THE HOLOCAUST IN HOLLAND AND THE TWILIGHT WORLD OF THE WESTERBORK TRANSIT CAMP

PATRICK S. WOLFE

I – EVOLVING PERSPECTIVES ON THE HOLOCAUST IN HOLLAND

The Netherlands was occupied by Nazi Germany from May 14, 1940 until May 7, 1945. These years increasingly became a time of privation and horror for much of the population, especially the country’s Jews, most of whom were swallowed in the Holocaust’s maw.

In the first years after the Netherlands’ liberation, the prevailing view of Dutch wartime behaviour “was not too nuanced,” historian Frank van Riet writes in The Jewish Guards: Supervision in the Dutch Gateway to Hell (2022).^[1] While this prevalent but facile perspective is understandable after the trauma of the occupation, it also fostered what van Riet calls “the myth of a ‘national resistance’.”^[2] This myth was discredited in the 1960s. First, in 1965, when Jacob Presser published Ondergang (Downfall), which came out in English three years later as Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry. Second, in 1969, when Friedrich Weinreb’s three-volume, 1,800-page memoir Collaboration and Resistance: An Attempt at Demystification “exploded,” in historian Jacob Boas’s words, “on a complacent, prosperous Holland like a bombshell.”^[3] A shady, deeply controversial figure who was tried and imprisoned by the Netherlands after the war, Weinreb was later investigated by the country’s State Institute for War Documentation, which concluded he ”was ‘one of the most successful fantasts of the Second World War’ whose every action was governed by ‘personal desires for power, money and sex.’”^[4] Boas emphasizes that “Collaboration and Resistance dismisses the fond postwar notions of a heroic Dutch resistance to the Nazis as ‘ridiculous,’ a ‘fairy tale’.”^[5]

Similarly, van Riet maintains that Presser’s book “set in motion a short but violent generational conflict,” which “had profound consequences for public opinion.”^[6] While The Jewish Guards primarily addresses supervision and control at the Westerbork transit camp in the northeast of the Netherlands, which was the last stop for most of the country’s Jews before the death camps in the east, the book also continues the historiographic reappraisal process, specifically related to Westerbork’s alleged “Jewish SS.”

The Nazis began introducing antisemitic measures during the autumn of 1940 and ratcheting them up that winter. This included the placement of “Jews not welcome” signs in restaurants, cafés and coffee houses. At one point, these signs were displayed in nearly all such establishments in Amsterdam, but most were quickly removed by the business owners. These and other measures prompted a series of violent clashes that culminated in the massive Amsterdam strike of February 25-26, 1941, protesting the persecution of the Jews.^[7]

Although the strike was quickly suppressed, Presser’s contemporary and fellow historian Louis de Jong referred to it in The Netherlands and Nazi Germany (1990) as “the first and only antipogrom strike in human history.”^[8] But Bob Moore, an historian of the next generation, maintains in Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940-1945 (1997) that “while the heroism of the strikers and the ‘particular dignity’ of the action cannot be denied, it has to be said that it failed to deflect the Germans from their task.”^[9] Little more than two weeks after the strike, Dr. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reichskommissar of the German occupation government, called for a policy of “for us or against us.”^[10] Moreover, in the spring of 1942, when Dutch officials, on German orders, once again placed “Forbidden for Jews” signs in restaurants and other public places, they encountered virtually no resistance.^[11]

Moore also stresses that the Nazis’ civilian occupation government in the Netherlands allowed “greater scope … for the SS, German police, and the Nazi Party to operate unhindered,” compared to the German military regimes in Belgium and France.^[12] This had devastating results for the Netherlands’ Jews, 73 per cent (102,000) of whom died against 40 per cent of those in Belgium and 25 per cent in France. Of the Netherlands’ 140,000 Jews, 107,000 were arrested and deported to the death camps; only 5,000 returned after the war.^[13] Of the remaining 33,000, about half survived by hiding, including Presser.^[14]

The Nazis established their policy of mechanized genocide at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. Mass deportations of Jews from Germany to Poland had begun in October 1941, the same month that the second of two planning meetings occurred to work out the mechanics for removing the Netherlands’ Jews. The plan for the Netherlands also included steps to increasingly isolate its Jews: first, in February 1942, by requiring that their identity papers bear a stamp indicating that they were Jews and, second, in early May, that they wear a yellow star on their outer clothing. At the same time, following notable public statements by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in November 1941 and Hitler in early 1942 on the pending annihilation of the Jews, the Nazis decided such statements could prove counterproductive by prompting protest and resistance in occupied Western Europe, so they began emphasizing the euphemism of Jewish resettlement.^[15]

During the violent clashes in the run-up to the Amsterdam strike, the Germans had demanded the creation of a Jewish Council, which spread the fiction of resettlement and served as a tool of Nazi manipulation and coercion. As with the council, the Nazis accomplished much of their “dirty work” at Westerbork through the Jews themselves.^[16] Originally built as a central camp for Jewish refugees in the Netherlands, it began operation in October 1939.^[17] When the Germans invaded the country on May 10, 1940, Westerbork housed approximately 700 refugees. This number grew to 1,527, including 270 children, by July 1, 1942, when the Dutch transferred control of the camp to the Nazis.^[18]

II – WESTERBORK: COMMANDERS AND KEY INDIVIDUALS

With the German invasion, Westerbork’s refugees were evacuated by train to prevent their possible capture by the Germans. At Leeuwarden, they were housed by local families until they were returned to Westerbork on May 27. In the interim, consideration was given to interning the refugees in Amsterdam, but this was rejected as they might “attract the attention of the Germans,” which “could have adverse consequences for all Jews living in the Netherlands.”^[19]

During the summer of 1940, Dirk Arie Syswerda, Westerbork’s commander, was replaced by Jacob Schol, who, as commander of the Hook of Holland refugee camp, had a proven record for leadership and discipline. Compared to Syswerda, Schol was expected to run a tighter ship at Westerbork. This included preventing Westerbork’s German refugees “from being sent back to Germany.” A Reserve Captain in the Dutch army, Schol apparently believed that “a more stringent policy” based on clear regulations, firm discipline and control, and appropriate punishments was the best way to protect the refugees; if the camp ran smoothly, the chance of German intervention would be minimized.^[20] Both Schol and the Dutch Gendarmerie, which assumed responsibility for policing the camp on March 1, 1941, maintained generally positive relationships with the Jewish residents.^[21]

Behind the scenes, major changes were brewing. In conjunction with their planning for the Final Solution, the Nazis would have decided during the latter months of 1941 to convert Westerbork into “a transit camp for all Dutch Jews and Jews residing in the Netherlands.” In addition, Westerbork was to be expanded. Arrangements were made in early 1942 to build 24 large wooden barracks to house 5,000 to 7,000 people. Construction “started without explanation as to why this was done. Documents prove that they waited until the last moment to do this.”^[22]

On February 19, 1942, anticipating the forthcoming German takeover, Schol modified the camp’s organization by establishing 13 service groups to cover “all parts of the camp organisation.”^[23] This important initiative was “proposed” by Kurt Schlesinger, one of Westerbork’s first German Jewish refugees. He was initially “employed building the camp,” subsequently joined the camp’s “Jewish Council bureaucracy,” and ultimately became the controlling figure in what van Riet refers to as “the Jewish self-government” that largely consisted of German Jewish refugees;^[24] “Dutch Jews did not arrive … until the summer of 1942.”^[25] This highly significant progression, which determined what Westerbork would become, was enabled by Schlesinger’s suggestion of inmate participation in the camp’s operation, which “led to the changes in the camp structure of March 1942,” according to Moore. Boas, who was born at Camp Westerbork on November 1, 1943, becoming Inmate 9378, notes that the changes included “the formation of a … Jewish police force,” the Ordedienst or OD.^[26]

July 1, 1942 is not only the date the Dutch government transferred Westerbork to the Germans, it’s also the date it became a transit camp and that SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Erich Deppner became the first German commander.^[27] Deppner made three notable decisions. First, to order Schol to remain in his position after Schol said he was resigning. Schol “gave in not because of [Deppner’s] order, but because he had received requests and even pleas … to stay. One of these pleas came from the Jewish Council in Amsterdam,” which asked him to “defend the Jews.” Deppner quickly transformed “the refugee camp into the gateway to the murder factories” (the first transport left Westerbork for Auschwitz on July 15), but he “did not have enough staff… to take over the camp as a whole.”^[28] Deppner’s second decision was “to appoint Schlesinger … camp administrator.” His third decision was to award 2,000 of Westerbork’s 3,000 original inmates, most of them German Jewish refugees, long-term resident status, exempting them from deportation.^[29]

Deppner’s second and third decisions appear to be responses to the problematic first transports to Auschwitz. According to Boas, “July 15 and 16 were days of confusion and tumult such as Westerbork had not seen before. On both days a total of four hundred inmates—almost all German Jews—was ordered to join a transport of Jews from Amsterdam for the journey East.” This caused “a furor … among the Alter Kampinsassen [the long-term residents]. They felt betrayed by the [Amsterdam] Jewish Council [which] had openly avowed their intent to place foreign Jews” at the top of lists of Jews to be deported.^[30] Hence, Schlesinger’s appointment as camp administrator and the special exemption given to many of the long-term residents, which greatly strengthened the position of the refugee German Jews. Moreover, Deppner “avoided Schol,” preferring to communicate with German Jews “who, as the disgruntled Dutch Jews put it, ‘understood [the German] manner a little better.’” Boas refers to Schlesinger’s “successful palace coup.” He adds that “Schlesinger was far from being Westerbork’s only example of Nazi-Jewish osmosis, though he showed the fruition at its crudest…. Having become inured to camp life over the years of their captivity, sharing moreover with Westerbork’s Nazis an antipathy towards the Dutch and Dutch Jews, [the German Jews who were administrative bigwigs] identified with the oppressor to a degree that was both comic and revolting.” Boas also states that “Schlesinger and Deppner understood each other. When the next transport left Westerbork, not one of the ‘pioneers’ was on it. Nor would there be any on subsequent ones,” until the latter half of 1943.^[31]

Van Riet agrees that the management of the July 15 and 16 transports “caused a lot of commotion. In fact, it almost caused a riot.” Yet he tells the story differently than Boas. Where there was a shortage in the number of Jews arriving from Amsterdam, Deppner made up the difference by selecting “100 men from Camp Westerbork,” plus 50 orphans who resided there, and had 300 Jews from Camp Amersfoort “quickly transferred [who arrived] without luggage, hungry and dirty, [and] must have left a horrible impression.” Van Riet notes that it was the use of the orphans that triggered the near riot. He also references “harrowing scenes, such as the rough way the Jews were forced into the freight wagons.” All this was antithetical to camp “peace and order” that was deemed essential if “the increasing number of incoming and outgoing transports” were to be managed efficiently.^[32]

