work. Jews who are not fit to work must be sent to the Final Solution, period."

"It's a difficult thing that I am telling you and I know I will be judged for it. But I cannot tell you otherwise. It's the truth. Why should I deny it?"

Adolph Eichmann, oral testimony/interview, 1957

 

Interview tapes held in private hands, known to exist but never publicly aired contained in a 180-minute, three-part document produced in Israel of a war criminal who, at the time of the trial holding him to account as the individual instructed by Adolf Hitler to personally oversee, plan and operate the Final Solution, denied at trial his role in the Holocaust, repeating he was a mere "little cog" in the machinery of genocide. The responsibility was not his, but rather that of the Third Reich which had mandated it.

The series now being shown on Israeli television represents a joint production between Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sipur, an Israeli company formerly named Tadmor Entertainment, Toluca Pictures and Kan 11, Israel's public broadcaster. With the completion  and public airing of this three-part documentary on the Holocaust and its prime mover-and-shaker, the consortium is in search of licensing partners to enable the documentary to be given global airing.

In Eichmann's view his dedicated work of eliminating Europe's Jews was not completed when a mere six million Jews were systematically murdered. The goal had been all of Europe's Jews to be destroyed, so the plan was only half-completed. The Israeli documentary series, titled The Devil's Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes, has been released in Israel where it has reminded the nation of its desolately terrible loss.

The arrival and processing of an entire transport of Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in 1939 to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, in May of 1944. The picture was donated to Yad Vashem in 1980 by Lili Jacob

 

Though the tapes' existence has been known of in the public realm for years, this marks their public debut. Following the end of World War II, Eichmann had recorded 70 hours of interviews in Buenos Aires years after he had fled for safety from detection to Argentina. A Dutch journalist and Nazi sympathizer, Willem Sassen had conducted the interviews.

During the 1961 trial in Israel efforts had been extended to gain possession of the tapes to augment the 700 pages of transcripts introduced at the trial. "He could hardly have been able to deny his own voice", observed Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor, of the man who steadfastly denied  his critical role in the prosecution of the Final Solution. 

A year after Eichmann was captured in Argentina by Mossad agents and flown to Israel, the transcripts were denied as evidence by Israel's Supreme Court, except for Eichmann's hand-written notes of his denial of the veracity of the printed transcripts. Other evidence was made use of to convict him of the charges laid against him as the architect of Jewish genocide. 

 

Bodies lie piled against the walls of a crematory room in a German concentration camp in Dachau, Germany. The bodies were found by U.S. Seventh Army troops who took the camp on May 14, 1945  AP Photo

To the very last, the man who revelled in his appointment by the Nazi regime to oversee the deaths of millions, insisted he was in charge of small tasks, like train scheduling, not responsible for the crimes of Nazi Germany. The recordings, however chronicle the truth in their depiction of a cold-blooded man nursing a vicious hatred for Jews, happy to play the lead role in exterminating Europe's Jewish community.

 

Courtesy: USHMM

"This is proof against Holocaust deniers and a way to see the true face of Eichmann", stated the documentary's co-creator, Yariv Mozer. In the hands of private owners the tapes were transferred eventually to a German government archive in Koblenz. The owner intended their use for academic purposes. To prove the existence of the tapes, a short clip was released decades ago. Until 2020 when Kobi Sirt and Mozer, creators of the documentary, were given clearance to make use of the recordings revealing the extent of Eichmann's culpability.

 Some 15 hours of recordings were made available to the duo for investigative purposes.After escaping an American prison camp, Eichmann lived in Germany under an assumed name until he travelled to Argentina in 1940. Following his trial in Israel, Eichmann was hanged on June 1, 1962 for his unspeakable crimes committed against the humanity of the Jews of Europe.

Images from the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann at an exhibition in Jerusalem in June. A documentary, “The Devil’s Confession,” has aired recordings unheard during the proceedings.  Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times

Time and the Tides Await Accountability

"The court has come to the conclusion that, contrary to what you claim, you worked in the concentration camp as a guard for about three years." 

"[In doing so, the defendant had assisted in the Nazis’ terror and murder mechanism]."

"You willingly supported this mass extermination with your activity. You watched deported people being cruelly tortured and murdered there every day for three years."

