On this date every year, Amsterdammers gather to lay flowers in commemoration of one of the most remarkable, if strangely little-known, events in recent European history, writes Michael O'Loughlin.
On the February 25th, 1941, Amsterdam and many other parts of the German-occupied Netherlands were brought to a halt by an all-out strike called by ship workers and dockers in the city. They were protesting at the arrest and deportation of 427 young Jews and the various round-ups and attacks which had taken place in the Jewish quarters of Amsterdam in the preceding months. Incredible as it may seem, in the four years that the Nazi death machine rolled across Europe, deporting and murdering millions of Jews, this was the sole act of mass resistance.
Rightly, though somewhat sourly, the great Dutch writer Adrian Roland Holst remarked that the February 1941 strike saved the Netherlands from complete disgrace in the second World War.
As with all the other countries in Nazi-occupied Europe, Holland's history in the second World War is a murky one, not nearly as black-and-white as people liked to believe after the war. Indeed, one of the best studies of that period is a book called simply Grey. The fact is that most Dutch people seemed to walk a fine line between passive collaboration and open resistance, and tried to get along with their lives as normally as possible after the capitulation on May 15th, 1940, five days after the German invasion.
But the Occupation grew steadily worse. There were few places in the world where Jews were as socially integrated as in the Netherlands, so the anti- Jewish regulations hit particularly hard. The Germans introduced Aryan laws and Jews were made to leave state employment, and forced gradually into ghettoes which were off-limits to non-Jews. In the Jewish areas of Amsterdam this led to violent clashes between Dutch fascist gangs and the gangs of young Jews, often Communist. The street-fighting round the famous Jewish-owned Koko Ice Cream Parlour was the ostensible reason for the Nazi crackdown, though of course it would have happened anyway.
The Communist-led reaction was swift and effective, and by February 25th the shipyards, transport, even large department stores had shut down in protest. The actual pamphlet calling the strike is interesting. Its Communist authors protested at the persecution of the Jews but were at pains to lay much of the blame for the situation on the "Big Capitalist Jews" such as like Asscher and Cohen, who were attempting to reach some kind of working relationship with the Occupation. In addition, with a prescient eye to post-war politics, they pointed out that the security police and SS men carrying out the raids were equally loathed by the ordinary German soldiers, workers like themselves.
The strike was soon brutally crushed. Nine workers were shot dead in Amsterdam and the Communist ringleaders were rounded up, taken away and executed in the dunes outside the city. Many others were sent to concentration camps. The Final Solution continued on its way, and over the next three years, more than 100,000 Dutch Jews were deported and murdered in concentration camps.
The heroic dockers are remembered by a beautiful statue beside Amsterdam's Portuguese synagogue, which perfectly expresses both their impotence and their defiance. The annual commemoration on this site has always been a remarkably pluralist event. Anarchists with purple Mohican haircuts walk alongside old Jewish ladies in fur coats and diamonds, and tall, elderly men in anoraks, the last surviving Communist dockers.
Now that there seems to be a post-Cold War tendency to equate communism with fascism, even on an official level in the Council of Europe, these facts are worth remembering. In Holland, as in countries such as France and Italy, the Communists often formed the backbone of the Resistance. Ultimately, the only real resistance to German occupation came from people who had firmly held beliefs and were prepared to fight for them. The German strategy was to ensure that fighting for those beliefs meant not only risking your own life, but the lives of your families, friends and even neighbours - something which most people, no matter how much they hated the Germans, were not prepared not to do. It was people who put morality and principle above business as usual, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and the strict Presbyterian sects in rural areas such as like Friesland, who resisted most fiercely. But above all it was the Communists trade unionists who on February 25th showed what could be done, even in the darkest of times.
Now the Netherlands is once again facing dark times, with the rise of radicalism among its Muslim population leading to a social and political crisis in what was once the most tolerant country in Europe, if not the world. It is no surprise that Amsterdam City Council has referred to this crisis and called for a particularly large turnout for the today's anniversary gathering.