Dutch General Strike To Oppose Nazis Deporting Jews, Feb. 1941: Dutch 'Winter Famine' 1944-45, WWII
- 'The February Strike: When the Dutch Struck Against the Nazi Holocaust.' Daily Kos, by 'WB Reeves,' March 2, 2020.
Almost eighty years ago, on February 24th 1941 a little known but profound event occurred in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of World War II. The workers and citizens of Amsterdam staged a general strike to oppose the deportation of Jews by the Nazis and their Dutch collaborators. The Netherlands had been overrun by the Nazis in 1940. The government in exile of Queen Wilhelmina was established in London thus forcing the Nazis to rule the country directly without resort to puppet regimes like Vichy France. The population lived directly under the guns of the occupiers.
- Arrest of Dutch Jews by Nazis in February 1941.
The Nazis hoped to absorb the Dutch into their National Socialist Greater German Reich. Consequently they initially tried a soft approach towards their ostensible Aryan kin. They pinned a great deal of hope on the pre-existing National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands, despite its small numbers and lack of popularity. Nevertheless, despite such consideration, when Nazis and Dutch collaborators began to stage attacks on the Jewish community in Amsterdam, culminating in the round up of 425 Jewish men ages 25-35 for deportation to Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps on the weekend of Feb. 22-23, the reaction was explosive.
On Feb. 24th a mass meeting was held on the Noordermarkt to call for a strike to protest the pogrom as well as the policy of conscripting Dutch civilians for forced labor in Germany..https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance
- THE FEBRUARY STRIKE: It started on 25 Feb. 1941 and lasted for 2 days; on 26 Feb., 300,000 people joined the strike. The strike was harshly suppressed by the Germans after 3 days. The 1941 February Strike is considered to be the first public protest against the Nazis in occupied Europe, and the only mass protest against the deportation of Jews to be organized by non-Jews...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_strike
On 25 February 1941, the Communist Party of the Netherlands called for a general strike, the 'February strike', in response to the first Nazi raid on Amsterdam's Jewish population. The old Jewish quarter in Amsterdam had been cordoned off into a ghetto and as retaliation for a number of violent incidents that followed, 425 Jewish men were taken hostage by the Germans and eventually deported to extermination camps, just two surviving. Many citizens of Amsterdam, regardless of their political affiliation, joined in a mass protest against the deportation of Jewish Dutch citizens.
The next day, factories in Zaandam, Haarlem, IJmuiden, Weesp, Bussum, Hilversum and Utrecht joined in. The strike was largely put down within a day with German troops firing on unarmed crowds, killing nine people and wounding 24, as well as taking many prisoners. Opposition to the German occupation intensified as a result of the violence against non-combative Dutch people (albeit in support of the Jews).The only other general strike in Nazi-occupied Europe was the general strike in occupied Luxembourg in 1942. The Dutch struck four more times against the Germans: the students' strike in November 1940, the doctors' strike in 1942, the April–May strike in 1943 and the railway strike in 1944.
The Dutch Resistance became so pervasive that it accomplished prodigies that seem incredible for a people under the boot of Hitler’s SS.
One of the most widespread activities was hiding and sheltering refugees and enemies of the Nazi regime, which included concealing Jewish families like that of Anne Frank, underground operatives, draft-age Dutchmen and, later in the war, Allied aircrew. Collectively these people were known as onderduikers ('people in hiding' or literally: 'under-divers'). Corrie ten Boom and her family were among those who successfully hid several Jews and resistance workers from the Nazis. The first people who went into hiding were German Jews who had arrived in the Netherlands before 1940. They were not duped by the German attitude just after the Dutch capitulation. In the first weeks after the surrender, some British soldiers who could not get to Dunkirk (Duinkerken) in French Flanders hid with farmers in Dutch Flanders...Read More, https://www.dailykos.com/stories/1923412
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- 'The Dutch Hunger Winter 1944-45,' 'Hongerwinter,' Environment and Society. The Hongerwinter was a major famine that took place in the Netherlands, particularly in the Nazi-occupied western part of the country. From November 1944 until the liberation of the Netherlands by the Allies on 5 May 1945, 22,000 people died and 4.5 million were affected by the direct and indirect consequences of the famine.
The “Dutch Hunger Winter” was caused by a number of reasons: in addition to an exceptionally harsh winter, bad crops, and four years of brutal war, the Nazis imposed an embargo on food transport to the western Netherlands in September 1944 in retaliation for the exiled Dutch government supporting the Allies in liberating southern parts of the Netherlands.
The population was forced to live on rations of 400-800 calories per day; to survive, people had to eat grass and tulip bulbs. Besides the aftereffects on the Dutch survivors such as poor physical health, the famine resulted in long-term effects on the descendants of the Hongerwinter generation. Babies born during this period were conspicuously small and extremely vulnerable to diabetes, schizophrenia, and lung diseases.
http://www.environmentandsociety.org/tools/keywords/dutch-hunger-winter-1944-45
- More: 'Dutch Famine of 1944- 45' https://dutchreview.com/culture/the-hunger-winter-the-dutch-famine-of-1944-45/
- More: NYT, 'Dutch Famine Health Effects' https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/science/dutch-famine-genes.html
- During the Dutch 'Hunger Winter' children sometimes carried a spoon with them, just in case.'
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