Amsterdam Jews who went into hiding or were imprisoned in concentration camps during the Holocaust were charged taxes in absentia, accruing fines and even losing their homes, according to recently resurfaced documents.
College students sifting through archival city documents came across the records, and its contents were then reported in a series of recent articles in the Dutch daily, Het Parool.
The paper reported that taxes were even charged on homes confiscated and used by members of the NSB Dutch Nazi party.
Speaking with Het Parool in a follow-up article on Wednesday, Amsterdam's current mayor, Eberhard van der Laan, said he would be looking into the matter and will attempt to address any injustices discovered.
"We can't leave it the way it was decided then," van der Laan said, according to a HuffPost translation. "We will investigate how we can make right what can be made right."
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that about 75 percent of Holland’s Jewish population was killed during the Holocaust.
The Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, a watchdog that monitors anti-Semitism based in The Hague, told the outlet that news of Amsterdam's Holocaust-era taxation was "shocking" but not entirely new information. Previously, reports of certain unsavory business dealings had been known but without any specifics, the center's senior adviser Ronny Naftaniel told JTA.
"The City of Amsterdam has never, to my knowledge, taken steps to correct its actions,” Naftaniel added.
The confiscation of Jewish property and assets was commonplace in many European countries during the Holocaust, according to Reuters, leading tens of thousands of Nazi Holocaust victims and their heirs to fight for reparations.
Various strategies of confiscation were employed against Jews during this time, and many were state-supported and encouraged, according to a report written by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.
An exhaustive research project also led by the United States Holocaust Museum recently concluded that the Holocaust, which is generally listed as having resulted in the deaths of about 6 million Jews, included far more ghettos and Nazi camps than previously estimated.
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