Deppner was only a temporary commander. He was replaced by SS-Obersturmführer Josef Hugo Dischner, who took over on September 1. Dischner, who Presser describes as “a rough SS man, with no brains and almost always under the influence of alcohol,” was in charge for less than six weeks. He was succeeded by Polizei Inspektor Bohrmann who was on the job for a mere three days before being replaced on October 12, 1942, by SS-Obersturmführer Albert Konrad Gemmeker, who was in command for 30 months, until just before the camp was liberated by the Canadian army. Gemmeker removed Schol in March 1943.^[33]

Gemmeker and Schlesinger are pivotal players in what transpired at Westerbork. Another important figure, as a witness, was the well-known Dutch journalist Philip Mechanicus, an inmate at Westerbork from November 7, 1942, until March 8, 1944. Of these 16 months, he spent the first nine in the hospital. He’d been “grievously ill treated” at Amersfoort concentration camp where he’d been taken on October 25, 1942, as a criminal case, after being arrested on September 27, apparently for not wearing the Jewish star. For the nine months from May 28, 1943, to February 28, 1944, Mechanicus kept a diary. On May 31, he recorded that Westerbork’s inmates believed Amersfoort was worse than the camps at Vught or Ellecom and that it represented “the peak of human misery.” On September 14, he added, “I got to know the brutes at the Amersfoort concentration camp.” It was “more than enough for one human life.” His diary, In Dépôt, was published posthumously in Dutch in 1964, slightly predating the important books of Presser and Weinreb. The English translation, Waiting for Death: A Diary, followed in 1968.^[34]

 

On August 15, 1943, Schlesinger informed Mechanicus that Westerbork’s structure and operation were “thanks to Deppner” and his key decisions. He added that Deppner’s successor, Dischner, had “wanted to bring in the SS and he sent a telegram to that effect to The Hague. But I sent off a counter-telegram to The Hague. Dischner threatened to shoot me for that. He stood with a revolver in front of me.”

Schlesinger told Mechanicus, “leaders must have the guts to say ‘no’.”^[35]

Dischner’s telegram may have contributed to the assessment that he “was not suited for the position of Commander,” for it contradicted the occupier’s goal of deporting the Jews while using as little German manpower as possible. Van Riet’s statement that the resource-strapped occupier “gratefully abused the existing camp system” points to the quid pro quo that emerged between the Germans and Westerbork’s Jewish refugees between February and July 1942.^[36] As Moore states, “the internal Jewish administration provided [the] smooth-running operation” the Germans wanted.^[37] This protected the Jewish administration’s privileged position and largely kept the dreaded SS and German Green Police at bay, although in a practical but not literal sense. Van Riet notes “the presence of only a dozen SS men, most of whom had suffered grave injuries on the Eastern Front, proved sufficient to run Camp Westerbork like a well-oiled deportation machine.”^[38] This arrangement also meant the Dutch Jews, for a time, would be deported first, while the refugee Jews would be deported later.

The Germans, Moore reiterates, were predisposed to deal “with ‘fellow’ Germans, even if they were Jews,” such as Schlesinger. This preference was also apparent with SS-Hauptsturmführer Ferdinand Aus der Fünten’s Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration), and his staff who sent the letters summoning Jews to report for deportation. They worked closely with the Austrian Jewish refugee Dr. Edwin Sluzker, head of the Expositur, a branch of Amsterdam’s Jewish Council, which was responsible for allocating exemptions from labour service, “a disproportionate number” of which likely went to refugee Jews.^[39]

III – WESTERBORK: THE REFUGEE ARISTOCRACY

Commander Deppner’s decisions created what Presser, Moore, and Boas describe as a camp “aristocracy” led by Schlesinger. Prior to this designation by these historians, Mechanicus, in one of his last diary entries, referred to Westerbork’s “aristocrats among the Jews: Schlesinger, Todtmann, Stein and so on…. Frau Stein [was] the dictator at the Accommodation Office,” while Todtmann was Commander Gemmeker’s “Jewish adjutant… who forms the link between the Commandant and the Registration Department.” The aristocracy “effectively determined the domination of the camp structure by German Jews.”^[40]

In addition to Schlesinger, the aristocracy’s leading trio included Dr. Fritz Spanier, who like Gemmeker was from Düsseldorf, and Arthur Pisk, a former officer in the Austrian army. Presser states Schlesinger was “the powerless and yet so powerful grand vizier of the all-powerful Camp Commandant. He and his round table were largely responsible for making up the transports for the weekly train from the ‘transport material’ available (this term was actually used)…. these paladins… had control over life and death and were accordingly flattered, influenced, bribed, envied and hated, and indeed loathed.”^[41]

Dr. Spanier was one of Westerbork’s earliest residents. Assigned to head the hospital, it became an extraordinary institution under his leadership in the even more extraordinary world of Westerbork. Moore writes, “the sick and the infirm were … nursed back to health so that they could be loaded on to the cattle wagons for the journey to Poland.” He adds, “Spanier was considered as by far the least corrupt of the aristocrats.”^[42] Mechanicus said Spanier was “charming” and “a man of some stature, a good man.” Spanier had the power to prevent members of his staff and their dependents being sent on transport, although it “could only be used sparingly.” His position was such that he reputedly “did not even rise when Gemmeker came in.”^[43]

Born in Vienna in 1891, Pisk left Austria after the Anschluss and new anti-Jewish measures made his women’s hat business impossible. He arrived at Westerbork at the end of February 1940. He headed the camp’s Fire Department. When Schol’s revamped camp organization created the OD, Pisk became its leader. The OD was initially staffed with 13 former firefighters. By July, it had grown to 20, of whom 18 were German or Austrian; two were Dutch. It developed into “a fully-fledged Police Force.”^[44]

The OD is a major focus of The Jewish Guards. Van Riet states that the background and motivation of some OD members “is explored for the first time.”^[45] The original OD uniform of brown overalls was changed to green overalls on April 27, 1943,^[46] which led to the OD being compared to the green-uniformed German police who were notorious for the roundup and arrest of Jews prior to deportation.^[47] Notably, the OD was sometimes deployed outside Westerbork to locations such as Amsterdam and Apeldoorn to assist the roundup process.^[48] The OD was “one of the most hated service groups” and was labelled by some as “the Jewish SS” and “the Jewish Gestapo.”^[49] Mechanicus recorded these phrases in his diary. Presser and de Jong both accepted and popularized the term “the Jewish SS,” a finding van Riet challenges—as will be discussed—given the complexity of the circumstances in which the OD operated.^[50]

The aristocracy extended to all those who had been exempted from deportation “until further notice,” including many long-term residents, baptized Jews, foreign Jews, Jews in mixed marriages or who worked for the German war industry or for the Jewish Council or who fell into another qualifying category.^[51] One’s category of exemption was indicated by the type of stamp on one’s personal identity card. The most valuable stamps conferred additional privileges such as smoking, a later curfew, and permission to have 250 guilders. Some long-term residents and service group members could also live in small, one-room cottages with kitchenettes, living and sleeping quarters. These provided “a world of difference from the barracks” in terms of privacy and not having to line up for the toilet, according to van Riet. The exemptions and stamps helped control the flow of Jews to the death camps.^[52] Presser called it “a wicked system of distinctions [and] a satanic application of the dictum ‘divide and rule’.”^[53]

Starting in 1941, the distinctions also included “lists,” identified by different names, that supposedly offered potential means of escape from deportation. “One of the most sought after lists was that organized by the German official Calmeyer, involving an investigation of ancestry by means of which one could present oneself as an ‘Aryan’,” writes Presser. “And there were all kinds of people… who arranged methods of evasion, emigration, exemption on a very long-term basis…. All the lists [had an admission fee and] smashed sooner or later.” This was true of Friedrich Weinreb’s list, which had its greatest success at Westerbork, but was revoked on February 3, 1944; “the bulk of his exemptees” were put on the transport to Auschwitz that left five days later. Presser quotes Mechanicus’s astute observation: “A list is a collection of Jews who will one day be deported.” Nonetheless, the subsequent investigation into Weinreb by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation found “that being on Weinreb’s list materially improved one’s chances of survival, from the 20 percent that was the Dutch-Jewish rate as a whole to a range of 28 to 38 percent.”^[54]

The exemptions, stamps and lists were always under threat of change and often operated in complex ways. Mechanicus was divorced from a mixed marriage, a union that had produced a child which he refers to as “an ‘Aryan’ child” and “my half-Aryan daughter.”^[55] In September 1943, after “A number of divorced partners from mixed marriages departed with the latest transport,” he observed: “Jewish fathers and mothers of ‘Aryan’ children are at present given Theresienstadt [concentration camp] as a mark of favour, whereas if Jewish men are found with ‘Aryan’ women they go to a [worse] camp where they are sometimes unlucky enough to be killed.”^[56]

As exemptions were cancelled, Westerbork’s aristocracy shrank and shifted. On July 7, 1943, a year after the deportations began, Gemmeker “announced that the stamps of all residents, with the exception of those with a blue ‘Z’, were no longer valid.” This was part of a camp reorganization. “In addition to the blue ‘Z’, a new group was formed, consisting of a maximum of 1,623 men and women between 14 and 65 …. They had to be able to be fully deployed in the labour process.”^[57]

Two months later, when department heads were “to nominate … ‘workers’ for a prolonged stay in the camp,” Mechanicus noted that Dutch Jews were “given preference…. [N]ow… baptized Jews, applicants for Palestine, Long-Term Residents, are finding it is their turn to worry about deportation.” He added, “All at once the portals of Theresienstadt,” which had largely “been reserved for German Jews…. have been opened to Dutch Jews.” In December, he stated explicitly, “The status of the Long-Term Residents has been lowered and undermined.”^[58]

Although undergoing some changes in the latter half of 1943, the privileged position of many of the long-term residents was a source of ill-will between the Dutch Jews and the German Jews. Presser referred to “the Long-Term Residents [as] the lucky ones,” but others, like Louis de Wijze, a newcomer who arrived at the camp in early October 1942, came to believe the long-term residents had “suffered as much and often even more than the Dutch Jews.”^[59] Apparently, Commander Deppner, in mid-1942, “felt that the German Jews had suffered enough and that it was the turn of the Dutch now.” Mechanicus, who brought a professional journalist’s thoroughness to describing the respective situations of Westerbork’s German and Dutch Jews,^[60] noted that “sentimentality of this kind or rather such sensitivity with regard to the just apportioning of all the violence and injustice inflicted on the Jews is not, as a rule, in keeping with the National Socialist regime.”^[61]

Boas maintained, in Moore’s words, “that three or more years of camp life and the view that they had been abandoned, both by the Dutch government and their co-religionists, made the German Jews … ill-disposed towards their Dutch counterparts and … enthusiastic to exploit their new positions of power.”^[62]

