the Netherlands

  • American-Dutch diplomacy

    On April 19, 1782, John Adams was received by the States-General and the Dutch Republic as they were the first country, together with Morocco and France, to recognize the United States as an independent government. John Adams then became the first U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands and the house that he had purchased at Fluwelen…

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  • “As long as a name is mentioned, someone is not forgotten,” meaning if you mention the name of one person, that person is remembered. I know it sounds quite obvious, but when you think about it for a minute, it is the essential first step to ensure that the Holocaust will not happen again. I…

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  • From Zero to 102

    I was reluctant to use the title, From Zero to 102 as the title, I didn’t want it to look like a review for a car. However, I couldn’t think of a more suitable title either. The 0 and the 102 are the ages of two victims of the Holocaust. This is how evil the…

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  • These are students and teachers of the Jewish Lyceum in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, July 1942. More than 75% of the Dutch Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. There are about 60+ people in this photograph of which most or all were murdered. Most of them are young people. Girls who never again received a Valentine’s card. Boys…

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  • Max Hirsch was one of the 937 passengers aboard the St. Louis, the cruise ship that left the port of Hamburg on May 13, 1939, with Cuba as its final destination. The vast majority of the passengers were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Across the Atlantic Ocean, they hoped to find a safe haven. However,…

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  • Geleen is a small former mining town in the province of Limburg, in the southeast of the Netherlands. It is not a particularly famous place, although it is where the first professional football was played in the Netherlands, and it used to host one of the world’s biggest rock festivals, “PinkPop.” It is also where…

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  • Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl is one of World War II’s most famous personal accounts, providing a powerful and intimate look into the life of a Jewish teenager in hiding. However, many readers are unaware that the original version of Anne’s diary contained passages about her developing sexuality, curiosity about the human…

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  • On March 24, 1941, the first train transport of Dutch artworks took place to the newly established art bunker in the Sint-Pietersberg. The Dutch stored approximately 800 art treasures in the Limburg art bunker, including works by Vermeer, Paulus Potter, and Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch.” The Dutch kept the artworks during the war in the…

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  • The term ‘work extension’ was a euphemistic term for the actual goal of the deportations: to work to death those who were healthy enough to work and to murder all others. At least 102,000 Jewish Dutch people were murdered or died from exhaustion and diseases. Auschwitz-BirkenauIt is not exactly known when the Nazis decided to…

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  • The National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (abbreviation: NSB) was a Dutch political party that existed from 1931 to 1945. The NSB adhered to the ideology of National Socialism, presented itself not as a party but as a movement based on an anti-democratic attitude, and functioned as a collaboration party during the German occupation of…

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