Until the 1980s, the Dutch Internal Security Service (BVD) monitored Jewish citizens of Amsterdam who had survived the Holocaust, viewing them as potential threats to democracy. Some of those spied on were members of the Dutch Committee for Auschwitz, founded in 1956, whose task was to commemorate the liberation of the concentration camp. The intelligence services classified the organization as extremist, according to declassified documents from the National Archives between 1945 and 1998, analyzed by the newspaper Het Parool. The military police responsible for customs were also involved in the espionage and reported on people who had taken part in trips to Poland, where the largest Nazi extermination center was located.
The writings held by the National Archives have been open to the public since 2022 and include a total of 71,000 personnel files. They reflect extensive surveillance by the secret services, are flawless and cannot be copied. The portfolios range from politicians, journalists and lawyers to intellectuals, activists, artists and other representatives of civil society in the capital.
The BVD is the predecessor of the current General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD), which issued a statement this Saturday declaring that Holocaust survivors “were not viewed as a threat.” However, an exception was made for those close to the Auschwitz Committee, as they were considered a “communist front organization.” The AIVD note adds that the Cold War context must be taken into account, noting that several historical studies show that the committee was “dominated by communists.” At that time, communism was “the great threat to national security.” It is clear from the contents of a 1964 letter read by the newspaper that the BVD viewed the committee as an organization of this type.
The Dutch Communist Party itself was also spied on and some of its members were also on the committee. “Nobody knew about it. Those were different times, but reporting on people remembering their massacred relatives is still unjustifiable today,” Jacques Grishaver, current president of the committee, told NOS public television.
The Dutch secret services had an informant whose statements were included in the police lists of travelers dedicated to the memory of Auschwitz who visited the camp in Poland. One of the topics discussed by the committee, according to a mole report, was the release of German Willy Lages, who was responsible for the deportation of more than 70,000 Dutch Jews. Lages was head of the city's security service and his death sentence for these crimes was commuted to life imprisonment in 1948. In 1966 he was released due to an alleged terminal illness. At the meeting reported by the BVD infiltrator, “everyone present considered the release of a subject in prison to be a scandal,” says Het Parool. Lages traveled to Germany after his release and died five years later.
Another issue analyzed by the committee and closely followed by the BVD was the search for compensation for Jewish war survivors and their families. A form of subsidization for those persecuted by the Nazis that was introduced by law in 1973, almost 30 years after the Second World War. Of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands in 1940, only 35,000 remained. Of the 107,000 deported to the extermination camps, 102,000 died. According to the Auschwitz Committee, 220 members of the Roma and Sinti communities also died.
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In 1947, at least 342 Jewish residents of Amsterdam had to pay taxes on their property abandoned through internment in the concentration camps. In most cases, their homes were confiscated by the Nazis and sold to Dutch collaborators. The facts were uncovered in 2011 by Charlotte van den Berg, an intern who worked on digitizing municipal archives. Since he received no response from the consistory, he went to Het Parool (founded in 1941 by the Dutch resistance) in 2013. The city council then commissioned a report, which was published in 2014, which resulted in a fund of 10 million euros being created for distribution to the city's Jewish community.
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