Mechanicus makes several points about the superior, sometimes abusive, attitude of the German Jews. First, “The German Jew, accustomed to… efficiency and thoroughness, cannot endure the lack of discipline or the touch of anarchy and individualism to be found in the Dutch Jews.” Second, by behaving like “National Socialists or Prussian soldiers,” the German Jews create “permanent tension…. This evil is to be found mainly in the subordinate staff, in hut leaders, porters, kitchen bosses, work leaders, people who, for the most part, have been given their authority and a say in things for the first time in their lives. They have been given some power and they abuse it completely.” Third, “these brothers of the same race… cannot stand one another. The Germans despise their Dutch camp companions and the Dutch hate the German Jews, not as fiercely as they hate the German National Socialists, it is true, but they do hate them because they are Germans—Prussians…. accustomed to playing the leader wherever they are.” According to Boas, an “unbending antagonism … kept German and Dutch Jews at daggers drawn.”^[63]

Notwithstanding examples of Dutch Jews being put on transport for insulting German Jews,^[64] it was de Wijze’s view that the use of Jews to deport other Jews was, in van Riet’s words, “perhaps one of the most gruesome and refined cruelties of the occupier,” which created “great inner struggle” for many. “Every day the residents experienced the fear of being sent on transport if they refused to do what was asked of them.”^[65] Van Riet adds that “the constant threat of being sent on transport if they refused to cooperate … kept the system functioning.”^[66] Indeed, thanks to this threat, “it was hardly necessary to apply physical violence.”^[67]

IV – WESTERBORK: THE TRANSPORTS

The arrival and departure of the trains was Westerbork’s central reality. Presser said the trains were the camp’s “dynamic factor”; Mechanicus said they created “constant tension.”^[68] According to Boas, “the train was [Gemmeker’s] obsession just as much as the inmates’. Both lived in complete thrall to its appetite—Gemmeker by wishing to satisfy its voracity, the Jews by wishing to escape it.” October 1942 was “the biggest transport month of all”; it saw “fifteen thousand Jews [enter] Westerbork and close to twelve thousand immediately [sent on] to Poland.”^[69]

The OD supervised people on both arriving and departing trains. Through that October, trains destined for Westerbork arrived at the Hooghalen railway station, more than five kilometres from the camp. At the start of November 1942, an extension of the rail line enabled trains to enter the camp. The OD played a support role to the Gendarmerie Detachment in unloading and loading trains at Hooghalen but assumed full responsibility for these functions from the beginning of January 1943. The first incoming transport of arrested Jews arrived on May 28, 1942.^[70]

Between July 15, 1942 and September 1944, 93 transports left Westerbork on a near-weekly basis, mostly on Tuesday mornings, most of them bound for Auschwitz.^[71] These trains, which carried varying numbers of people, were augmented by some that went direct from Amsterdam and Apeldoorn to Auschwitz.^[72] But almost “107,000 Jews and several hundred Sinti and Roma were deported … largely via Westerbork.”^[73] While Auschwitz was the terminus of all previous transports: “Suddenly on 2 March [1943], the destination was changed and 19 of the following 20 transports were sent to Sobibor extermination camp in Lublin district.” There was also a five-week break from July 20 through August 23, 1943, when no transports left Westerbork. The reason for these interruptions was that Auschwitz, during March-May, “was almost entirely taken up with the extermination of the Jews from Salonika,” after which it was “beset by a typhus epidemic.”^[74]

There were other exceptions. The trips to the camps weren’t always three days, nor was the conveyance always a “cattle truck” or “cattle car” that Mechanicus said was filled “with forty, fifty or sixty persons”; a second witness maintained “about seventy people [were] squashed into each [freight car].”^[75] On a few occasions a proper “passenger train” was used.^[76] Mechanicus mentions “real passenger coaches, for Jews, as if they are going on a pleasure trip.”^[77] This refers to “the Palestine exchange,” involving “Jews who are on the Watik List, the list of the so-called ‘Veterans’ who are to be exchanged for Germans.”^[78] Originally scheduled to depart for Celle, near Hanover, in November 1943, these Jews didn’t actually depart until January 11.^[79] Fräulein Slottke, “an agent of the Sicherheitsdienst,” the SS’s Security Service, called it “a unique transport.” Mechanicus said it left “in the middle of the day” in a relaxed manner: “The applicants could also take all their goods and chattels with them.”^[80] The January 18 transport was also “made up of third-class carriages with luggage vans for the sick and livestock trucks for provisions.” It was destined for Theresienstadt and would take “More than half of the remaining Long-Term Residents.”^[81] There were at least three other transports to Celle (February 1 and 15) and Theresienstadt (February 25) during this period, all with upgraded cars.^[82] As Boas observed: “The camp’s Long-Term Residents not only lived, ate, and dressed better than the proletariat, they also anticipated a qualitatively superior resolution of their Westerbork internment. Not for them Auschwitz, the dumping-ground of the unexempted, but the reputed comforts of Theresienstadt, the ‘Model Camp’ in the Bohemian forest.”^[83]

Whether the transports consisted of routine cattle cars or were the novel passenger car variety, they all ended during the first half of September 1944. Two factors stopped them: the Allied advance into the Netherlands and, starting September 17, a national railway strike, which paralyzed the system.^[84]

On the day the first transport left for Auschwitz, a 28-year-old woman, Etty Hillesum, began work as a typist for the Jewish Council in Amsterdam. She did this on the “urgent advice” of Jaap, the elder of her two younger brothers, to avoid being sent to Westerbork.^[85] But two weeks later, she voluntarily changed jobs, moving to the council’s Department of Social Welfare for People in Transit, at Westerbork. However, for the 13 months, July 30, 1942, to September 7, 1943, that she was attached to Westerbork, she was physically there for only five months. As a volunteer, she was permitted to leave the camp at least several times before her exemption was cancelled in July 1943.^[86] When she was absent from Westerbork, she was mostly at home in Amsterdam suffering extended periods of ill health related to gallstones that took a long time to diagnose.^[87]

Like Mechanicus, Hillesum was a diarist. Her diary, An Interrupted Life, covering March 9, 1941 to October 13, 1942, was first published in Dutch in 1981 and in English in 1983. She also kept a diary at Westerbork, but it was lost. The 1996 edition of Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork includes 125 pages of her letters which, Presser says, “are incomparable documents of their kind.” They and Mechanicus’s diary both cover the June through early September 1943 period.^[88]

“I’ve been up since four this morning dealing with babies and carrying luggage,” Hillesum wrote on June 8 about that day’s transport of 3,017 Jews, the largest to leave Westerbork. “In a few hours you can accumulate enough gloom here to last a lifetime…. The whole camp holds its breadth; another three thousand Jews are about to leave. There are babies with pneumonia lying in the freight cars. Sometimes what goes on here seems totally unreal.”^[89]

Hours after the July 6 transport, she told friends, “the uncertainty until the last minute … is precisely what saps you.” Two days later, in another letter, she added: “I must explain that the call-ups for the transport come in the middle of the night, a few hours before the train leaves. If people are still needed at the last minute to fill the quotas, then Jews are seized here and there at random from the barracks. And that’s why the days before the transport are so nerve-racking. The day afterward I fainted twice, but I’m fine again now—until the next transport.”^[90]

Hillesum and Mechanicus both compared the transports to amputations. Mechanicus also said they were like shipwrecks. After one transport, with the atmosphere “normal again,” he said it was “like a raging sea that has grown calm after a fierce hurricane.” On a rare, transport-free Tuesday, he rejoiced: “Peace and quiet. The world seems kind and merciful.”^[91]

Mid-summer 1943, Mechanicus observed: “The hospital hut with its 250 beds … is the daily setting for family reunions.” Although he did mention the fright that existed “at the prospect of deportation,” his focus was not the looming reality of the transports, it was on how people’s lives had changed.

Families sit together looking at family portraits, sometimes the only possession they managed to bring with them … apart from their personal linen. Others sit together eating their evening meal from the mess-tin that the wife has prepared…

Understanding wives try to calm nervy or impatient husbands with words of comfort. It is like a colourful market where human tendernesses are exchanged—in an atmosphere of misery on the threshold between two worlds—the familiar and established milieu with its fixed values and the world of the pauper in endless space, indeterminate and unprotected.^[92]

V – WESTERBORK: A MACABRE, NIGHTMARISH, FAIRY TALE WORLD

Mechanicus’s depiction of Westerbork as the threshold between two worlds applies in multiple ways and, sometimes, as if seen in a hall of distorting mirrors. He notes, for example: “There is something loathsome going on in the background when every transport leaves. This time [August 31, 1943], while the transport was being got ready and was moving off, people were dancing. Actually dancing. Rehearsals have been going on for some time for a revue. As if Westerbork itself was not rather like a theatrical show.”^[93] Five weeks earlier, he’d remarked:

The henchmen of the Führer play a cat and mouse game with the Jews—they chase them from one corner to the other and take pleasure in their fear and gradual exhaustion. The henchman at Westerbork mocks and derides them by laying on a cabaret with light and airy music as a change from the macabre Tuesday morning transports.^[94]

Yet, earlier still, on July 13, he’d claimed: “Westerbork has the best cabaret in Holland. National Socialist dignitaries come here to see it.”^[95]

Among the performers were famous pre-war cabaret entertainers: Max Ehrlich, Chaya Goldstein and Willy Rosen. Hillesum mentions them all. Mechanicus references Ehrlich and adds Camilla Spira, the star of the new revue that opened October 16. When Spira was “Aryanized,” enabling her to return to Amsterdam, Mechanicus commented: “A great loss for the revue,” the opening of which had been “Absolutely packed out,” as were earlier revues. He had mixed feelings about the entertainment. “Over this whole revue an atmosphere of painful melancholy and suffering hangs like a haze.” Of the October 16 opening, he said: “…well-acted. A great part of the programme consisted of dancing by revue girls with bare legs. The Oberstrumführer present with Aus der Fünten. Went home with a feeling of disgust.” On September 2, Hillesum noted: “The revue is taking over the whole camp…. Before the last transport, the people who were due to leave worked all day for the revue. Everything here has an indescribably clownish madness and sadness.”^[96] She was contemptuous of the entertainers, referring to them as “the commandant’s court jesters” who, as Boas notes, “by day wheeled the belongings of the deportees to the transport train and at night basked in the adulation of the cabaret crowd.”^[97]

Of the six chapters in Boas’s compelling history Boulevard des Misères: The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork, one is titled “Cabaret” and is devoted to Ehrlich, Rosen and Erich Ziegler who Boas says, “were the three separate parts of Westerbork’s entertainment dynamo.” From the summer of 1943 through the summer of 1944, they were responsible for “a total of six original variety shows [which were presented] almost entirely in German.” Although Boas states that Rosen “raised the idea of starting a cabaret with the Commandant,” it appears the origin of the revues may go back to mid-1942. Mechanicus, in his diary entry for July 6, 1942, remarks that “among [today’s] deportees was a male nurse who had been given permission by Dr. Spanier to sing a few songs in the hospital hut in the evening, but had laid on a whole cabaret show. For this excess he was punished by deportation. We must have discipline!”^[98] (This act of Dr. Spanier’s contrasts markedly with some of the descriptions of him cited earlier. Moreover, when the wife of Dr. Elie Cohen, a member of Spanier’s staff, insulted a German Jew, resulting in the couple being put on transport to Auschwitz, Spanier refused to intercede; Dr. Cohen survived. It is notable that the report by a Herr Wohl, who visited Westerbork during the summer of 1943 to determine what made it a “model camp,” said about Spanier: “No one questions his medical ability, but there is some question as to his humanity.”)^[99]

