The Protestant Church of the Netherlands which brings together nearly two million faithful mostly Calvinists and Lutherans has decided to publicly acknowledge 75 years after the end of World War II that it contributed to heating the climate of antiSemitism during the war and did not do enough to help Jews persecuted by the Nazis
And not later when the surviving Jews from the Nazi concentration camps returned home and lacked social support to overcome the tragedy
It is the first time that this Christian Church admits the errors committed and it will do so publicly on November 8 during the commemoration of the Night of Broken Glass the pogrom that prepared in 1938 in Nazi Germany the terrain of the Holocaust
The official statement has been consulted with the Dutch Central Jewish Platform which represents the Hebrew community and comes after the Government apologized for the first time last January for having failed the Jewish community in the face of persecution during the Nazi occupation Of the 140000 Jews who lived in the country before the war only 38200 survived
King William later acknowledged that his greatgrandmother Queen Wilhelmina exiled in London during World War II seemed to relegate this group of deported fellow citizens to the rest
They are two historical speeches that precede these words of the Protestant Church and cover a national debate And they arrive before the last survivors disappear says historian Jan Bank author of a book on European churches during the war
On the attitude of the different branches of Dutch Protestantism towards the persecution of the Jews Bank explains The Dutch Calvinist churches were the most important and majority in the country at the time and this Calvinism became a form of resistance against the Nazi regime publicly from the synod of the socalled Reformed Church against the persecution of the Jews and on the part of the believers who hid them in a private capacity
However the Lutheran churches whose majority attitude was loyalty to the secular power doubted for a year whether they should join the Calvinist protest On the other hand the smaller and more dogmatic groups thought that they should accept the divine punishment represented by Adolf Hitler instead of opposing it he adds
In 2017 the Lutheran branch of Protestantism finally distanced itself from antiJewish sentiment in Luthers teachings For Bart Wallet a historian specializing in Hebrew and Jewish Studies the declaration of the Protestant Church will now take place within the framework of a national dialogue between Jews and Christians
Given the current rise in antiSemitism it is a form of commitment to the Jewish community
In World War II most churches in occupied countries focused on their own survival and although their behavior ranges from collaboration to active resistance at the local level the perception of the Dutch branch is that it could have done more because their protest against the Nazis was not unanimous he said in a telephone conversation
Wallet has prepared the historical report on which the admission of the errors that the Protestant community will make public on November 8 is based and recalls that during the war it was seen that the churches cared above all for their faithful
There were Jews who had converted to Christianity decades before the war and others who did then and there were also Protestant pastors of Jewish origin but there came a time when they were taken as moral hostages by the Nazis to avoid ecclesial rejection
That is if the curia did not bend they would finish off these converts The Catholic Archbishop did not yield and his parishioners were deported The Protestant hierarchy did not complain so much although many of their religious on the ground did and it is one of the reasons that explain the current recognition
The Central Jewish Platform considers this recognition important because antiSemitism persists in public debate school and work It seems normal today to speak again with hatred of the other and references to racism end up entering Parliament from the street and permeating daily discourse says Eddo Verdoner the president of this platform
When evaluating the declaration of the Protestant Church he remembers that in 1944 there was a schism within it because one part wanted to be more critical of the Nazis While the entire country suffered the hardships of the occupation Verdoner recalls that before the war there were 140000 Dutch Jews around 101800 were killed and 38200 survived
On their return of the survivors there was a small Shoah they had nothing their houses had been frequently occupied by other compatriots and in some cases they even had to pay back taxes It took almost two decades for the true reconciliation to begin
The compensation of the national railways which brought them by train to the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands on the way to the death camps it only crystallized in 2019
While reconciliation as a whole came late as does this proclamation the admission of guilt comforts us because there are forms of antiSemitism in religion and this is a commitment in the name of respect and understanding concludes Verdoner
