Excerpt:
Holland is a tolerant country. Throughout the ages those who were persecuted by totalitarian regimes found refuge in the so-called Low Countries. Not only persecuted Protestants in France – so-called Huguenots – but also many Portuguese Jews fled to Holland because they knew they would be safe there. There is no tradition of anti-Semitism in Holland. The most tolerant and liberal city is the Dutch capital of Amsterdam. Things changed in 1940, when the Nazis occupied Holland, and also sixty years later, after the turn of the millennium when Moroccan youths began to harass Jews.
During the five year long Nazi occupation of Holland – between May 1940 and May 1945 – the Nazis sent more than 100,000 Jews from Holland to the gas chambers in Poland. The deportations, though, did not start immediately. It took the Nazis two years to send the first Dutch Jews – Jews from Amsterdam, by the way – to Auschwitz. About 75 percent of all the Jews from Holland did not survive the war – an extremely high percentage (even higher than the percentages in France and Belgium). Among those who died in a Nazi concentration camp was a girl from Amsterdam whose name was Anne Frank. She and her parents left Nazi Germany as early as 1933 and settled in Amsterdam where they thought they would be safe from persecution.
After the brutal invasion of peaceful and neutral Holland in May 1940, Dutch collaborators assisted the German Nazi occupiers in many ways. It actually began in Amsterdam in February 1941 when paramilitary Dutch Nazi groups called the "WA" decided it was time to harass the local Jews. Amsterdam Jews were beaten up, molested and forcibly thrown out of streetcars.