On February 12, 1941, German and Amsterdam police officers closed the access roads and bridges to the Jewish Quarter. No citizens were allowed to enter or leave that part of the city. In a speech to the Dutch section of the NSDAP （the German Nazi Party） at the Concertgebouw on March 12, Commissioner Seyss-Inquart declared, “We will strike the Jews wherever we find them, and anyone who walks alongside them will have to bear the consequences.”4 That June, the Nazis purged the Concertgebouw of all its Jewish musicians. On their final day as members, the orchestra performed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. When the chorus sang the line “Alle Menschen werden Brüder” （All people shall become brothers）， it was meant to shame the Nazis. In 1942, the names of Jewish composers carved into the walls of the concert hall were effaced.5
The Germans had already created a brilliant template for how to deceive, control, and slowly destroy a community. In 1939, in the newly occupied countries and in the Jewish ghettos, they established Jewish Councils to act as filters between the occupiers and the Jewish community. The Germans imposed directives, and the Jewish Councils were responsible for implementing them. In the Netherlands the council published its own newspaper, Het Joodsche Weekblad, which listed each new anti-Jewish decree out of the eye of the general public. Had the decrees been published in a newspaper of more general circulation, the Germans would have risked an adverse reaction from non-Jews.
At its first meeting on February 13, 1941, the Jewish Council responded to the violent incident that had just occurred in the Jewish Quarter by insisting that all weapons in the hands of Jews be turned over to police. It was as if it was conceding that the Jews bore some responsibility for the violence initiated by the Nazi thugs when in fact they’d simply been defending themselves.6 The council was clearly acquiescing to German orders, which set a ruinous precedent.
There was much blackmail by the German high command; if the council refused to carry out a measure, the Germans threatened to do it much more brutally. The real force behind the scenes was the Zentralstelle （Central Agency for Jewish Emigration）。 The name was devious in the extreme, implying that the possibility of emigration for Jews was real. It would seem that at least initially, the leaders of the Jewish Council assumed that the Germans had no intention of removing the entire Jewish community from the Netherlands and that the council’s role was to protect those in the most danger. In the early days, even as they received dire warnings about concentration camps in Poland and Germany, Dutch Jews remained convinced that the Germans would never dare to do in the Netherlands what they were doing in Eastern Europe.
When the deportations began, the Zentralstelle created a system of Sperres, or exemptions from deportation, and allowed the Jewish Council to make recommendations. Members of the council and their families automatically qualified for Sperres, and those who were selected were safe for a time. However, the system was rife with abuse. The line between cooperation and collaboration gradually grew thinner and thinner.7
Meanwhile, civic chaos continued in Amsterdam. On February 22, 1941, a Saturday afternoon and therefore the Sabbath, trucks with six hundred heavily armed members of the German Ordnungspolizei entered the sealed-off Jewish Quarter and randomly arrested 427 Jewish men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five.8 They were sent first to Kamp Schoorl in the Netherlands. Thirty-eight were returned to Amsterdam due to ill health. The remaining 389 were sent to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and some eventually to Buchenwald. Only two of them survived.
Three days later, on February 25, in protest against the roundup, Dutch workers staged a massive strike. Joined by three hundred thousand people, the strike lasted two days. Responding ruthlessly, the Nazis called in the Waffen-SS, which had permission to use live ammunition against the striking workers. Nine people were killed and twenty-four seriously wounded. The strike leaders were tracked down, and at least twenty were executed. Men from the Jewish Quarter who had been arrested were photographed with weapons in their hands. The photographs were published in the Dutch press as evidence that the German command was dealing with “an outbreak of terrorism.”9 If any Dutch had harbored illusions about what the German occupation might mean, they now lost them.
But German Jews had no such illusions. Otto Frank knew the Nazi drill: excluding Jews from air-raid shelters; banning Jews from employment; the Aryanization of businesses; the registration of Jews, who were forced to wear yellow stars; the confiscation of wealth and property; mass arrests; transit camps; and finally, the deportations to the east, where it was not clear what awaited them. Otto now put every ounce of his strength into the fight to save his family. He knew he had to secure his business and get out of the Netherlands.