The Story of the Jewish Dutch Diamond Workers during WWII

Internationally the image of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands has been stamped by the story of Anne Frank. The end of that story clearly is not a happy one, with her pitiful death in Bergen-Belsen, but her story nevertheless has regularly functioned as a soft-focus lens, suggesting a less horrible history and shedding a more favorable light on the attitude of the non-Jewish population—think of the courageous Miep Gies and the other helpers of the secret Annex—than the facts would justify. Those facts are that the percentage of deported Jews was higher in the Netherlands than in any other occupied country in Western Europe: 75%.

Historians have pointed out multiple causes of this shockingly high percentage (Moore, 1997; Griffioen & Zeller, 2012).1 These range from the geography of the densely populated country without mountains or extensive wooded areas, to the government's exile, leaving civil servants in charge, whose first purpose was to keep the economy and the society running, even if that required collaboration with the occupying forces to a certain degree. Another reason was, contradictory as it may sound, the solid integration of the Jewish population within Dutch society. There was an undeniable anti-Semitic undercurrent, but for centuries Dutch official politics and legislation had not made distinctions between Jews and non-Jews, and therefore Jewish citizens tended to trust the authorities just like their fellow countrymen. Yet another reason, related to the previous one, was the cunning way the Nazis employed a system of exemptions, Sperren, which made people who were

able to obtain such a waiver feel safe from deportation, unaware that these exemptions could, and would, be withdrawn at any moment, and that in many cases its main aim was to squeeze money from those qualified for exemption. There were various ways of acquiring such a waiver, paying a huge amount of money being the most obvious o