After WWII, Dutch tram company demanded cash for transporting Anne Frank to the camps
Documents show Amsterdam’s GVB billed West Germany for the final transports of some 48,000 Holocaust victims, including the diarist and her family
Cnaan Lidor is The Times of Israel's Jewish World reporter
A new archival discovery is shedding light on an oft-disregarded accomplice in the murder of Anne Frank and tens of thousands of other Dutch Jews: The GVB Amsterdam Public Transport company.
The find, unearthed recently by filmmakers Willy Lindwer and Guus Luijters, includes an invoice for 80 guldens (the equivalent of about $4,500 today) that GVB had issued to the German occupation forces — and later to authorities in West Germany — to obtain payment for the tram ride that took Frank, her family and dozens of other Jews to train stations en route to being murdered in death camps.
GVB’s involvement in the deportation of some 48,000 Jews in Amsterdam has been known for decades. However, the discoveries added information about the scale and characteristics of this collaboration.
GVB earned at least $66,000 for transporting Jews to dispatch or internment locations, according to the new discoveries. After World War II, GVB accounting workers tried to obtain payment from Bonn for the final transports in a move that reflects “an inconceivable degree of indifference” to the tragedy, filmmaker Lindwer told The Times of Israel.
The discovery concerning Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager whose diary about hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam became an international bestseller after she died in 1945, “makes the active and already poignant collaboration of the GVB in the deportation of the Jews more palpable for large audiences because Anne Frank is an icon of the Holocaust,” wrote Lindwer and Luijters in a new Dutch-language book they published on their findings, titled “Lost City.”
The publication of their book and the imminent release of a documentary film bearing the same title have indeed attracted considerable attention in the media in the Netherlands, including an in-depth treatment this month on Nieuwsuur, the flagship current affairs show of the high-brow NOS public broadcaster, and coverage in other Dutch media.
Occurring shortly ahead of the reopening of the National Holocaust Museum, the works by Lindwer and Luijters have put GVB on the spot. The Central Jewish Organization of the Netherlands and CIDI, the local Jewish community’s watchdog on antisemitism, have called on GVB to offer Dutch Jews restitution and investigate for the first time its complicity in the murder of at least 75 percent of the Netherlands’ Jewish population – the highest death toll of any country in Nazi-occupied Western Europe.
GVB in a Dutch-language statement said that the matter should be investigated “quickly but carefully” by the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, in whose archives Lindwer and Luijters had found the invoices, with help from the renowned Holocaust researcher Johannes Houwink ten Cate. But the investigation should be part of a comprehensive research that began in 2020 into the role of the Amsterdam Municipality — to which GVB belongs — as a whole, the GVB said.
GVB did “not operate as an independent organization but belongs to the municipal apparatus that was used in additional ways to exclude the Jews,” the statement reads. “It is impossible to overstate how terrible we find the fact that it happened, and it’s a good thing that a book and a documentary were made about this,” GVB said about the transport of Jews during the Holocaust.
The documents found show that the firm had leased about 900 trams to the German occupation forces for the deportation of some 48,000 Amsterdam Jews.
After their arrest on August 4, 1944, in the secret annex on Prinsengracht 263, the Franks were jailed and later taken from the internment facility to Central Station on the infamous number 8 tram – a line that the Nazis used to transport Jews because it connected the station to Amsterdam’s heavily-Jewish areas. After World War II, GVB scrapped line 8 from its list of lines in recognition of its Holocaust role. The list of lines to this day jumps from 7 to 9.
From Central Station, the Franks were taken by train – those were operated by the NS railway company and not GVB – to the Westerbork internment camp. Otto and Edith Frank, Anne’s parents, were taken to Auschwitz, where only Otto survived. Anne and her sister Margot were sent to Bergen-Belsen, where both sisters died of typhus mere weeks before Nazi Germany’s defeat.
The story of the Franks — refugees from neighboring Germany who came to the Netherlands to escape Nazism – encapsulates the multifaceted story of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, which features much betrayal and estrangement from Jews by their compatriots, but also robust and heroic efforts on their behalf.
Izak Salomons, a Holocaust survivor who was 5 when his family was deported from Amsterdam to Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen, shared one of the most moving testimonies in the film by Lindwer and Luijters, which is scheduled to premiere next week.
Salomons recalled his excitement about being allowed to ride the tram for the first time in his life, not knowing that the ride would lead to a cattle cart to a Nazi concentration camp.
At the Daniel Willink Square (currently called Victory Square), “I saw all the trams waiting for us. Which was terrible, but for a kid like me it was a stroke of luck: A fun ride on the tram finally, which I wasn’t allowed to do ever before, and suddenly a ride across the city,” he said. “I had very loving parents who made sure I wasn’t afraid and that I was happy to ride the tram.”
The tram brought the Salomons – two parents and four children – to “where we shouldn’t have been: Central Station, where we were crammed into cattle cars,” said Salomons. His nuclear family is one of the very few households where all members survived the war after being deported.
The new discoveries about the GVB’s complicity are especially poignant because the company for decades has served as a symbol and model of solidarity with the Jews.
It was GVB that in 1941 kicked off the February Strike: The first and largest act of civilian insurrection over the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. On February 25, 1941, word of the strike spread like wildfire when GVB staff failed to show up for work. The strike soon ballooned into a national paralysis, bringing the economy to a halt for days.
The strike was soon broken under the violence of German authorities, but it galvanized the Dutch resistance — one of the most effective networks in occupied Europe — and became a lasting symbol, despite the fact that GVB fired all of its Jewish employees days later.
GVB marks the anniversary annually with a motionless minute of silence aboard all its vehicles, which include trams, buses and ferries.
But the new discoveries paint a different picture of the GVB, and, more broadly, of Dutch society’s level of collaboration with the Nazi-led murder of the vast majority of the country’s Jews.
Despite the defiant GVB strike of 1941, “This is a tale of total collaboration,” Lindwer said.
