Worthy Christian News > World News > Dutch Remember Horrors Of Dachau

AMSTELVEEN, NETHERLANDS (Worthy News) – Dutch survivors and local leaders on Saturday recalled the horrors of the Dachau concentration camp at the National Dachau Monument on the outskirts of Amsterdam at a time of growing antisemitism.

Mayor Tjapko Poppens of the Dutch municipality of Amstelveen was the first to lay a wreath at the Dachau Monument in the Amsterdam Bos (Amsterdam Forest) on Saturday.

His colleague Mayor Femke Halsema of Amsterdam wondered “from where the resistance fighters from World War Two and the people killed in Dachau got the strength to continue their resistance against anti-Semitism which is rising again,” and Nazism. “Our hope is based on their lives and those who perished,” she stressed.

Among the tens of thousands who perished at Dachau was Dutch Reformed Pastor Jo Kapteyn, who became a close friend of Priest Titus Brandsma, after whom a church in Amstelveen was named. Brandsma was “canonized” last year by Pope Francis.

Speaking at Saturday’s ceremony was Jo Kapteyn’s son, also named Jo, who was born after his father had already passed away.

He recalled that his father “preached and prayed” for the return of Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, who had fled to Britain and against Nazism and anti-Semitism.

“Because of traitors among churchgoers and prayer-meeting visitors,” his father ended up in Dachau.

READING AND PRAYING

This year’s Dachau Lecture on September 27 is dedicated to Titus Brandsma. “There was a lot in common between the two,” recalled Jo Kapteyn Jr. “They read and prayed together.”

Though most clergies were locked up in barrack 26 of the Dachau camp, the two clergymen were put in barrack 28 “where the regime was more horrific,” added Kapteyn Jr. Due to torture, both men died shortly after each other in 1942, historical records show.

Pastor Kapteyn, who married two years after becoming a pastor, left behind a wife and three children.

Young pupils studying at the Merkelbach School in the Buitenveldert district of Amsterdam wrote a poem after “adopting” the Dachau Monument. “Every year, group 8 helps with the commemoration by handing out flowers and wreaths and reading their poem,” the school said. “It’s always a beautiful and special gathering, including for pupils who learn much about World War Two.”

The Dachau Committee involved in the annual commemoration said it wanted “to honor those who died and whose death must not be in vain.” Survivors gradually disappeared, including from the Committee, it concluded. “But the slogan ‘no more war’ remains, although it has been trampled by antisemitism. War always leads to hatred and exclusion.”

The monument, designed by Niek Kemps, a Dutch visual artist, consists of a sixty-meter (197 feet) long street of Belgian Bluestone. The names of the 500 “most famous” German-run concentration camps are engraved in the street.

On both sides is a yew hedge in which commemoration participants placed flowers presented by the Melkelbach School students.

DACHAU LIBERATION RECALLED

The Dachau concentration camp was liberated on April 29, 1945.

It was one of the first concentration camps built by Nazi Germany and the longest-running one after it opened in March 1933.

The camp initially intended to detain opponents of Germany’s Nazi leader Adolf Hitler including communists, social democrats, and other dissidents. But it was later enlarged to eventually hold Jews and Gypsies, who prefer to be known as Roma, as well as others the Nazis didn’t like.

Dachau arose on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, 16 kilometers (10 miles) northwest of Munich in southern Germany.

More than 200,000 prisoners from over 40 nations, including the Netherlands, were held in the Dachau concentration camp and its subcamps.

Many didn’t survive.

“At least 41,500 persons died here of hunger and illness, from the torture they suffered, were murdered, or perished from the consequences of their imprisonment,” the Dachau memorial site confirmed.