The War That Changed Everything

Most people know the story of Anne Frank through her diary. They know the secret annex, the betrayal, the concentration camps. Fewer people know the full context of her story within the broader Dutch experience of World War II—a war that lasted five years and transformed the Netherlands from a prosperous neutral nation into an occupied country marked by collaboration, resistance, starvation, and the loss of three-quarters of its Jewish population. Anne Frank’s diary is real, moving, and profound, but it tells only part of a much larger story about what occupation meant for the Dutch people.

To understand the Netherlands in the 1940s, you have to go back to 1940. On May 10th, German forces invaded, and the Dutch government’s hopes for neutrality—which had kept them out of the First World War—evaporated. The country was defended, briefly. The Battle of the Netherlands lasted five days. Dutch soldiers, many armed with World War I-era rifles, faced the German Luftwaffe and armor. Thousands of soldiers died. German paratroopers landed behind Dutch lines. By May 15th, it was over. Queen Wilhelmina and her government escaped to London. The Netherlands, it seemed, had simply been swallowed by the Nazi war machine.

What followed was five years of occupation, five years during which the Netherlands lost nearly a quarter of a million people to war, hunger, and systematic genocide. It transformed Dutch society, created profound collaborations and resistance, and left scars that lasted generations.

The First Days of Occupation

When you walk through the Binnenhof (Parliament complex) in The Hague today, it’s hard to imagine what it was like when German soldiers marched through it. The building is now open to visitors and filled with the apparatus of modern government. But in May 1940, it was the seat of a conquered nation. German military command established headquarters throughout the country. The Dutch government apparatus remained in place—there was no need for a revolutionary restructuring. The Nazis were pragmatists about occupation; if they could use existing Dutch bureaucracy to implement their plans, that was simpler than imposing something entirely new.

But the occupation quickly became something more sinister. In 1940 and 1941, the racial laws began. Jews were required to wear yellow badges. Jewish businesses were marked and boycotted. Universities expelled Jewish professors. Professional organizations banned Jewish members. It happened gradually enough that it could be accepted as incremental policy change, but cumulatively, it was a systematic exclusion of Jews from civil society. Many Dutch people protested privately, but public resistance was limited.

Then came February 1941. German police conducted mass arrests of Jews in Amsterdam, dragging them from the streets and throwing them into trucks. This was the opening move in a systematic deportation process. In response, workers in Amsterdam declared a general strike—the famous Februaristaking (February Strike). The tram workers, dockers, factory workers, and others simply refused to work. For two days, Amsterdam was paralyzed by protest. It was one of the only effective mass protests against Nazi persecution of Jews in all of occupied Europe.

The strike was suppressed, executions were threatened, but it stands as a moment of moral clarity: ordinary Dutch people, for a moment, chose to resist. You can visit the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam, located in a house on the Prinsengracht (the same canal where the Anne Frank House sits), to understand the full scope of Dutch resistance. It includes documentation of the February Strike and the stories of those who participated.

The Diary

Anne Frank’s family went into hiding in July 1942, moving into a secret annex behind her father Otto Frank’s business on the Prinsengracht canal. For over two years, the family and four other Jews lived hidden in the back building, invisible to the world, dependent on helpers who brought food and news. Anne was 13 when they went into hiding, 15 when they were discovered.

The Anne Frank House, now one of the most visited museums in Amsterdam, is the building where the family hid. Visiting it is profoundly moving. The house is largely unchanged—the actual furniture, the bookshelf that concealed the entrance, the thin curtains that kept them hidden from street view. Anne’s actual diary lies protected behind glass in a climate-controlled room. You can read her words in her own handwriting, see her early entries written in a girl’s careful script, and then watch how the entries become darker and more introspective as she matures and the world grows more dangerous.

But what many visitors don’t realize is how exceptional Anne Frank’s story was within the broader Dutch Jewish experience. Most Dutch Jews who were arrested weren’t hidden by helpers; they were transported directly to concentration camps. Anne’s family was hidden; most were not. Anne survived being discovered and transported, but most did not. Her diary survives; most testimony does not. She has become the face of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, but her story is both typical and atypical—it shows us the possibilities of resistance and survival while reminding us that for the vast majority of Dutch Jews, resistance wasn’t possible.

The Numbers: Dutch Jews and the Holocaust

The statistics are staggering. Before the war, about 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands. By the end of the war, 110,000 were dead. Of the roughly 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands in 1941, 107,000 were deported to concentration camps. About 95% of deportees were killed. Of all the Jewish populations in Western Europe, the Netherlands had the highest percentage killed—75%. Why?

