Camp Amersfoort played a greater role in the destruction of Jews than thought

NOS News•today, 01:21

Camp Amersfoort played a greater role in the Holocaust than previously thought. For example, direct deportations did indeed take place via the transit camp at Leusden, on the south side of Amersfoort, to concentration camps in the east.

This is evident from the book The forgotten story of the Jewish prisoners of Camp Amersfoort by researcher Amanda Kluveld (Maastricht University), reported in the newspaper Trouw writes.

“This research puts Camp Amersfoort in a completely different light,” says Floris van Dijk in the newspaper. Van Dijk is head of research at National Monument Camp Amersfoort.

Camp Amersfoort has been known since the Second World War as a transit camp for forced laborers and as a location where resistance fighters were held. But not as a camp in which Jews were collected and from which they were immediately deported. Historian Kluveld’s research now shows that this image needs to be adjusted and that the camp is wrongly missing from the list of Nazi camps that played a major role in the destruction of Jews during the war.

The camp was already a gathering place for Jews even ten months before the opening of Camp Westerbork. Groups of Jewish Dutch people were transported from Amersfoort to the Auschwitz extermination camp and to Mauthausen penal camp, where they were murdered.

Jews were also treated horribly in the camp itself. For example, it appears that 82 Jews were murdered in Camp Amersfoort. One of them was a baby.

We could have guessed that it was bad. But the fact that it was that bad is really shocking.

“What happened to the Jews in Camp Amersfoort does not fit into the relatively clean image that exists of the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands,” Kluveld told Trouw. “Pencils were stuck in their eyes, beards were set on fire, Jews were thrown into cesspools, beaten to death.”

Based on new documents and statements made after the Second World War, Kluveld also concludes that non-Jews in the camp were pitted against their Jewish fellow prisoners. “It was said to Jewish helpers: you will be an anti-Semite here within three months.”

Kluveld: “What we learn from this research is that Camp Amersfoort was the beginning of the end for many Jewish prisoners.” The historian hopes that her research contributes to recognition of the suffering in Amersfoort camp during the Second World War.

“We could have suspected that it was bad,” Van Dijk responded in the newspaper. “But the fact that it was that bad is really shocking.”