"Now that the last survivors are still with us, I apologize today (Sunday) on behalf of the government for the actions of the authorities at the time," said Mark Rutte, before an audience of community representatives. Jewish, political figures and survivors. For the first time, the Dutch Prime Minister has apologized for the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands during the Second World War.
Appeals launched in 2012
Mark Rutte, Liberal Prime Minister, spoke in Amsterdam during a national tribute to the victims of the Holocaust, on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz by the Red Army. Of the 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands, 102,000 were killed. "I do this knowing that it is impossible to put words into something as big and horrible as the Holocaust," said Mark Rutte, wearing a blue kippah.
In 2012, calls were launched, notably by the leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), the far right deputy Geert Wilders, for the government to apologize for the role of the Dutch state in the persecution of Jews under German occupation. But Mark Rutte, already prime minister, had estimated that there was not enough information on the action of the government at the time, nor of "enough broad support" to justify an official apology. He then replied to anyone who questioned his judgment that the Dutch State had already recognized certain shortcomings in 2000, when then Prime Minister Wim Kok had apologized for the "icy reception" reserved for the survivors of the camps in their return to the Netherlands, occupied by the Germans from 1940 to 1945.
A symbolic date
On Sunday, Mark Rutte finally said the words long awaited by the victims of the Shoah and their families. "Our government institutions have not acted as guardians of justice and security," said the Prime Minister, adding that "too many Dutch officials had carried out the occupier's orders". "The bitter consequences of (Jewish) registers and deportations were not sufficiently recognized or recognized in time," said Mark Rutte. “Overall, it was too little. Too little protection. Too little help. Too little recognition, ”he added. “Seventy-five years after Auschwitz, anti-Semitism is still with us. This is precisely why we must fully recognize what happened at the time and speak it out loud, ”he said again.
The day chosen by the Dutch government to recognize the authorities' "failings" during the war is very symbolic, observes Frank van Vree, director of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD). "This is an appropriate time," he said, quoted by Dutch public television NOS. "The first steps towards apologizing have already been made in the past, I think it is no coincidence that it is precisely during this commemoration, 75 years after Auschwitz, that they are pronounced", he says.
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