Image by getty images

The City of Amsterdam earmarked $1.18 million from its budget to pay back fines it unjustly collected from Holocaust survivors.

The allocation, which Mayor Eberhard van der Laan announced Thursday, is for fines that the city had imposed on hundreds of Jewish Holocaust survivors for properties they owned but for which they had failed to pay ground lease fees after the German army invaded the Netherlands in 1940, the Het Parool daily reported.

The money is to be transferred to a fund the city will set up in the near future to handle reimbursement claims by survivors or their descendants.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

The city also intends to transfer to the same fund the equivalent of the actual ground lease fees unjustly levied from Jews when they were in hiding from the German occupation forces or in concentration camps, Het Parool reported.

The reimbursement comes after the submission last month of a report by the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, or NIOD, finding that the municipality unjustly collected more than $10 million from Holocaust survivors.

“The NIOD report shows that the taxation of war victims was formalistic and inappropriate [not only] in hindsight but also at the time,” van der Laan said in a statement to the Dutch news agency Novum on Thursday.

Nazi authorities began in 1942 the deportation and murder of 75 percent of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands then.

Many of the houses in question were used by Nazi occupation officers and local collaborators, Het Parool reported. The city pursued Holocaust survivors for missed payments as late as 1947 and imposed fines on them for missing payments, according to the daily, whose publication on the issue last year prompted the investigation.

The NIOD researchers estimate the city received a total of $14.5 million from fines unjustly levied against Jews during the relevant period, according to Ronny Naftaniel, a former chief negotiator for the Dutch Jewish community in restitution talks and a member of the supervisory committee of the NIOD research.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

$90 $180

$360

Other amount