Presiding Judge Udo Lechtermann, war crimes trial, Brandenberg/Havel

 

"There has been a huge memory work, huge work on what happened in this camp that was almost forgotten." 

"The important thing here today was that he was proven guilty."

Lili Grumbach, granddaughter of Antoine Grumbach, surviving Sachsenhausen prisoner 

"Even if the defendant will probably not serve the full prison sentence due to his advanced age, the verdict is to be welcomed,."

"The thousands of people who worked in the concentration camps kept the murder machinery running."

"They were part of the system, so they should take responsibility for it."

"It is bitter that the defendant has denied his activities at that time until the end and has shown no remorse."

Josef Schuster, head, Central Council of Jews in Germany

Former Nazi concentration camp guard Josef Schütz, 101, hides his face behind a folder in a German court Tuesday, before he was convicted of more than 3,500 counts of accessory to murder  AFP via Getty Images

"[The sentence] sends a message that if you commit such crimes, even decades later, you might be brought to justice."

"And it’s a very important thing because it gives closure to the relatives of the victims."

"The fact that these people all of a sudden feel that their loss is being addressed and the suffering of their family who they lost in the camps is being addressed … is a very important thing."

Efraim Zuroff, head Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jerusalem

It's never too late to repent. On the other hand, repentance in a court of justice is an admission of guilt.

And so, 101-year-old Josef Schuetz denied guilt and had no need to repent. He claimed innocence of the charges brought against him, that as an SS guard during the years 1943 to 1945 he was responsible as an accessory to annihilation of Europe's Jews, for the deaths of tens of thousands who passed through the gates of the Sachsenhausen death camp in Oranienburg.

"I don't know why I am here", he said, since he "did absolutely nothing wrong", for he had not worked at the camp. He had been an agricultural labourer in Pasewalk, 115 kilometres northeast of Sachsenhausen. The Sachsenhausen camp, north of Berlin, was established as the first site in 1936 in what would eventually become mass incarceration and mass murder of the Jews of Europe. An experimental site for which Adolf Hitler had assigned the SS control of what was to become a vast network of such camps throughout occupied Europe.

 

Sachsenhausen, model camp

 

There is no total agreement on the full death count at the camp; some estimates place it at 100,000, others between 40,000 and 50,000; a sizeable collected community of Jews meant for annihilation, but in the overall picture of six million Jewish lives extinguished, a relatively modest number. The camp's inmates died of various causes: starvation, disease, forced labour, medical experimentation, shooting, hanging, and gassing, all to achieve the goal of ridding Europe of its Jews.

Another 101-year-old, a survivor of the death camp, Leon Schwarzbaum left testimony and a statement that was read posthumously in March, asking the accused "to tell the historical truth". Another Holocaust survivor, 80-year-old Antoine Grumbach said as far as he was concerned the verdict helped to prove that Sachsenhausen was "an experimental extermination camp" which took his father's life.

Germany's antisemitism commissioner, Felix Klein stated that the sentencing of this man was nothing to celebrate since he "lived undisturbed for so long and the indictment came so late". The trial began in October, suspended on several occasions in view of Schuetz's ill health. He took part in the trial with his presence for about two-and-a-half hours every day, held in a gymnasium where Schuetz lives, in Brandenburg/Havel.

Although his lawyer, Stefan Waterkamp stated that "As early as 1978, investigators had information about him but did not pursue him", the public prosecutor responded that Schuetz had "knowingly and willingly" participated in crimes as a guard; evidence in hand that shared Schuetz's name, date and place of birth. Schuetz "willingly supported this mass extermination with your work", Judge Udo Lechtermann added.

Josef Schuetz found guilty as an accessory to the murder of over 3,500 prisoners. An accessory to attempted nurder between 1942 and 1945 at Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg. He has made history by becoming the oldest person to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity in the Holocaust years. There was no escaping his personal accounting, although it is a symbolic punishment; his age and health will rescue him from his penalty after a long life denied his victims. 

 

There are many more like him who will, in the final analysis, escape prosecution and the verdict identifying their actions complicit in the wholesale destruction of six million Jewish lives.

 

Prosecutors said that between 1942 and 1945, Schütz served as an SS guard at the Sachsenhausen camp outside Berlin, where tens of thousands of prisoners died   Associated Press

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