Female concentration camp survivors whose heads had been shaved in the camps often found themselves misidentified as collaborators and humiliated. Returning Jews discovered that other people were living in their houses or their homes had been robbed, and some even received tax demands to cover the years they had been in the camps. It was blamed on the postwar chaos, but it was traumatizing.
It should be added that the Dutch authorities were not alone in this. When a US intergovernmental committee commissioned a report on US-run displaced persons （DP） camps, they found Holocaust survivors in horrific conditions, poorly fed, and under armed guard.
The Dutch government in exile annulled Nazi legislation that had removed Jews from commerce. That should have been good news for Otto, but he was now classified as a German national and his businesses fell under the Decree on Hostile Property. He was forced to prove that he had never behaved in an anti-Dutch manner. In February 1947, twenty-one months after he had returned from Auschwitz, he was informed that he was no longer considered “a hostile subject.”3 At least he had had Miep and Jan to house him and friends who had supplied letters of support. As he wrote to his brother Robert, some survivors who couldn’t prove they had means of support had been put into camps or not allowed to reenter the country.
Dutch civilians were not more welcoming. They’d had their own suffering. The last winter of the war, called the “Hunger Winter,” had been brutal. The Dutch government in exile had ordered the railway workers to go on strike in sympathy with the Allies. In retaliation, the Germans had cut off all food and heating supplies. Over the Hunger Winter, between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand Dutch people had starved to death. As it retreated, the German Army opened the dikes, flooding 8 percent of the landmass, and its systematic looting meant that the economic destruction in the Netherlands was greater than in any other western country.4 Many Dutch dismissed the stories of the extermination camps in the east as an exaggeration. The truth, at least at that stage, was that many did not realize that there had been a Holocaust. As Miep Gies put it sadly, “Everyone had been through so much misery that no one had much interest in the suffering of others.”5
Meanwhile, the Dutch government in exile directed much of its attention to collaborators. Because it expected acts of vengeance against those known to have conspired with the Nazis, it set about identifying the collaborators so they could be prosecuted legally. In 1943, it drew up the Special Justice Act （Besluit Buitengewone Rechtspleging）， and then, starting in May 1945, it established a series of tribunals and special courts throughout the country. In the newly liberated Netherlands, the Political Investigation Service （POD） looked into hundreds of thousands of cases.*
Over 150 police departments were set up to collect evidence—letters, photos, witness statements, membership cards—on collaborators. The death penalty, which had been abolished in the Netherlands in 1870, was reinstated.
Dossiers were compiled and were eventually filed in the Central Archives of Extraordinary Justice （CABR） in The Hague. Housed in the National Archives, they stretch for more than two and a half miles and contain more than 450,000 dossiers. Protected by privacy laws, the files include information on convicted collaborators, people who were wrongly accused, people who were acquitted, victims, and those who acted as witnesses. There can be dozens of files on one person since that individual might have been under investigation by multiple police departments and been prosecuted for multiple crimes. The files contain photographs, NSB membership certificates, psychological reports, bank statements, transcripts of trials, witness statements by fellow collaborators and surviving Jews, and more. Two hundred thousand of the dossiers were sent to the Office of the Public Prosecutor. It was chaos, of course, and, though the numbers are somewhat sketchy, it is estimated that 150,000 Dutch people were arrested. （A small number of German officials were also tried and imprisoned in the Netherlands.） Of the Dutch prisoners, 90,000 were released and placed “conditionally outside prosecution.” In all, 14,000 sentences were passed, 145 people were sentenced to death, and in the end 42 were executed.6
Some of the most aggressive collaborators among the “Jew hunters” were a group of Dutch Nazis working in the investigative division of the Household Inventory Agency （Abteilung Hausraterfassung）， which was charged with tracking down and expropriating Jewish goods and property. One of the four subdivisions, or Kolonnen, of the agency was called the Colonne Henneicke, named after its leader, Wim Henneicke. A ruthless man, he’d been an underworld figure who’d previously run an illegal taxi service and exploited his contacts with that world in the service of the column.7 In October 1942, the Henneicke Column began the work of tracking down Jews in hiding. By the time it was disbanded in October 1943, it had delivered eight thousand to nine thousand Jews to the Nazis.8