The camp’s cultural life also featured symphony concerts, smaller musical events and a range of initiatives to create a degree of normalcy in acutely abnormal circumstances.^[100] At the outset of the five-week transport hiatus, Mechanicus reported: “…it is said the Commandant intends to establish a café chantant for the grown-ups and a playground for the children.” The playground with “four seesaws, two horizontal bars and a sandpit” was ready by the end of August. A month later, Mechanicus recorded: “The Westerbork Café opened yesterday in the old Registration Hall. Packed out, almost all young people. A string orchestra.” On February 18, he added: “Westerbork is becoming a social centre. This afternoon yet another café opened.”^[101]

There was a kindergarten for children of “two to fourteen years” so their parents could work. When the school experienced a lengthy closure due to infectious diseases, the small children were taken for a walk each morning. There was a wide variety of athletics for young people: football and boxing matches, “basket-ball,” gymnastics, ju-jitsu, and sports meets. Mechanicus remarks: “Sport is under the august patronage of the Obersturmführer.”^[102]

All of this was one world, but it could never negate the world of the transports and how Westerbork had been structured to support the transport process. Central to this structure was Deppner’s decision to exempt 2,000 German Jews. Boas describes the importance of this decision and its ramifications:

By creating this list Deppner followed a model that without exception formed the social structure in every German concentration camp: a small elite set against a powerless Jewish commonality. In the case of Westerbork, the German Jew was pitted against the Dutch Jew, the privileged against the unprivileged—in fact, those who were to live against those who were to die. The internal tensions flowing from this strife generated a state of electric tumult among the camp dwellers while leaving the Nazi rulers in a vacuum from which they could pursue their ends without perturbation.

….The camp’s elite lived segregated from the rest of the inmates in small cottages…. A Hobbesian war of all against all among the inmates, stimulated by the corrupt excesses of the Jewish elite, served to deflect hatred from the common oppressor…. [Paradoxically,] the Nazi command … managed to promote a sense of security among the inmates which contributed to the dispatch of the deportation process…. [The] abominable thoroughness … of Westerbork’s bureaucratic machine [included the immersion of the bureaucrats in a system] that had warped them.^[103]

Gemmeker, who liked to project a public persona that was “cool, methodical, efficient,” was not immune to this warping effect. It manifested in delusion and magical thinking. “Very strangely,” Boas writes, “there had grown up in his mind a belief in some sort of compact between himself and the inmates…. For such favors as being allowed to pick berries, for example, he expected grateful compliance at the time of deportation.” On one occasion when two inmates scheduled for transport escaped, “Gemmeker’s equability collapsed…. ‘foaming with rage, ranting and raving, completely beside himself, cursing [and] screaming [about] “uncomradely behavior.”’”^[104]

Westerbork “swallowed [Hillesum] whole” in November 1942 and again upon her return in mid-1943. It was a “Heath Metropolis” that experienced “successive tidal waves of Jews.” On July 8, she described misery “so beyond all bounds of reality that it has become unreal” and suggested that the best form to convey Westerbork’s ungraspable horror was “to write fairy stories.”^[105]

Two months later, on September 7, Mechanicus wrote: “A great number of orphan children have been deported without anyone accompanying them.” He was more appalled the following February. “The carrying of the invalids from the hospital huts to the train yesterday beggars description. At two o’clock in the morning the nurses had already started to dress the people who were to be deported. OD men went in front with a horse and open cart and pushed the patients lying in their beds on to the open cart, alongside and on top of one another, just as one would push coffins into a hearse…. Children with scarlet fever and diphtheria were carried weeping to the long snaking train. Children without parents from the orphanage. Perhaps the most abominable transport that has ever gone.”^[106]

Mechanicus makes frequent allusions to death—the barracks are “sepulchral huts,” a half-moon is “like a death mask,” another transport brings “the plague train again” and “Light music beside an open grave.”—yet he also reflects or exhibits uncertainty.^[107] Noting the “daily discussion about the length of the war,” he quotes the queries of one participant on June 15, 1943: “what has Poland got in store for us? What news do we ever get from there? Hardly a thing.” Seven months later, he commented: “People still do not know what happens to the deported Jews in Poland.” On February 1, when a transport of 1,000 people departed for Celle, he asked: “Where are you, you thousands and tens of thousands who have been carried from one place to another—what has been your fate?” Many things at Westerbork were “Incomprehensible” to him.^[108]

VI – WESTERBORK’S CHRONICLERS: PHILIP MECHANICUS AND ETTY HILLESUM

Within a week of her return to Westerbork on June 6, Hillesum had met Mechanicus. He recorded on the 13^th: “Went for a long walk round the edge of the camp with an intelligent young girl who is here voluntarily.” He was almost twenty-five years her senior. Toward the end of the month, she wrote: “Each day Mechanicus, with whom I go for walks along the narrow, barren strip of earth between the ditch and the barbed wire, reads me what he has just written. You develop friendships here that are enough for several lives at once.” Days later, she describes him as “a stylish, strong-minded character” with whom she has “struck up a firm friendship in a short time.”^[109] In July and August, he referred to her as “a woman-friend of mine” with “a clear and perceptive mind.”^[110]

Presser says Mechanicus compiled his diary like “a war correspondent setting down his record while his life was constantly in danger.”^[111] Mechanicus also wrestled with depression. “The daily struggle against the disgust of communal life, against noise and triviality and vulgarity uses up a lot of energy.” It curbed both his “urge to make [his] notes” and his “desire to write.” Nonetheless, he concluded the same entry: “It is more important … to record the daily happenings for those who in time to come will want to get an idea of what went on here. So I have a duty to go on with my writing.”^[112]

Hillesum faced similar challenges: “it is impossible to write from here; it would take the better part of a lifetime to digest it all,” a November 1942 letter says. She was also similarly motivated. In August 1941, she recorded in her diary: “I want to live to see the future, to become the chronicler of the things that are happening now.” Eleven months later, she reiterated this sentiment. She wrote about bearing “witness where witness needs to be borne.”^[113]

On August 22, 1943, she reported: “Opposite me across the rough wooden table, Mechanicus is chewing at his fountain pen. We look at each other now and then over our little scraps of scribbled-on paper. He records everything that happens here most faithfully, almost officially. ‘It’s too much,’ he says suddenly. ‘I know I can write, but here I am face to face with an abyss—or a mountain. It’s too much.’”^[114] Two days later they were both composing word pictures of Gemmeker, Schlesinger and other key members of Westerbork’s power elite immediately before the departure of the August 24 transport. Had Hillesum and Mechanicus, as they sat at that wooden table, agreed to do this? (Hillesum’s letters of August 24, 1943 and December 18, 1942 were published clandestinely by the resistance.)^[115]

In addition to the threat of being sent on transport, inmate compliance was also achieved by intimidation and retribution. Gemmeker’s order of February 11, 1943, stated that ten residents would be put on transport for every person who escaped.^[116] This “collective punishment,” as both Hillesum and Mechanicus termed it, was carried out two months later when 20 sick Jews with provisional exemptions were put on transport after two Jews escaped.^[117] Hillesum’s August 24 letter says Gemmeker was “remorseless” in administering collective punishment. She describes a “terrified young boy” running off upon learning he’s on the list for the next day’s transport. The result: “Fifty victims for one moment of insanity.” Mechanicus’s August 24 diary entry confirms this figure, but adds “three S-men, two from the S [punishment] hut and one more from the hospital” were involved. Only two were caught.^[118] Many inmates opposed escape attempts, which likely contributed to compliance, although attempted and successful escapes continued until the end of the occupation.^[119]

“Like bloodhounds OD men in green uniforms and with police sticks—rather like table legs—were sent out after the fugitives,” Mechanicus wrote.^[120] He continued:

Jews had gone out after other Jews like wild dogs and had not allowed them to escape. The mental degradation of many people here has advanced to such a degree that their indignation did not fall upon the executioner and his henchmen, but upon those who had attempted to escape from their clutches…. But a prisoner has still a right to escape, even though the executioner threatens reprisals against those who do not. They know they will be deported one day, but they cannot or will not offer any resistance; they merely go a little sooner.^[121]

Hillesum: “Slowly but surely six o’clock in the morning has arrived. The train is due to depart at eleven, and they are starting to load it with people and luggage.”^[122] Mechanicus:

Everything was done under the direction of Pisk…. Dr. Spanier appeared in his characteristic long waterproof, with his hands behind his back. He paused here and there and exchanged a brief word with someone, outwardly unmoved. The wagons were filling up….

When the train was full and all that remained was to close the doors and give the signal for departure, Schlesinger came up in a black jerkin…. a heroic figure, a lion-tamer. A fêted lion-tamer. A few handshakes here and there, a few words with this person and that. Not a studied performance. He went up quite naturally to the Obersturmführer who received him with a stern face. Still in a bad temper about the escapes …

The wagons were shut tightly…. The train got under way. At the oblong ventilators high up in the wagons the heads of the Jews and Jewesses appeared all in a line, as if at a puppet show. They went past like the pages of a book of living pictures. Bare, swaying arms and waving hands stuck out of the ventilators like independent living organs, like the limbs of buried human beings giving their last sign of life.^[123]

The commandant, Hillesum writes, “appears at the end of the asphalt path, like a famous star making his entrance during a grand finale.” Then Gemmeker is joined by Schlesinger. “The Oberdienstleiter is a German Jew of massive build, and the commandant looks slight and insignificant by his side. Black top boots, black cap, black army coat with yellow star. He has a cruel mouth and a powerful neck…. The light green commandant with his military bearing, the fawn, impassive secretary [Todtmann, and] the black bully-boy figure of the Oberdienstleiter, parade past the train. People fall back around them, but all eyes are on them…. [Gemmeker] is absolute master over the life and death of Dutch and German Jews here on this remote heath…”^[124]

Mechanicus once observed that he was “well on the way to becoming a misanthropist…. People in the mass, especially if they are living under bad conditions, are the most hideous and repulsive thing imaginable…. the chaotic, immoral passions of twenty, a hundred or a thousand human beings all packed together in a small space [produced] loathsome degradation.” Hillesum understood, but her spirituality and inner radiance (which was commented upon by others) protected her. She wrote: “Many feel that their love of mankind languishes at Westerbork because it receives no nourishment—meaning that people here don’t give you much occasion to love them. ‘The mass is a hideous monster; individuals are pitiful,’ someone said. But I keep discovering that there is no causal connection between people’s behavior and the love you feel for them. Love for one’s fellow man is like an elemental glow that sustains you.”^[125] Unlike Mechanicus, she never lived in the massive, crowded barracks.

