The beginning of the German occupation of The Netherlands

[pieter]

In the beginning the German Nazi occupation was rather mild, because they wanted to win the 'Aryan', Nordic, Blond and Blue eyed West-German people for the German/Austrian Third Reich Nazi cause. Later when the German and Austrian occupiers witnessed Dutch indifference, lack of interest and even resistance to their Greater Germanic Nazi cause the German/Austrian Nazi regime became harsh. Of course the Second World War in The Netherlands was terrible for Dutch Jews, Sinti and Roman, Gays and Lesbians, Jehova Witness poeple and other minorities which were persecuted and threatened.

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

This is both a fascinating and deeply tragic film about Durchgangslager Westerbork in The Netherlands. People who later died in Auschwitz Brikenau, Sobibor and Bergen Belsen extermination camps.



Class photo from the school within Westerbork. It is hard to realise that these nice children were killed later on.

Most people you see in this film died in the Nazi extermination camps, Auschwitz concentration camp (65 train-loads totaling 60,330 people), Sobibór (19 train-loads; 34,313 people), Theresienstadt ghetto and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Westerbork was considered by Nazi standards as "humane". Jewish inmates with families were housed in 200 interconnected cottages that contained two rooms, a toilet, a hot plate for cooking, as well as a small yard. Single inmates were placed in oblong barracks which contained a bathroom for each sex.

Camp Westerbork also had a school, orchestra, hairdresser and even restaurants designed by SS officials to give inmates a false sense of hope for survival and to aid in avoiding problems during transportation. Cultural activities provided by the Nazis for designated deportees included metalwork, jobs in health services and other cultural activities.

A special, separate work cadre of 2,000 "permanent" Jewish inmates was used as a camp labour force. Within this group was a subgroup constituting a camp police force which was required to assist with transports and keep order. The SS had little involvement with selecting transferees; this job fell to another class of inmates. Most of these 2,000 "permanent" inmates were eventually sent to concentration or death camps themselves.

Notable prisoners in Westerbork included Anne Frank, who was transported to Camp Westerbork on 4 August 1944, as well as Etty Hillesum, each of whom wrote of their experiences in diaries discovered after the war. Frank remained at the camp in a small hut until 3 September, when she was deported to Auschwitz.


Anne Frank was the most famous inmate of Camp Westerbork 'after the war'


Esther (Etty) Hillesum (15 January 1914 – 30 November 1943) was a Dutch Jewish author of confessional letters and diaries which describe both her religious awakening and the persecutions of Jewish people in Amsterdam during the German occupation. In 1943, she was deported and murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp.


Etty Hillesum (15 January 1914 – 30 November 1943)

Hillesum was able to avoid the Nazi dragnet that identified Jews until April 1942. Even after being labeled a Jew, she began to report on antisemitic policies. She took a job with Judenrat for two weeks and then volunteered to accompany the first group of Jews sent to Westerbork. Hillesum stayed at Westerbork until 7 September 1943, when she was deported to Auschwitz, where she was killed three months later.


Parts of a rebuilt hut at Westerbork, which once held Anne Frank

Camp Westerbork also housed German film actress and cabaret singer Dora Gerson who was interned there with her family before being sent to Auschwitz and Professor Sir William Asscher who survived the camp when his mother secured his family's release by fabricating English ancestry. Jona Oberski wrote of his experience as a small child at Westerbork in his book, Kinderjaren ("Childhood"), published in the Netherlands in 1978 and later made into the film, Jonah Who Lived in the Whale.



Maurice Frankenhuis chronicled his family's experiences while interned in Westerbork and in 1948 conducted an interview with its Commander SS-Obersturmführer Albert Konrad Gemmeker [de] while awaiting trial. The published interview in Dutch and English became the basis for a docudrama created in September 2019. The film features colorization of original video of transports from Westerbork by photographer Rudolf Breslauer.


Albert Konrad Gemmeker (September 27, 1907 in Düsseldorf; † August 30, 1982 in Düsseldorf) was a German SS Obersturmfuhrer and commander of the Westerbork transit camp. Around 80,000 Jewish people were deported to Auschwitz during his service in the Dutch camp.


Westerbork, a transit camp from which prisoners were transported to Auschwtiz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Bergen Belsen and Theresienstadt Ghetto
, was run by an SS commander, Albert Konrad Gemmeker, third from the left.Credit...Collection of NIOD/Sound and Vision the Netherlands

Another prisoner at Camp Westerbork from 9 March 1944 to 23 March 1944 was Hans Mossel (1905–1944), a Jewish-Dutch clarinetist and saxophonist, before he was sent to the Auschwitz III camp.


Camp Westerbork with in the forefront a German Nazi Police officer

[karl]

Pieter

It is good of you to present this for a reminder of a time that should never be repeated or forgotten. For it was a needless destruction of all that was dear of a Europe that at one time was prosperous. With this, your Nederland was a victim of the stupidity and reckless ambitions of that Austrian Adolf Hitler. It needs be noted that Adolf Hitler took Germany as a tool of his destructive ambitions and not his birth land of Austria and in the end, Germany paid the price of defeat and total destruction, but not Austria.

My self was taken back with the story of Etty, Hillesum, for not only was she very attractive, but an excellent recorder of events of her time. With this, her record in writing of the needless persecutions of Jewish people in occupied Netherlands of that time. For even to her writing skills and observations, she was remarkable in her ability in intellectual understanding as shown by the written records left after her death.

For my self, it is understandable of the two most powerful books upon your bedside table is: The Bible and the one of Etty,Hillesum "An Interrupted Life".

Karl