Kopgeld: Nederlandse premiejagers op zoek naar joden 1943 (review)

The existence of Dutch bounty hunters (premiejagers), who pursued Jews living in hiding, has been acknowledged in all the major works on the persecution of the Jews in the occupied Netherlands during the Second World War. This small group of individuals undoubtedly played a material role in the fate of thousands of Jews after the deportations began in the summer of 1942. Their collaboration with the occupying power in the worst excesses of Nazi racial policy makes them an uncomfortable subject in the Netherlands even sixty years after events.

Surveys of the persecution of the Jews (jodenvervolging) by Abel Herzberg, Jacob Presser, Louis De Jong, and the author of this review analyze these men's activities as one factor in the overall "success" of the Nazis in the Netherlands. In this new, extensively researched study, Ad van Liempt has taken the subject a step further by looking at the backgrounds, careers, and activities of the fifty-four individuals who earned money from the German authorities by tracking down Jews in hiding. At a time when more and more scholarly attention is being paid to individual and collective biography as a means of understanding both the mechanics of the Holocaust and the workings of Nazi rule in general, this book comes as a welcome addition that improves our knowledge of indigenous perpetrators.

The most infamous, and most successful, group of "Jew-hunters" were the so-called Henneicke Colonne, named after their leader, Wim Henneicke. Henneicke was the head of the investigation subsection of the Hausraterfassungsstelle, the organization charged with the retrieval of Jewish assets, itself a department of the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung, the body that oversaw the deportation of the Jews from the Netherlands. By 1943 it had become increasingly difficult for the Zentralstelle to meet its quotas, and this, combined with Nazi assumptions about the numbers of Jews still at large in the Netherlands, led to the creation of a system where Henneicke and a small group of hand-picked men used their contacts and informers to discover the location of Jews in hiding. Each Jew discovered and brought to the holding area of the "Joodsche" Schouwburg in Amsterdam produced a bounty from the German authorities, a bounty which increased as time went on. While the Henneicke Colonne was undoubtedly the largest and best organized, other groups and individuals also asked to participate. Thus five men working in the Zentralstelle's card index section were also given permission to hunt Jews in their spare time, although they were offered smaller bounties and told not to infringe on Henneicke's work. Van Liempt's research suggests that as many as 8,000-9,000 Jews in hidingmay have fallen victim to the jodenjagers, many more than previously suspected. Moreover, he shows just how far these men were prepared to travel in order to secure a single Jew and the extreme methods they employed to extract information.

The case studies and individual stories that form the basis of the book are informative in their own right, but it is the section devoted to the author's conclusions that carries the greatest weight. Although wary of making too many claims for a collective portrait of these men, van Liempt is prepared to make some generalizations. Most were relatively young, around forty years old when they participated; most had not been educated to a high level and the majority came from occupations in the lower reaches of the service sector. Their age meant that they had borne the full effects of the economic crisis at an early stage in their working lives, and a number seem to have been unemployed for extended periods in the 1930s. Some also fell victim to the changes in the Dutch economy brought about by the German occupation, when various sectors ceased to function and unemployment resulted. Normally, unemployed Dutch workers would have been expected...