Part of the reason was Dutch pragmatism and organization. The Jewish Council (Joodse Raad), created by the German authorities to serve as an intermediary between the Jewish community and the occupation government, kept detailed records. The Nazis used these records to round up Jews. Many Dutch Jews believed that cooperation and organization would protect them—that if they registered, paid taxes, worked in approved occupations, they might be safer. This was a tragic miscalculation.

Another reason was the character of Dutch occupation. The Nazis appointed a civil administrator (Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart) rather than directly governing through military command. This encouraged a certain bureaucratic efficiency in the implementation of Nazi racial policy. The trains ran on time. The records were kept carefully. The persecution was systematic.

Many Dutch people helped hide Jews; estimates suggest between 20,000 and 25,000 Jews were saved by Dutch helpers. But many more Dutch people collaborated with the occupation, either actively or passively. Some of this collaboration was ideological—there was a Dutch Nazi party, the NSB, that genuinely supported the regime. Some was opportunistic. Some was simply the result of people trying to survive under occupation, making compromises they might not have made under different circumstances.

The Hunger Winter of 1944-45

As the war wound down and allied forces approached, the Netherlands faced a catastrophe of different character: starvation. In September 1944, Dutch railway workers, responding to a call from the Dutch government in exile, declared a strike to disrupt German troop movements supporting the Eastern Front. The Germans responded by imposing a food embargo on the Netherlands. From November 1944 to May 1945, people starved.

The Hunger Winter (Hongerwinter) killed roughly 20,000 people from starvation and the diseases that came with severe malnutrition. People ate flower bulbs (tulip bulbs, ironically, became a food source), tree bark, anything. Children born during the winter were underweight; studies show that Dutch people born during this period had lifelong health consequences. Elderly people simply lay down and died.

It’s difficult for visitors today to understand the scale of this suffering. Amsterdam and other cities are prosperous now, full of restaurants and cafes. But talk to elderly Dutch people and they’ll tell you stories of this winter that sound almost medieval: people freezing because they’d burned their floorboards for fuel, children being taken away to be fed in other countries, the complete breakdown of normal life for months.

The liberation in May 1945 came when Canadian forces swept in, and the Nazis surrendered. The speed of it is almost shocking in retrospect. From catastrophe to freedom in weeks. But the impact lasted for decades. Dutch society emerged from the war traumatized, but also more united than before. The shared experience of occupation and resistance became part of the national identity.

Visiting the War in Modern Amsterdam

The Netherlands has done a remarkable job of preserving and interpreting its World War II history. Beyond the Anne Frank House, several museums tell parts of the story. The Resistance Museum documents the Dutch resistance movement—not a monolithic force, but a diverse set of groups with different ideologies and methods. The Hollandsche Schouwburg, in Amsterdam, was a Jewish theater during the war where Jews were assembled before deportation. It’s now a memorial and museum.

The National War Museum in Overloon, in the eastern Netherlands, documents the war from a military perspective, with tanks, vehicles, and weapons displayed. The Dutch War Museum focuses on the Dutch experience and includes exhibits about civilian life under occupation, the resistance, and the liberation. Many smaller towns have local war museums or memorials.

One of the most moving is the Westerbork Transit Camp, in the northeast. This was the staging point from which Dutch Jews were transported to Auschwitz. Today it’s a museum and memorial. The actual barracks are mostly gone, but the shape of the camp—the railway tracks that led to the deportation platform, the foundations where buildings stood—remains visible. It’s a pilgrimage site for many visitors trying to understand what happened.

The Long Aftermath

The liberation of 1945 didn’t end the war’s impact on the Netherlands. Dutch identity had been forged in the crucible of occupation. The question of collaboration versus resistance became central to how Dutch people understood their national character. Those who’d collaborated were eventually prosecuted; those who’d resisted were celebrated. But the reality was more complex than either narrative suggested—most Dutch people were neither heroes nor villains but ordinary people trying to survive.

This complexity is what makes the study of the Dutch experience during the war so important. Anne Frank’s diary is powerful because it captures the interiority of a girl growing up under impossible circumstances. But the full story—the February Strike, the hiding of 25,000 Jews, the 110,000 who died, the Hunger Winter, the liberation—is a story about what happens when one of Europe’s most prosperous and tolerant nations is occupied by one of history’s most brutal regimes. It’s a story about how quickly normal life can become extraordinary, how ordinary people can become collaborators or resisters or something in between.

When you visit the Anne Frank House or walk through Amsterdam’s canal ring, you’re walking through the geography of this history. The Grachtengordel, where Anne’s family hid and where several other Jews also sheltered, looks peaceful and beautiful now. But its beauty is shadowed by what happened here. That shadow is part of what makes visiting so important—to remember, to understand, and to grapple with what ordinary people are capable of doing and enduring when tested by extraordinary circumstances.