Dutch chief rabbi seeks apology for Holocaust-era complicity

Dutch Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs called on the prime minister of the Netherlands to apologize officially for authorities’ collaboration with Nazi Germany in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust.

Weighing in on a polarizing debate over this issue in the kingdom – whose neighbors have all offered such apologies – Jacobs said in an interview with JTA last week that, following expressions of regret of certain army and police units and other institutions, “it is time that the Dutch head of state offer a comprehensive apology.”

Some 75 percent of the 140,000 Jews who lived in the Netherlands before the Holocaust were murdered by German Nazis and their local collaborators in the genocide – the highest death rate in all of Nazi-occupied Western Europe. The Dutch police under Nazi occupation and the national railway company were widely complicit in hunting down Jews and transporting them to death and concentration camps.

— JTA