Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [178]
The war years
The Netherlands remained neutral during World War I and although it suffered privations as a by-product of the Allied blockade of German war materials, this was offset by the profits many Dutch merchants made by trading with both sides. Similar attempts to remain neutral in World War II, however, failed. The Germans invaded on May 10, 1940, and the Netherlands was quickly overrun. Queen Wilhelmina fled to London to set up a government-in-exile, and members of the NSB, the Dutch fascist party which had welcomed the invaders, was rewarded with positions of authority. Nevertheless, in the early months of the occupation, life for ordinary Amsterdammers went on pretty much as usual. Even when the first roundups of the Jews began in late 1940, many managed to turn a blind eye, though in February 1941 Amsterdam’s newly outlawed Communist Party did organize a widely supported strike, spearheaded by the city’s transport and refuse workers, shipbuilders and dockers in support of the Jews. It was a gesture rather than a move to undermine German control, but an important one all the same. Interviewed after the war, one of the leaders summarized it thus: “If just one of Amsterdam’s Jews did not feel forgotten and abandoned as he was packed off in a train, then the strike was well worth it.”
As the war progressed, so the German grip got tighter and the Dutch Resistance stronger, its activities trumpeted by underground newspapers such as Het Parool (The Password), which survives in good form today. For the most part, the Resistance focused on industrial and transportation sabotage as well as the forgery of identity papers, a real Dutch speciality, but it paid a heavy price with some 23,000 of its fighters and sympathizers losing their lives. The city’s Jews (see "The Jews in Amsterdam"), however, took the worst punishment. In 1940, Amsterdam’s Jewish population, swollen by refugees from Hitler’s Germany, was around 140,000, but when the Allies liberated the city in May 1945 only a few thousand were left. The Old Jewish Quarter lay deserted, a rare crumb of comfort being the survival of the diary of a young Jewish girl – Anne Frank.
History |
Reconstruction – 1945 to 1960
The postwar years were spent patching up the damage of occupation, though at first progress was hindered by a desperate shortage of food, fuel and building materials. Indeed, things were in such short supply – and the winter of 1945–46 so cold – that hundreds of Amsterdammers died of hunger and/or hypothermia, their black cardboard coffins being trundled to mass graves. Neither did it help that the retreating Germans had blown up all the dykes and sluices on the North Sea coast at IJmuiden, at the mouth of the Nordzeekanaal. Nevertheless, Amsterdam had not received an aerial pounding like the ones dished out to Rotterdam and Arnhem, and the reconstruction soon built up a head of steam. One feature was the creation of giant suburbs like Bijlmermeer, to the southeast of the city, the last word in early 1960s large-scale residential planning, with low-cost modern housing, play areas and foot and cycle paths.
Two events marred Dutch reconstruction in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The former Dutch colonies of Java and Sumatra, taken by the Japanese at the outbreak of the war, were now ruled by a nationalist republican government that refused to recognize Dutch sovereignty. Following the failure of talks between Den Haag and the nationalists in 1947, the Dutch sent the troops in – a colonial enterprise that soon became a bloody debacle. International opposition was intense and, after much condemnation and pressure, the Dutch reluctantly surrendered their most important Asian colonies, which were ultimately incorporated as Indonesia in 1950. Back at home, tragedy struck on February 1, 1953 when an unusually high tide was pushed over Zeeland’s sea defences by a westerly gale, flooding 160 square kilometres of land and drowning over 1800 people. The response was the Delta Project, which closed off the western part of the Scheldt and Maas estuaries with massive