Both chroniclers discussed escape. “Will I escape and go into hiding or will I go on the long journey, along with the crowd?” Mechanicus asked. He often discussed the idea, mentioned numerous escapes, twice noted the guards’ indifference to escapes, and once said his escape the previous evening would have been “Dead easy.”^[126] His “desire to escape” absorbed him “like a kind of hobby”: “I imagine myself going along the railway line in the darkness in the middle of the night and reaching Zwolle, from where I could catch a train…. The thought fascinates me.” But he knows the threat of retribution is “a guarantee against escape.” His entry of January 15 appears to represent his conclusion: “…if I escape the interests of many people might be prejudiced… the risk involved… is quite considerable. Recently people who have been in hiding have been pouring into the camp. I am an old S-man and, if arrested, would be in danger of getting a double S.”^[127]

Hillesum “rejected all offers to help her escape.”^[128] Her parents and her youngest brother, Mischa, arrived at Westerbork on June 21, 1943. Soon after, when half of the 120 Jewish Council volunteers were ordered to leave Westerbork, she remarked: “Luckily I am not one of the sixty, so I can keep on protecting my parents as best I can.” Discussing her resistance to escaping and hiding, she wrote: “I don’t think I would feel happy if I were exempted from what so many others have to suffer.” Her moments of weakness didn’t last long. “I sometimes feel like quietly packing my rucksack and getting onto the next transport to the east,” she disclosed. “But enough; it’s not right for a human being to take the easy way out.”^[129]

She observed: “Accepting your own doom needs inner strength.” She said Mechanicus had the same philosophic toughness: “We were both able to bear our lot…. most people are not able to bear their lot, and they load it onto the shoulders of others.”^[130] Mechanicus remarked, “the only real support is… to be found in yourself, in your beliefs or convictions or in your determination to get through these hard times.”^[131]

They both faced the reality of Westerbork with practical and mature attitudes. “Captivity,” Mechanicus wrote, “means the barbed wire and the discipline of hut life, but with a little imagination and a sense of humour and a love of nature you can create a world of your own in which it is possible to forget the captivity of the material body.”^[132] Hillesum swore off the usual sources of anxiety: “Debates, computations, laws of probability, are the order of the day. I keep well out of it. All this talking takes up energy, and nothing comes of it in the end.” Where Hillesum stood apart from Mechanicus was in the depth of her faith and her ability to find silver linings. “Against every new outrage and every fresh horror,” she declared, “we shall put up one more piece of love and goodness, drawing strength from within ourselves.” She wrote repeatedly of “helping to build a new and different society.” Author Patrick Woodhouse maintains that Hillesum became “a universal person, seeking to be in communion with all people across all boundaries.”^[133]

She maintained:

rebellion born only when distress begins to affect one personally is no real rebellion and can never bear fruit. And the absence of hatred in no way implies the absence of moral indignation.

I know that those who hate have good reason to do so. But why should we always have to choose the cheapest and easiest way? It has been brought home forcibly to me here how every atom of hatred added to the world makes it an even more inhospitable place.^[134]

Did she speak this way to Mechanicus on September 6, 1943, upon learning she, Mischa and their parents were going on the next day’s transport? This sudden development was the result of actions by their mother and Mischa that displeased the authorities and led to “intervention by The Hague.” Gemmeker interpreted the resulting orders to mean “the whole family” was to go on transport. Mechanicus’s diary entry refers repeatedly to Mischa, mentions the parents, but only alludes to his friend Etty as “their daughter.” More important is this apparently critical statement: “The men and women who feared they would be deported packed yesterday evening with a resignation which could have been mistaken for courage, but was simply the resignation of human beings not familiar with the passion of indignation and opposition. It is the resignation of caged beasts who have lost their natural impulses and have got used to the cage. No word of protest, just calm preparation for the journey.”^[135]

Other than this, Mechanicus didn’t acknowledge Etty Hillesum’s departure. But in February, he wrote: “We were not emotional about the good-byes, nor have we ever been.” Yet, despite Dutch “sober restraint … we had a lump in our throats … as we have had so often before at those farewell moments.” Two weeks later, he added: “At every handshake with a departing friend one soul seems to penetrate into the other, hands grasp and clasp each other as if they will never let go. The spoken word is either too much or too little. The queue lining up in front of the hut door is like a caravan solemnly going on a pilgrimage to a far country.”^[136]

VII – WESTERBORK: POPULATION, POLITICS AND PREPARING FOR THE POSTWAR

“Amsterdam was finally deemed clear of Jews,” following the last raid on September 29, 1943.^[137] This ended the intensive, 15-month roundup phase, which saw Westerbork’s population exceed 15,000 the previous autumn, following the massive, country-wide roundups the night of October 2-3. Despite the Amsterdam milestone, the transports continued until mid-September 1944. Many Jews in hiding were rooted out during this latter twelve-month period, and after it as well.

On February 5, 1944, the population of Westerbork was “about 6,000 residents,” Mechanicus says, but by the 16^th only 4,700 Jews remained. “Unless the war soon comes to an end,” he foresaw Westerbork “completely emptied out” and all Jews sent east.^[138] Although the population dropped to “4,230 Jews” on the 25^th, there were still 4,000 in the camp in early September when Seyss-Inquart declared a state of emergency owing to the Allied advance into Belgium and their imminent arrival in the Netherlands. On September 2, Gemmeker said Westerbork’s population had to be reduced. The last three transports departed on the 3^rd, 4^th and 13^th. They carried 1,019 Jews to Auschwitz, 2,087 Jews to Theresienstadt and 280 Jews to Bergen-Belsen respectively, dropping the camp population to about 600.^[139] When the Allied advance toward Holland’s big cities came to a stop that same month, the Nazis resumed searching for Jews in hiding. Those they found increased Westerbork’s population to 848 people by the beginning of March 1945 and to “about 900 residents” when it was liberated on April 12.^[140]

Mechanicus’s final diary entry is February 28, 1944. The S-cases were a focus of his attention that January. On December 30, he noted that 80 people had arrived from Amsterdam, most of whom “had been in hiding.” S-hut went from being “packed [with] about 650 men and women” to being “crammed full, about 800 people” on January 12 and to having “900 people” on the 19^th. The transport on the 25^th carried “1,000 persons” to Auschwitz, 590 from S-hut.^[141]

Mechanicus, the former S-case, was on the March 8, 1944 transport to Bergen-Belsen. Seven months later, on October 9, he was part of a group of 120 sent to Auschwitz. They were all shot three days later.^[142] By this time, Westerbork’s most famous S-cases had also been sent east. After being betrayed and arrested on August 4, Anne Frank and her family, along with their hiding companions, Hermann, Auguste and Peter van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer, arrived at Westerbork on August 8. They were transported to Auschwitz on September 3. While at Westerbork, Anne worked disassembling batteries. She worked 12.5-hour days, excluding a 90-minute lunch break, six days a week; she also worked four hours on Sunday mornings until 12:30 p.m.^[143]

Anne’s work raises the subject of Westerbork as a labour camp. Gemmeker, while imprisoned after the war, “claimed that he had tried with great difficulty and risks and without the knowledge of his superiors to turn the transit camp into a labour camp, which could have saved part of the Jewish population.”^[144] In October 1943, Mechanicus referred to Westerbork “residents employed on the sorting of scrap metal. This branch of activity is important for the German Wehrmacht.”^[145] This work took place in “the industrial barracks” and involved disassembling crashed aircraft as well as batteries.^[146] During December, Mechanicus referred three times to Westerbork being “a labour camp,” noting on the 21^st: “The camp has officially become a labour camp which… can provide permanent work for four to five thousand camp residents in the metal industry, thereby safeguarding them from deportation to Poland.” On the same day, however, Westerbork’s controller reported that the Bureau of Non-Ferrous Metals in The Hague was unhappy with the shoddy work of the foil-sorters, which, in Boas’s words, could jeopardize “any chance of Westerbork becoming a labor camp.”^[147]

While Westerbork’s one imperative was to provide the required “transport material” for the east-bound trains, it appears that Gemmeker and senior members of the Jewish aristocracy, recognizing that the war was increasingly turning against Germany, were influenced by the pending postwar and what it held in store for them and how they might best position themselves.^[148] Probably the most remarkable example of this positioning was the 70-minute film Westerbork “made on Gemmeker’s own initiative…. toward mid-1944.” An amateurish production, the script was the work of Todtmann. “It had been made outside proper Nazi channels,” with no reference to The Hague or Berlin, according to Boas. He added pointedly that the film “had been made for none but the president of the court in Assen” where Gemmeker was tried in December 1948. When asked by the court what the film’s purpose was, Gemmeker replied: “With this film, which was made for the camp and for showing in the camp, I tried to record everything, including the sadder aspects, in order that it might not be said that I only focused on the better side of the camp.”^[149]

Although less clear than the Westerbork film, the notion of Westerbork becoming a labour camp may be another example of Gemmeker’s trying to position himself for more favourable consideration after the war. But, as with so much at Westerbork, the labour camp idea was buffeted by conflicting factors. On the one hand, Mechanicus could write on December 21, 1943, that “the Jews have no choice but to take a fairly serious view of their employment and see to it that they produce enough for the work section to be a paying proposition, which will mean that they will not be sent to Poland.” On the other hand, as “an ordinary foil-sorter,” he noted on January 3 that he and his co-workers had “taken idleness as their motto.” Their principle, he added, was: “Be idle, but do it well and systematically—it is for a good cause.”^[150]

“The ‘good cause,’” Boas writes, “was to contribute as little as possible to the German war machine—which was easier said than done. By working hard you might prolong your stay but also the war; by slacking off might shorten the war but also your stay. Weighing one against the other was no simple matter. To their credit, most Jews seemed to have opted for the latter rather than the former, the threat of deportation notwithstanding. An order issued in December, 1943, forbidding prayer during work hours was honored only in the breach. The campaign against ‘work-shy’ women, launched by the Commandant at about the same time, was also stillborn. Many of these so-called shirkers were far too busy with their own small ‘businesses’—ironing, altering, tailoring, cleaning, mostly for the wives of the camp’s elite—to bother responding to the call.” The subject of shirking work was celebrated in at least one of the cabarets. The opening number for the “Humor and Song” revue, which opened September 4, 1943, was called “Roll-Call! Roll-Call!” and included the lyrics:

Whoever is a glutton for work
And fails to shirk
And works himself to the bone
Is a drone and a jerk.^[151]

