Amsterdam Apology—Hollow Rhetoric?

By Rafael Medoff

Eighty years after the end of the Holocaust, the mayor of Amsterdam has apologized for the crucial role the city’s administration played in the mass deportation of Dutch Jews to Auschwitz. Do such apologies serve any purpose? And has the current mayor genuinely learned the lessons of the Nazi genocide?

In July 1942, the German occupation authorities began the mass deportation of Amsterdam’s Jews to the death camps. The municipal administration, including the police and railway workers, actively collaborated. 

City officials also participated in the later hunts for Jews who were hiding in attics and elsewhere, including Anne Frank and her family. Altogether, at least 80% of Holland’s 135,000 Jews were murdered, which was the highest rate for any German-occupied country in Western Europe.

In a recent speech marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, Mayor Femke Halsema acknowledged that her predecessors “horribly abandoned [the city’s] Jewish residents.” She said, “Amsterdam’s government was, when it mattered, not heroic, not determined, and not merciful.”

Mayor Femke Halsema

Mayor Halsema noted, “Administrators and officials were not only cold and formalistic, but even willing to cooperate with the occupier. That was an indispensable step in the isolation, humiliation, deportation, dehumanization, and murdering of 60,000 Amsterdam Jews.”

Five years ago, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte also apologized for his country’s abandonment of the Jews. “With the last remaining survivors among us, I apologize on behalf of the government for the actions of the government at the time,” Rutte said.

Public apologies of this sort have a certain symbolic value, since they represent a belated but necessary acknowledgment of historical truth. Moreover, apologies can help set a society’s moral parameters and thus influence future behavior in times of crisis.

Whether or not the current mayor has truly learned from the mistakes of the past is another question. 

In her speech last month, Mayor Halsema said, “Antisemitism wasn’t brought to the Netherlands by the German occupier, and it didn’t disappear after the liberation. There has always been hatred against Jews—also in this town—and there still is.”

All true, but how did Mayor Halsema herself respond when antisemitic mob violence erupted in her city? On November 7, 2024, more than one hundred masked Muslim extremists carried out coordinated attacks on Israeli Jews who had attended an Amsterdam soccer match. According to the Amsterdam police, the violence was coordinated through social media posts in which mob leaders directed their followers to “hunt Jews.”

The Israeli victims were “ambushed by gangs of masked assailants who shouted pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel slogans while they hunted, beat and harassed them,” the Times of Israel reported. Ten Israelis were injured, and hundreds more hid in nearby buildings for hours to escape the mobs.

At a news conference the next day, Mayor Halsema called the attack “a pogrom,” noting the careful planning and the widespread extent of the violence. Other Dutch political figures likewise called it a pogrom. Ten days later, however, the mayor said she regretted using the word “pogrom,” because several Israeli soccer fans reportedly insulted some Arab fans; therefore, Halsema said, “both sides” shared the blame. 

Pressure from Halsema’s colleagues in the far-left Groenlinks (Green) Party may have influenced her retraction. Note that some Groenlinks parliamentarians publicly declared that “the fascism of the Israeli state” was to blame for the October 7 Hamas massacres.

In December 2024, five of the Amsterdam pogromists were convicted of incitement and assault. Yet the maximum sentence handed down was just six months in prison, which was given to a convict who was identified by the media only as “Sefa O.” He played a “leading role” in the pogrom, and videotape was shown in court in which he could be seen chasing Jews, punching them, knocking them down, and kicking them in the head. Another thug, identified as “Umutcan A.,” was sentenced to just one month in jail for beating up Jews.

In March 2025, three more of the attackers were convicted and likewise given slaps on the wrist. “Mounir M.” was sentenced to six weeks in jail for coordinating the assaults on WhatsApp. The longest sentence was just three months in prison, given to “Cenk D.,” who directed attackers via WhatsApp, wrote “A good Jew is a dead Jew” in the group chat, and distributed a photo of Anne Frank that the judges said trivialized the Holocaust.

The Nieuw Israelietisch Weekblad, a leading Dutch Jewish newspaper, criticized the sentences as much too lenient. Former parliamentary candidate Femke Sirag characterized them as “joke punishments for serious, subversive antisemitic violence.”

There are three concrete steps that Mayor Halsema should take now. First, she should acknowledge that the violence did resemble a pogrom and–based on the attackers’ own words–was obviously motivated by antisemitism. Second, she should call for the release of the attackers’ names; there is no reason violent antisemites should enjoy the shield of anonymity. And third, she should take a portion of the $ 28 million that she has allotted for “promoting Jewish life” in Amsterdam and use it to pay restitution to the pogrom victims.

These three steps will not erase the black cloud of shame that hangs over Amsterdam’s political and legal authorities for their mishandling of the November 2024 attacks. But such actions would at least demonstrate that the mayor’s Holocaust apology was not just hollow rhetoric. 

Dr. Medoff is the founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust.