The municipality of Amsterdam is planning to allocate ten million Euro to the Jewish community to compensate them for the fact that Holocaust survivors were forced to pay city taxes upon their return to Holland, even though they hadn't resided there during the war period. The mayor, Everhard Van Der Lan, promised that the taxes and bills paid over the years will be returned to the survivors, explaining during the course of the dedication ceremony of the new Holocaust Museum in the city which took place Sunday this week that the money will be donated for the use of public communal needs.
In 2013, documents from Dutch archives were first published, showing that Amsterdam demanded that their Jewish Holocaust survivors pay up municipal taxes for the period during which they hid from the Nazi regime or were interred in concentration camps. The Dutch daily newspaper "Het Prol" reported that for two years after the end of the war in 1945, the city demanded from the survivors payment for municipal taxes and rentals for the period which they did not even reside in their homes, and even fined them for late payments.
The archive documents show that only in 1948 did the municipality agree to reimburse half of the sum which had been collected unjustly from its Jews. The city archives showed 342 requests for reimbursement. Only 35,000 Dutch Jews, out of the 140,000 which had resided there before the Holocaust, survived the horrendous war.
The new National Dutch Holocaust Museum was opened this past Monday. While work on its construction extended over three years, it was only opened to the public this week. It was established in a building which had served as a teachers' seminary located in the heart of the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam.