The latter part of Gemmeker’s claim that he tried to transition Westerbork from a transit to a labour camp without the knowledge of his superiors is plausible given the intrigue that existed within the SS in the Netherlands. On August 25, 1943, Mechanicus stated that Hanns Albin Rauter, the head of the SS in the country, had sent “a few NSB men [Dutch Nazis] …. to Westerbork to operate as spies.” Gemmeker assigned “his camp detective, Simon,” to follow them. Simon reported “that the NSB men were operating against the Commandant who, in their opinion, was too kind to the Jews.” Gemmeker “had them locked up … and sent away on the S-transport. But first the guards beat up one or two of them.”^[152] The following January 6, Mechanicus reported: “Arrest in hut 71 … of mevrouw Z.-S., a spy working for the Sicherheitsdienst …. The Police had intercepted a letter written by her to the SD in which she had criticized … the Obersturmführer.”^[153] Between these two examples of internecine activity, Mechanicus wrote on October 21 that, based on “the high incidence of infectious diseases,” Gemmeker accepted Dr. Spanier’s recommendation and ordered a “strict quarantine for the camp.” Mechanicus later said he’d heard that Spanier and Gemmeker “are working together to have the transports stopped because of … infectious diseases.”^[154]

“But everyone is playing his own little game here,” Mechanicus observed in December. He had personal experience with Westerbork’s quid pro quos. When he avoided being sent on the July 6 transport “by the skin of [his] teeth,” it was due to the calculated intervention of Schlesinger and his associate Trottel.^[155] Hillesum was involved too, but as a pleader not a decision maker: “What exactly it was that I did, I’m not sure. I went to all sorts of officials.” She walked “around with a mysterious gentleman [she’d] never seen before.” They “went to all sorts of camp VIPs who are usually not available, especially before a transport. But this time invisible doors opened…. There is a sort of ‘underworld’ here … I sensed something of it … I don’t think it’s a savory story.”^[156]

Schlesinger and Trottel believed Mechanicus could be helpful to them after the war. Trottel told Mechanicus that he needed to commit to “look after” their interests. “And give your word of honour…. And you must also make it clear to [Schlesinger] that he will have some say in what you publish … about Westerbork.” On July 15, Mechanicus learned he’d been given a blue Z stamp. It exempted him from transport to the east “until further notice” and provided other benefits.^[157] On July 19, Trottel identified the nub of the problem: “After the war the German Jews will find themselves in a difficult position and it’s vital for us to have Dutch Jews who will look after our interests.” When a newly-arrived friend asked Mechanicus how he’d “managed” to remain at Westerbork, Mechanicus answered: “Because of Schlesinger’s protection.” He added he’d do anything for Schlesinger as long as it didn’t involve “compromising myself.”^[158]

On August 3, Mechanicus stated Schlesinger “rides rough-shod over everyone. [He’s] self-assured, arrogant, uncouth and cold…. an upstart who [can] do what he likes with the Jews.” That evening, Mechanicus and Trottel met with Schlesinger. Mechanicus explained his views on removing “tension between Dutch and German Jews” and eliminating any resentment after the war. Mechanicus’s August 4 meeting summary said: “A Dutch-German contact committee should be formed to spread the idea that Dutch and German Jews should bury their feuds and, if necessary, create an organization which in an emergency would prevent acts of violence.” On August 27, Schlesinger told him he was one of three members of an arbitration committee approved by Gemmeker; Mechanicus was invited to be “the chairman,” according to Boas. “After a few months of desultory negotiations,” Boas notes that the peace initiative “simply collapsed under the burden of accumulated hatreds.”^[159] The relentless need for “transport material” may have contributed to this result as well. Trottel was put on transport in January, Mechanicus in March. Schlesinger’s maneuvering may also have reinforced the status quo. The previous November, a member of Westerbork’s Jewish Council described to Mechanicus “a very hostile atmosphere between German and Dutch Jews in the camp”; Mechanicus advised Schlesinger. But, even though “the leading members of the Jewish Council were … viewed with mistrust and contempt,” Schlesinger didn’t want to “rebuff” them: “He might need them and is covering himself on more than one side. I feel this is like a comedy in which all parties are making fools of one another.”^[160]

These machinations extended to Gemmeker and Rauter, who was scheduled to visit Westerbork mid-February. Mechanicus said it was critical the SS chief “get the impression that the work was being done” by older people rather than the “many young working folk [Rauter would likely demand] be sent to Germany…. Gemmeker prefers to keep them here for the sake of his own position. So the deceivers deceive each other.”^[161]

Despite Mechanicus’s and Hillesum’s word portraits of Gemmeker quoted earlier, their other descriptions of him contribute to a complex picture of the man. “We are told,” Hillesum wrote, “that he likes music and that he is a gentleman…. for a gentleman he certainly has a somewhat peculiar job.” On one “cruel” transport morning, she said his face was “almost iron-grey. It is a face I am quite unable to read. Sometimes it seems to me to be like a long thin scar in which grimness mingles with joylessness and hypocrisy. And there is something else about him, halfway between a dapper hairdresser’s assistant and a stagedoor Johnny. But the grimness and the rigidly forced bearing predominate.”^[162] Mechanicus’s characterizations are equally striking: “There are some who think that, although he wants to get the Jews out of western Europe, he has nothing personal against them and does not want to do them any harm.” Mechanicus notes Gemmeker referred to Westerbork’s Jews as “My Jews” and, when highlighting the Commandant’s thoroughness, energy and determination, quotes him saying: “I care more about many of the Jews than about most of my own SS men.” Were these genuine sentiments or cynically manipulative statements? What is known is that Gemmeker valued and sought to maintain calm and order in the deportation-driven, twilight world of Westerbork. Next to meeting the quotas and deadlines for the transports, they were his top priority. “Once upon a time we had a commandant who used to kick people off to Poland,” Hillesum quotes another inmate. “This one [Gemmeker] sees them off with a smile.”^[163]

On September 14, Gemmeker had a large group of young Jews, who were members of the Hashera, “fetched out” of that day’s transport; “500 certificates had been made available for Palestine for members of the Aliyah. Actually they could only be members of the Aliyah up to their eighteenth year, but the age was forced up to twenty-one.” This spared 37 young people “the journey to the east,” at least temporarily. Gemmeker, who provided “favourable treatment” to Hashera members, managed this “because other camp residents volunteered for the journey in order to accompany relatives.” But two days later, Mechanicus remarked: “You cannot see the workings of [Gemmeker’s] heart,” an assessment he reinforced in December, calling Gemmeker “An over-sensitive man” and “An enigmatic character with iron hands covered in velvet.” Mechanicus noted that an unspecified number “of the young men of the Aliyah” were sent to Poland on the January 25 transport.^[164]

Gemmeker supervised “the deportation of 80,000 Jews.” At his trial he said he had “a strong conflict of conscience” about his work at Westerbork and that he tried to make life there “as tolerable as possible.” He was backed up by Schlesinger who testified that “Gemmeker was a good commandant, who prized order, calm, and humanity.” Schlesinger added that Westerbork’s general population shared this view and were impressed by Gemmeker’s “camouflaged sense of justice.” Dr. Spanier also testified for Gemmeker who was one of his patients in Düsseldorf in the 1960s. Nonetheless, during his tenure as commandant, according to van Riet, Gemmeker “was seen as an extremely suitable person” for the role. He ensured the transports ran on time and met the specified quotas.^[165] With Allied troops closing in, he left Westerbork on April 11, 1945.^[166] A month later, after Germany’s capitulation, he was arrested in Amsterdam. After his trial, he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment less time served. “The Court could not prove that he knew what had happened to the vast majority of the deported Jews…. The sentence was also lower because the Court took into account the correct treatment of residents.” He was freed April 20, 1951, his sentence reduced for good behaviour and his work in the Limburg mines. He subsequently worked as a salesman in a Düsseldorf tobacco shop. During his trial and in a 1959 television interview, he repeatedly maintained he didn’t know that most people deported from Westerbork were killed. But the 1967 Westerbork trial in Munich concluded “he must have known,” although there wasn’t enough evidence to retry him.^[167]

VIII – DID WESTERBORK’S OD DESERVE TO BE LABELLED THE “JEWISH SS”?

“The OD men act as assistants to the [German] Green Police,” Mechanicus wrote about the August 24, 1943 transport.^[168] But on this occasion, and as a general rule, there was often a clear division of responsibility: The OD loaded the cattle cars; the Green Police were on standby until the train departed when they became escorts, travelling in a separate passenger car “to the final destination.”^[169] Mechanicus said the OD and Green Police came from “Two worlds that are diametrically opposed. They do not understand each other and gropingly size each other up.”^[170]

Outside the train, on the platform, or hanging out of … a third-class compartment were the Green Police…. completely indifferent and insensitive to their surroundings…. Under their scrutiny the OD men … carried out their duties…. In an unbroken stream they went along carrying stretchers with broken, half-dead human beings whom they hoisted efficiently into the cattle trucks…. Other OD men chased the public away from the Boulevard [des Misères] with threats and entreaties.^[171]

Hillesum’s August 24 letter refers to a “squad of armed, green-uniformed guards.” The fact they are armed identifies them as Green Police. “On earlier transports, some of the guards were simple, kindly types with puzzled expressions…. One would have found their company not too objectionable on the journey. Now I am transfixed with terror. Oafish, jeering faces, in which one seeks in vain for even the slightest trace of human warmth. At what fronts did they learn their business? In what punishment camps were they trained?”^[172]

Despite Hillesum’s portrayal of the Green Police and Mechanicus’s contention that they and the OD came from “diametrically opposed” worlds, there are numerous negative descriptions of the OD, whose members’ average age in mid-1942 was “between 20 and 25 years.”^[173] By April 1943, the OD had 182 members, its highpoint.^[174] If newcomers who were young men “had the right contacts and/or qualities,” they could land a position in the OD or another service group, usually with an exemption.^[175] Van Riet says, “Often immediately after arrival, the [newcomer’s] struggle for a stamp on the camp card began.”^[176]

The attraction of an exemption normally overcame the stigma of joining the OD.^[177] Mechanicus said OD members were “crude and course men, without civilization, without feeling and without compassion.”^[178] Van Riet says it was Boas’s view that “the OD was a messy collection of wretched people … with pathological issues, just like the SS.”^[179] Moore found the OD’s “conduct was anything but honourable and the treatment of fellow inmates often despicable.”^[180] Nevertheless, “examples that support the allegations about the brutal actions of the OD are not all that common,” van Riet maintains.^[181] He seeks to bring a more nuanced perspective to the “complex” question of the OD’s behaviour.^[182]

In Kamp van hoop en wanhoop (Camp of Hope and Despair), Willy Linder says escorting Jews to trains departing Westerbork and closing the boxcar doors was “one of the unpleasant and dramatic tasks of the OD.”^[183] They performed this function with merciless zeal, Boas maintains.^[184] Van Riet states: “They would occasionally push and/or scream people into the trains.”^[185] He adds that people who were to be transported “sometimes refused to climb into the wagons at the last minute, which threatened to slow everyone down,” possibly undermining the scheduled departure time.^[186] As Presser writes, meeting the quotas and timelines demanded by Adolf Eichmann in Berlin was the “absolute priority.”^[187]

Hans Margules and Werner Bloch, two German Jewish refugees and Westerbork long-term residents, were OD members who survived the war. They and other OD members were instructed, prior to supervising the loading of transports, to yell at people who were causing delays and to push them into the boxcars, if necessary.^[188] Van Riet maintains that “the OD had to act tactically, in order to be one step ahead of the Germans…. to prevent the Germans from intervening with violence.” While Margules and Bloch admitted some OD members “were bad and fanatical,” the OD, as a whole, had to perform a careful balancing act.^[189] If they were too lenient it invited Nazi intervention and could result in some OD members being put on transport. While walking this tightrope meant they were undeniably part of the deportation machine and subject to the contempt of many of their fellow Jews, “it was still better,” in Bloch’s view, “to be pushed into the train by a member of the OD than to have to go on transport bleeding due to being beaten with a rifle” by an SS man or a German police officer.^[190]

Mechanicus recorded an August 1943 confrontation between four women and an OD man.

