Five Brothers and a War

Razzias

Another razzia in Den Haag, this time on the corner of the Theresiastraat and the Paulinastraat— about 7km from Margrietstraat. The color photo is the same corner today.

It was not only the Nazis who worked to hunt people down—the NSB did this with a vengeance. There were 230 police officers whose sole job was to hunt Jews. Of those, 96% belonged to a National Socialist organization—82% to the NSB. They were well paid, and got bonuses for successful arrests of Jews, not to mention the plundering and sexual misconduct that occurred during the detention process.

Razzia against Amsterdam Jews, in the Jonas Daniël Meijerplein , (“plein” = “square”), 1941. One of those working with the Den Haag police was Maarten Spaans. He was “credited” with capturing 362 people, 260 of whom were killed. He took a pragmatic approach, when he said, “After the Dutch army surrender in May 1940, I no longer considered the Germans to be the enemy, and I had no objections to working with them as police.” He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but that was later commuted to only 22 years. Perhaps the most violent of the bounty hunters was Kees Kaptein, who also worked with the police department in Den Haag. He captured between 1,750 and 2,000 Jews, and once arrested, would physically abuse them. Often this involved a red-hot poker. For men, it involved very hard kicks to the groin in his attempt to sterilize them. Ultimately, he was sentenced to death for what was described as “the most serious and heinous cases of the persecution of the Jews”. But there were also Jews who hunted other Jews. One notable example was Ans van Dijk, a Jewish woman who hid from the Germans for the first three years of the occupation.

nazi germany

Five Brothers and a War

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