Students explore Camp Amersfoort in the Netherlands, April 19, 2021. (Mike Bink/National Monument Kamp Amersfoort)
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte inaugurates a museum on the former grounds of Camp Amersfoort, one of the Netherlands’ most infamous Nazi camps, 80 years after its construction.
“We are confronted here by the unimaginable suffering that happened in the place,” Rutte says at the opening. “We let the stories sink in and we learn from the lessons they offer to us today.”
National Monument Camp Amersfoort is a large, underground and dark space dominated by the portraits and personal stories of about 47,000 people who were imprisoned at the facility in the center of the Netherlands.
Jews being escorted by German troops to the Amersfoort Concentration Camp during World War 2. (Facebook)
At least 850 of the prisoners at Camp Amersfoort were Jews, according to Nazi documents, though the real number is probably much higher, the museum’s website states.
The Jewish prisoners were imprisoned briefly along with communists, dissidents, homosexuals and those who tried to evade forced labor. But Jewish prisoners were shipped within a few weeks at most to Westerbork, a facility in the eastern Netherlands where mostly Jews were imprisoned, and from there to death camps in Poland.
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