“I’d rather have the men in green any day,” one woman says. “You know where you stand with them, at least.”

“They hit much harder than we do,” the OD man answers.

“I’d rather have the men in green than you because you beat your own people.”

“We carry sticks, but we don’t need to use them.”

“You do that all right. And even if you didn’t hit anybody at all, I’d still rather have the men in green. We hate you more than we hate them. So now you know!”

“Applause from the other women,” Mechanicus noted.^[191]

Boas maintains that Westerbork’s inmates “feared and detested” the OD “with a passionate intensity [and] came to regard the OD as a greater ill than the SS itself.”^[192]

Van Riet maintains “OD members were convinced that the Germans present would have acted much worse,” but also concludes “it is hardly possible to make an informed and fully accurate judgment about their actions.”^[193] The OD was not “the Jewish SS.” Van Riet says “collaborative survival” is a better but still inadequate description of the OD’s behaviour. His preferred phrase is “participation for survival.”^[194] This conclusion also applies to the OD’s conduct “during the pickup operations at Amsterdam and Apeldoorn,” which, according to testimonies, was as cruel as that of the Nazis but, in contrast to the Nazis, was sometimes prompted by duress and coercion.^[195]

IX – SURVIVAL OF WESTERBORK’S GERMAN JEWS COMPARED TO ITS DUTCH JEWS

Compared to the less than five per cent of transported Jews who survived (5,000 of 107,000), more than nine per cent of the OD members who went on transport returned (15 of 164). When the 32 OD members who remained at Westerbork are included (47 of 196), the OD survival rate jumps to almost 24 per cent.^[196] Upon Westerbork’s liberation, “the Canadian army compiled a list of the inmates and noted…. a large number of the survivors were of German origin and had managed to stay in the camp.” Moore continues, “the overall totals are striking,” adding: “Superficially, this does support the view that non-Dutch Jews had been much more successful as survivors of the camp. Their numbers are substantially more than might have been expected given the proportion of foreign Jews in the Netherlands in May 1940.” But he concludes: “The idea that non-Dutch Jews… were more likely to have survived the Holocaust in the Netherlands than their Dutch counterparts must remain conjecture.”^[197]

It is clear, however, that for some, including the leaders of the camp’s aristocracy, the unequal world of Westerbork bestowed privileges not only during their stay in the camp but for the remainder of their lives. Schlesinger, Spanier, Pisk and their families all survived, with the exception of Pisk’s mother who died, age 78, at Theresienstadt; Pisk was unable to save her from transport. Spanier’s parents were also at Theresienstadt.^[198]

“For those who have been granted the nerve-shattering privilege of being allowed to stay in Westerbork ‘until further notice,’” Hillesum wrote in her December 18, 1942 letter, “there is the great moral danger of becoming blunted and hardened…. What matters is not whether we preserve our lives at any cost, but how we preserve them.”^[199]

Writing about Amsterdam’s Jewish Council, she observed on July 28, 1942: “Nothing can ever atone for the fact … that one section of the Jewish population is helping to transport the majority out of the country. History will pass judgement in due course.”^[200] The same could be said about the leaders of Westerbork’s aristocracy collaborating with the Nazis.

X – FINAL AND FIRST WORDS

Jacob Boas quotes Hannah Arendt who said: “The destruction of Dutch Jewry was ‘a catastrophe unparalleled in any Western country,’ a disaster comparable only to the extinction of Polish Jewry.” He goes on to say: “The ordinary Dutch Jew, hedged round by the German gun, a collaborative Dutch officialdom, and the zeal of the Jewish administrators, confronted a situation that was absolutely hopeless.”^[201]

The first Dutch book to examine the Holocaust in Holland got it right. The title of Heinz Wielek’s De Oorlog die Hitler Won (The War that Hitler Won), published in 1947, captured the centrality of annihilating the Jews to Nazi ideology, the driving force of which helps explain the Nazis’ exploitation and manipulation of Westerbork’s German and refugee Jews, resulting in the camp’s aristocracy and functionaries doing much of the Nazis’ dirty work eliminating Dutch Jews and themselves, with a small number of exceptions who survived through complicity and/or luck.

Copyright © 2024 Patrick S. Wolfe
All rights reserved. Short segments may be quoted with due attribution.

For more on Etty Hillesum, see:

• Etty Hillesum Safeguards God: The Story of Her Spiritual Transformation During the Holocaust
• Holocaust remembrance: Etty Hillesum’s story in her own words
• Etty Hillesum and the Great Protective Hand (poem)

