The Amsterdam tram company tried to collect money until 1947 for the deportation of 50,000 Jews, including Anne Frank and her family

A package of 23 invoices kept in a Dutch historical archive shows that the Amsterdam Municipal Transport Company (GVB) not only took nearly 50,000 Jews from the capital of the Netherlands by tram to the trains that would take them to the concentration camps and extermination.

He also tried to collect until 1947—two years after the end of World War II—the 80 guilders for a few unpaid trips, out of a total of 900. Anne Frank, the author of the

Diary

that symbolizes the Holocaust, and her family appeared in one of those trips, paid for by the Nazis with money confiscated from the Jewish community.

A book and a documentary now reveal the role of the municipal company, which did not apologize or offer compensation to the survivors or their families.

Once arrested, the Jews of Amsterdam were gathered in groups in detention centers set up in the city.

Their data appears in the 23 invoices, found in 1994 by the historian Johannes Houwink ten Cate, who worked for four decades at the Institute for Studies on War, the Holocaust and Genocide (Niod).

The receipts were in the center's archive and he included them in a report prepared for the Israeli institute Yad Vashem, which leads studies on the Shoah.

“At that time they didn't seem interested.

Maybe because the historians focused more on the question of Nazi ideology and not on what the deportations were like,” he explains in a telephone conversation.

He has now collaborated with the filmmaker Willy Lindwer and the writer Guus Luijters, responsible for the documentary and the book, respectively, titled

Verdwenen stad

(The Disappeared City).

Two works that show that without the support of the tram network, the deportations of Dutch Jews would not have been carried out as effectively.

More information

The Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust hidden in the heart of Nazi terror

The GVB company carried out the transfers between 1942 and 1944, and sent its invoices to the German office coordinating the persecution of the Jews of Amsterdam during the occupation.

The last two receipts, relating to the months of July and August 1944, were never paid.

And they are those claimed until 1947. For the 900 journeys, 9,000 florins were invoiced, about 61,000 euros at the current exchange rate, according to the authors.

“The payment came from the goods stolen from the Jews,” indicates the Israel Center for Information and Documentation.

The schedules of these trams, heavily monitored, varied.

At first, they were nocturnal to dilute the image of the deportation.

Then it also happened during the day.

From a single stop on the urban route, up to 18,000 Jews were taken to the train, as indicated by the two authors' research.

The fare requested by the GVB company was 10 guilders for each tram, and 12.50 for night trips.

They were not in regular circulation, but rented by the occupying forces for this use.

“In the summer of 1943, entire neighborhoods of Amsterdam were cordoned off and there were three large raids on the streets in broad daylight,” Houwink ten Cate recalls.

In his opinion, the change in historical focus has resulted in “the expansion of the circle of those who perpetrated the events, many of them originating from occupied countries.”

Nazi troops parade on one of the main avenues of Amsterdam around 1940.Three Lions (Getty Images)

Between July 1942 and September 1944, an estimated 63,000 of Amsterdam's 77,000 Jews were deported.

Of these, almost 58,000 were murdered.

Starting in 1942, Jews were prohibited from using the tram, but around 50,000 were forced to travel this way to the railway on the way to the extermination camps.

On August 8, 1944, Anne Frank, her parents and sister, along with the four other people who hid with them in the annex of a canal house, were taken by tram to the central train station of the city. Dutch capital.

They had been arrested four days earlier and their names appear on the receipts.

They were taken to the Westerbork transit camp, in the northeast of the country, and from there to Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen.

Only Otto Frank returned.

“You realize that maybe they passed by tram near their hiding place, in the city, before getting on the last train,” say Lindwer and Luijters in a documentary moment.

After the liberation of the country by the Allies, only those who joined National Socialism were punished among the Dutch civil service.

“The charge to prosecute them was for having publicly disobeyed the legal Government of the Netherlands in exile,” says the same historian.

With the Third Reich gone, and the Federal Republic of Germany not being its successor in any way, how could the tram money still be claimed in 1947?

According to him, after the war there was no solidarity with the Jews who returned.

“The dominant position was that all Dutch people suffered a lot and only those who fought in the resistance needed to be honored.

Because?

Because they saved the national honor.”

The result was that the surviving Jews were not seen as special victims and had to pay even local taxes that they could not pay because they were in Nazi camps.

“Focusing on the resisters was also a way to compensate for the humiliation of the defeat in 1940, with the occupation of the country,” says Houwink ten Cate.

And he remembers: “The Dutch Jewish writer Abel J. Herzberg wrote that persecution against a minority stigmatizes it.

So Nazi persecution resulted in an increase in anti-Semitism among the Dutch.”

And he adds: “Remember Primo Levi [Italian anti-fascist resistance writer and Holocaust survivor] when he said that all this happened and can happen again.”

Anne Frank, at her desk at school, 1940.Alamy Stock Photo

In the summer of 1944, officially, there were no longer Jews living on Dutch soil.

Four years before, there were nearly 140,000 citizens of Jewish descent residing there.

Between 102,000 and 107,000 were deported.

Of these, between 5,000 and 5,500 survived, according to data from the Anne Frank Foundation.

Of the nearly 28,000 who hid, about 17,000 survived.

The GVB company was part of the Amsterdam City Council until 2007. Today it is the concessionaire of public transport in the metropolitan area and, in 2018, requested an investigation into these events.

The Consistory decided to commission it a year later from the Niod institute and will wait to have all the results to make a ruling on the matter.

Femke Halsema, the mayor, has already said that she is “ashamed” of what happened.

In a note published on its website, GVB admits that “the past of the municipal tram during the war will be incomplete” until it has been thoroughly investigated, “and until the actions carried out have been explained and recognized” then.

In 2019, the Dutch National Railways (NS) compensated 43 million euros to survivors and relatives of Holocaust victims who were brought by train to Westerbork.

In this case there were about 6,000 people and their transportation earned the railway during the war some 409,000 florins (2.5 million euros), according to calculations made by the historian.

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