The National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam will be the first in the country to explore how Nazi-installed bureaucracy carried out by Dutch officials led to the highest ratio of Jewish victims in western Europe.
In the Netherlands, the Nazis deported 75 per cent of the country’s Jewish population – about 102,000 men, women and children.
Exhibitions highlight how Dutch civilians enforced diktats barring Jews from sports clubs, riding bicycles and attending universities.
‘You feel the oppression’
Annemiek Gringold, the museum’s head curator, told The New York Times: “You feel the oppression and the dismantling of the rule of law and freedom for every Jew.
“That crime, no matter how neatly captured in judicial text, is always present.”
It contains clothes, items of jewellery, suitcases and other keepsakes taken from the Jews transported to concentration camps by the Nazis.
“That’s the only way to do justice to someone’s memory,” Ms Gringold added.
“Otherwise someone is reduced to what the Nazis made them into. We don’t want that.”
