the Netherlands

  • Cornelia “Corrie” ten Boom (15 April 1892 – 15 April 1983) was a Dutch watchmaker and Christian who, along with her father and other family members, helped many Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. She was imprisoned for her actions. Her most famous book, The Hiding Place, describes the ordeal. It is…

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  • Hugo de Groot (AKA Hugo Grotius) born in Delft on 10 April 1583 (the year before William of Orange was murdered). He was the intellectual prodigy of his age, and one of the ornaments of the University of Leyden. Early in life he became associated with Olden Barneveld, and when the struggle between Arminius and…

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  • Safekeeping the Flag

    In 1943, the Jewish family Gans was on their way to the train station because Father Josef, Mother Martha and their four children Abraham, Louise, Emma and baby Harry had received a call-up notice. After earlier deferments they were ordered, like many other Jews, to report for internment in the Vught Concentration Camp. The evening before…

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  • In 1944, a little Jewish girl named Elianne Muller wore this dress made of parachute material – dyed orange – during the Liberation celebration that took place in the village of Neerkant in the Dutch province of Brabant. It went beautifully with her reddish curls. The family Tijssen, Peter and Maria Tijssen had 11 children,…

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  • Ironically Camp Westerbork had been set up in 1939 to house Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany to the Netherlands. Following the German invasion of the Netherlands, the Nazis took over the camp and turned it into a deportation camp. From this camp, there was a deportation of 101,000 Dutch Jews and about 5,000 German…

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  • A RING FOR ROZA

    After their hiding place was betrayed, Roza and Siem Vos were deported via Westerbork to the Auschwitz Extermination Camp in Poland on 3 March 1944. They were immediately separated from each other. Siem ended up in the men’s camp and Roza in the women’s camp. Contact with each other was basically impossible. Despite the appalling…

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  • Karl Josef Silberbauer (21 June 1911 – 2 September 1972) was an Austrian police officer, SS-Oberscharführer (staff sergeant), and undercover investigator for the West German Federal Intelligence Service. Silberbauer is best known, however, for his activities in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during World War II. In 1963, Silberbauer, by then an Inspector in the Vienna police, was…

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  • The Netherlands Armed Forces surrendered to Nazi Germany in May 1940, and the first anti-Jewish measures (the barring of Jews from the air-raid defence services) began in June 1940. These culminated in November 1940 in the removal of all Jews from public positions, including universities, which led directly to student protests in Leiden and elsewhere.…

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  •   This may seem a strange title for a WWII related subject but in fact it is probably more appropriate then you’d expect. One of the definitions of Supply Chain Management  is “the management of the flow of goods and services,involves the movement and storage of raw materials, of work-in-process inventory, and of finished goods…

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  • It is not often you come across a feelgood Holocaust story but this is one of them. On 27 September 1942, the Jewish boy Joop Levy went into hiding with his parents. They were taken in by the Ebbers family on their farm in the village of Lintelo in the Achterhoek, a region in the eastern…

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