1. Frank van Riet, The Jewish Guards: Supervision in the Dutch Gateway to Hell, Assen, Netherlands, Nedvision Publishing, 2022, 202. ↑
2. Van Riet, 202. ↑
3. Jacob Boas, Boulevard des Misères: The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork, Archon Books, Hamden, Connecticut, 1985, 137, 147, 145, 164. ↑
4. Boas, 132, 134, 145, 146. ↑
5. Boas, 147. ↑
6. Van Riet, 202. ↑
7. Patrick Wolfe, A Snake on the Heart – History, Mystery, and Truth: The Entangled Journeys of a Biographer and His Nazi Subject, Iguana Books, Toronto, 2023, 163-168. ↑
8. Louis de Jong, The Netherlands and Nazi Germany, Harvard University Press, 1990, 8. ↑
9. Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940-1945, London, Arnold, 1997, 73. ↑
10. Gerhard, Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands under German Occupation, 1940-1945 (translated by Louise Willmot), Berg Publishers, 1988, 80. ↑
11. Moore, 89. Wolfe, 189. ↑
12. Moore, 9. Boas, 8. ↑
13. Moore, 2. Jacob Presser’s Introduction to Philip Mechanicus, Waiting for Death, Calder and Boyars, London, 1968, 5. Van Riet, 200-201. ↑
14. Moore, 16, 146, 148 (Presser), 249 (Presser). ↑
15. Wolfe, 188-189. ↑
16. Van Riet, 38, 114. ↑
17. Van Riet, 18-20. ↑
18. Van Riet, 23, 41, 43. Presser, 5-6 (750 people). ↑
19. Van Riet, 24. ↑
20. Van Riet, 24-28. ↑
21. Van Riet, 29, 33. ↑
22. Van Riet, 34, 41. Wolfe, 188-189. ↑
23. Van Riet, 34-35. Boas (43, 45) refers to “twelve administrative units.” ↑
24. Boas, 40 (proposed). Moore, 219 (building camp, Jewish Council bureaucracy). Van Riet, 42, 43. ↑
25. Moore, 218. ↑
26. Moore, 219. https://jacobboas.com (date of birth, innate number). Boas, 40, 41. ↑
27. Van Riet, 41, 43. ↑
28. Van Riet, 43, 49 (first transport). ↑
29. Moore, 219-220, 218. Van Riet, 127. ↑
30. Boas, 41, 68. ↑
31. Boas 42, 47 (osmosis), 70 (eventually German Jews also put on transport). ↑
32. Van Riet, 51-53. ↑
33. Van Riet, 53 (including Presser quote), 59, 194-195, 221 (Schol “forced” to leave). ↑
34. Presser, 12 (ill treated, September 27, October 25). Mechanicus, 23, 158. ↑
35. Mechanicus, 128. ↑
36. Van Riet, 53, 100. ↑
37. Moore, 223. Boas, 46 (“functioned so extraordinarily well”). ↑
38. Van Riet, 7. ↑
39. Moore, 255 (also 218), 106-107, 217 (disproportionate). Boas, 97 (German Central Office for Jewish Emigration). ↑
40. Presser, 8. Moore, 221, 220 (domination). Boas, 37. Mechanicus, 261, 104, 32. ↑
41. Moore, 220-222. Presser, 8-9. ↑
42. Moore, 221-222. ↑
43. Moore, 222, 221. Mechanicus, 107, 229. Boas writes (50-51): “If Gemmeker was the most treacherous man in Westerbork, Schlesinger the most feared, and Pisk the most hated, the sobriquet ‘most mysterious’ might be fitted to Dr. F. M. Spanier [whose] extraordinary … hold … over [Gemmeker] was seen as the key to his omnipotence.” ↑
44. Van Riet, 37, 39, 49, 102. Moore, 220. ↑
45. Van Riet, 7. ↑
46. Van Riet, 39, 104. ↑
47. Van Riet, 105. Boas, 48. ↑
48. Van Riet, 110-122. Moore, 220. ↑
49. Van Riet, 102 (most hated), 7 and 105 and 202 (Jewish SS), 37 (Jewish Gestapo). ↑
50. Van Riet, 7, 202, 229 (complex). ↑
51. Van Riet, 126-127. ↑
52. Van Riet, 127-128, 126 (control the flow: exemptions were reduced over time; they were “never intended to keep the Jewish community alive, not even part of it.”). ↑
53. Presser, 9. ↑
54. Presser, 9-10. Boas (re: Weinreb), 140, 144, 146. ↑
55. Mechanicus, 159, 161, 171. According to Moore (124), “Presser states that on [the question of Jewish partners in mixed marriages] the Germans ‘never knew what they were doing.’” ↑
56. Mechanicus, 161. ↑
57. Van Riet, 128-129. ↑
58. Mechanicus, 151, 152, 154, 213. ↑
59. Presser, 8. Van Riet, 100 (De Wijze). ↑
60. See Mechanicus, 30-31, 34-35, and Moore, 218-219. ↑
61. Mechanicus, 32. ↑
62. Moore, 219. ↑
63. Mechanicus, 34, 30. Boas, 70. ↑
64. See Moore, 222, and Mechanicus, 81. ↑
65. Van Riet, 100-101. ↑
66. Van Riet, 203-204. ↑
67. Van Riet, 77. ↑
68. Presser, 7. Mechanicus, 71. ↑
69. Boas, 27, 96, 101 (“peak periods” like “the first half of October, 1942.”). ↑
70. Van Riet, 52, 101, 51. ↑
71. Jan G. Gaarlandt’s Introduction (and Notes) to Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork, Holt, 1996, xx (“From 15 July 1942 until 3 September 1944, week in and week out, the trains left, ninety-three in all.”). Gaarlandt’s statement is not entirely correct. In The Jewish Guards (166-168, 173), van Riet discusses the transports of September 3, 4 and 13, 1944. ↑
72. Moore, 102. ↑
73. Van Riet, 6. ↑
74. Moore, 102. Gaarlandt, Notes, 375 (Note 58). ↑
75. Mechanicus: “cattle trucks” (57,97, 137, 235, 239, 244 – “going like cattle”); “forty, fifty or sixty persons” (57); he also referred (25) to “filthy old wagons …. originally intended for carrying horses.” Hillesum: “cattle cars” (285, 342); she also referred to “dilapidated boxcars” (285), “freight cars” (274, 293, 309, 348), and “sealed” cars (274, 293); “about seventy people” (309, see also 293); “three-day journey” (309, see also 293, 347, 348). ↑
76. Mechanicus, 225, 230 (“third-class carriages”). ↑
77. Mechanicus, 194. ↑
78. Mechanicus, 193, 192. ↑
79. Mechanicus, 192-193, 230 (“the exodus of exchange Jews”), 231 (“last week [January 11] 200 went on transport to Celle.”). ↑
80. Mechanicus, 84 (agent), 225. ↑
81. Mechanicus, 228-230. ↑
82. Mechanicus: Celle (238, 253), Theresienstadt (263). ↑
83. Boas, 63. ↑
84. Wolfe, 254-257. ↑
85. Hillesum, 180. ↑
86. Patrick Woodhouse, Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed, Bloomsbury, 2009, 2 (several occasions). Gaarlandt, xix (dozen times). ↑
87. Woodhouse, 98-99. ↑
88. Boas, 109 (lost diary). Presser, 10. ↑
89. Hillesum, 273. Email of February 25, 2024, from Frank van Riet to the author (largest transport; 3,017 Jews). ↑
90. Hillesum, 300, 308. See also, 285, 297. ↑
91. Hillesum, 354. Mechanicus, 246, 144, 68. 111. ↑
92. Mechanicus, 87-88. ↑
93. Mechanicus, 144-145. ↑
94. Mechanicus, 100. ↑
95. Mechanicus, 89. See also, 61-62, 80, 146-147. ↑
96. Gaarlandt, 375 (Note 49). Hillesum, 306, 357. Mechanicus, 158, 159, 176. ↑
97. Boas, 127, 126-127. ↑
98. Boas, 118, 120. Mechanicus, 80. ↑
99. Boas, 35, 51-52. Moore, 222. ↑
100. Mechanicus, 46, 48, 224. ↑
101. Mechanicus, 99, 145, 166, 258. ↑
102. Mechanicus, 82, 179 (infectious diseases), 117, 135, 138, 141, 176. ↑
103. Boas, 62, 52-53, 53, 54, 39, 54. Boas also maintained (70): “Fear forced a revolution in the conventional patterns of behavior, and Jews ended by discarding the wrap of civilization like so much excess baggage…” ↑
104. Boas, 154, 28. See also Van Riet, 95, 226. ↑
105. Hillesum: “swallowed” (239, 267), 263, 276, 305. ↑
106. Mechanicus, 149, 248. See also, 235. ↑
107. Mechanicus, 43, 150, 135, 147. ↑
108. Mechanicus, 48, 235, 240, 127. Jacob Boas notes (66) that Dr. Elie Cohen, “a survivor of Auschwitz and the author of a study of human behavior in the concentration camp, claimed that people in Westerbork knew that Jews were being gassed in the East but repressed the thought.” ↑
109. Mechanicus, 47. Hillesum, 279, 291, 297. ↑
110. Mechanicus, 87, 139. ↑
111. Presser, 11. ↑
112. Mechanicus, 181-182. ↑
113. Hillesum, 239, 41, 173, 195. ↑
114. Hillesum, 338. ↑
115. Hillesum’s letters of December 18, 1942, and August 24, 1943, were, according to Gaarlandt (370 – Note 9), “published under the false title Three Letters by the Painter J. B. van der Pluym (1843-1912) [and] were the only writings of Etty Hillesum published prior to 1981.” ↑
116. Van Riet, 94, 224. ↑
117. Hillesum, 351. Mechanicus, 226. Van Riet, 95, 226. ↑
118. Hillesum, 350, 341. Mechanicus, 136. ↑
119. Van Riet, 93-94. ↑
120. Mechanicus, 136. ↑
121. Mechanicus, 136. ↑
122. Hillesum, 348. ↑
123. Mechanicus, 137, 138. ↑
124. Hillesum, 351, 353, 352. ↑
125. Mechanicus, 245. Hillesum, 323. ↑
126. Mechanicus, 146, 152 and 161 (indifference), 241 (Dead easy). See also, 104, 158, 163, 164, 176, 179, 193, 222, 228. ↑
127. Mechanicus, 159 (desire), 229, 166 (guarantee), 228. Boas writes (80-81) that the widespread belief, in the summer of 1943, that the war would soon be over … combined with the tolerable living conditions at Westerbork, especially compared to those at Vught and Amersfoort, “probably kept more Jews from escaping…. many of the inmates, Mechanicus and Dr. [Elie} Cohen contended, actually preferred sitting out the war in the camp to returning to the uncertainty of life on the outside.” ↑
128. Gaarlandt, xxii. ↑
129. Hillesum, 275, 289, 177, 297. ↑
130. Hillesum, 287 (also 314), 315. ↑
131. Mechanicus, 264. ↑
132. Mechanicus, 105 (see also 106). See also, Boas, 83. ↑
133. Hillesum, 280 (see also 304), 294, 295. Woodhouse, 39. ↑
134. Hillesum, 255-256. ↑
135. Mechanicus, 149, 148. See also, Boas, 109 (re: Etty and her family’s departure on transport).. ↑
136. Mechanicus, 239-240, 254. ↑
137. Moore, 104. See also, van Riet, 120-121). ↑
138. Mechanicus, 243, 256. ↑
139. Mechanicus, 264. Van Riet, 166 (1,019, 2,087, 600), 173. ↑
140. Van Riet, 183, 186, 195. ↑
141. Mechanicus, 219, 226, 231, 235. ↑
142. Presser, 12. ↑
143. Van Riet, 86, 166, 88-89. Email of February 6, 2022 from Frank van Riet re: Anne Frank, etc., being on the September 3, 1944 transport to Auschwitz. ↑
144. Van Riet, 224. See also, 227. ↑
145. Mechanicus, 179. ↑
146. Van Riet, 89. ↑
147. Mechanicus, 205, 213-215. Boas, 78. ↑
148. In his diary entry of December 25, 1943, Mechanicus writes (216-217): “We have looked for a reason for the Commandant’s irritability…. We think that the underlying reason is that he is annoyed at the unfavourable course the war is taking and the concentrated bombing of German cities. The Commandant has just been to Düsseldorf on leave and would have seen the devastation with his own eyes. He probably realized that Germany was losing the war. He is supposed to have said something of the sort the other day.” ↑
149. Boas, 31. Van Riet, 225 (trial date). ↑
150. Mechanicus, 215, 220, 221. ↑
151. Boas, 77, 113-114. ↑
152. Mechanicus, 139. Boas refers (67) to these “NSB men” as “Jewish Nazis.” ↑
153. Mechanicus, 223. ↑
154. Mechanicus, 177, 178, 183. ↑
155. Mechanicus, 206, 77. See also, 77-80. ↑
156. Hillesum, 298. ↑
157. Mechanicus, 84, 92. ↑
158. Mechanicus, 96, 101-102. ↑
159. Mechanicus, 111, 113, 140. Boas, 69-70. ↑
160. Mechanicus, 225-226, 183, 185, 186. ↑
161. Mechanicus, 255-256. ↑
162. Hillesum, 245, 352. ↑
163. Mechanicus, 59, 99, 145. Hillesum, 352. ↑
164. Mechanicus, 157, 20 (favourable treatment), 159, 215, 216, 235. ↑
165. Van Riet, 225 (80,000), 224 (extremely suitable, on time). Boas, 15 (Gemmeker quotes), 20 (Schlesinger). https://kampwesterbork.nl/downloads/wandelroute/wandelroute-hckw-en.pdf – 17-page booklet, “Neighbours, Guards, Residents & Controversial Traces,” accessed June 15, 2024 (see p. 6 re: Spanier). ↑
166. Van Riet, 194. ↑
167. Van Riet, 224-228, 220. ↑
168. Mechanicus, 137. ↑
169. Van Riet, 137. ↑
170. Mechanicus, 137. ↑
171. Mechanicus, 137. ↑
172. Hillesum, 340, 349. ↑
173. Van Riet, 39. ↑
174. Van Riet, 102, 108. ↑
175. Van Riet, 102. See also, 126, 203, 204. ↑
176. Van Riet, 126. ↑
177. Van Riet, 203. ↑
178. Van Riet, 105. ↑
179. Boas’s view paraphrased by van Riet, 106. ↑
180. Moore, 221. ↑
181. Van Riet, 106. ↑
182. Van Riet, 229. ↑
183. Van Riet, 106. ↑
184. Van Riet, 106. ↑
185. Van Riet, 107. ↑
186. Van Riet, 204. ↑
187. Presser, 6. Moore, 92 (meeting the requirements of the deportation process was “imperative” and “the central objective”). Boas, 64 (“the iron laws of the Final Solution”). ↑
188. Van Riet, 204. ↑
189. Van Riet, 204. ↑
190. Van Riet, 203 (“It was precisely the constant threat of being sent on transport if they refused to cooperate”), 204. ↑
191. Mechanicus, 140. ↑
192. Boas, 49. ↑
193. Van Riet, 230. ↑
194. Van Riet, 230. ↑
195. Van Riet, 230, 111. Examples of duress provided by van Riet include OD members being “beaten” (112) and kicked (112) by Germans for being too gentle or “humane” (112) when removing patients from the psychiatric hospital “Het Apeldoornsche Bosch” (110) and having an SS man draw his revolver and threaten them when they were too slow removing a woman from her Amsterdam home (118). The OD men were also coerced by the threat that five family members would be put on a transport to the east if they failed to return to Westerbork (117). ↑
196. Van Riet, 199-201, 230. ↑
197. Moore, 218, 222, 223, 224. ↑
198. Moore, 223 (Schlesinger and Spanier and families). Van Riet, 194-195 and 200 (Pisk, wife, son and mother). Mechanicus, 229 (Spanier’s parents). ↑
199. Hillesum, 250. ↑
200. Hillesum, 196. ↑
201. Boas, 4, 7. ↑