Dutch government apologises over diplomat punished for saving Jews in WWII

The Dutch Foreign Ministry has apologised to the family of a diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, but was punished after the Second World War for his actions because they involved issuing unauthorised visas.

In a written response to parliament, Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok said efforts had been made to make amends for the treatment of Jan Zwartendijk, who was honorary consul of the Netherlands, in what today is Lithuania, during the war years.

After the war the Dutch Foreign Ministry reprimanded the diplomat for overstepping his authority to save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust, and deprived him of royal honours, new research has shown.

“If that happened,” Blok wrote, “that was completely inappropriate. Jan Zwartendijk earned recognition and tribute for his brave behaviour, unfortunately posthumously, from the 1990s onwards.”

Blok said he and King Willem-Alexander of The Netherlands had spoken with Zwartendijk’s son and daughter.

“In doing so, there was great admiration for the actions of their father in 1940,” he wrote.
The research into the treatment of Zwartendijk is part of a Dutch-language book published this month on his actions, titled “The Righteous” by biographer Jan Brokken.

Zwartendijk served in Kaunas as consul at the same time that Chiune Sugihara was there to represent Imperial Japan.

Largely eclipsed by Sugihara, Zwartendijk was the initiator and chief facilitator of the rescue of more than 2,000 Jews by the two diplomats. Sugihara gave the refugees, who were fleeing German occupation, transit visas that enabled them to enter the Soviet Union. But they would have been unusable had Zwartendijk not given them destination visas to Curacao, then a Caribbean island colony of the Netherlands. Some of those rescued by Zwartendijk nicknamed him “the angel of Curacao.”

Both men acted without approval from their superiors. Unlike Sugihara, Zwartendijk risked his own life, as well as those of his wife and their three small children, who were all living under Nazi occupation.

Yet Zwartendijk, who died in 1976, was “given a dressing down” after his actions became known by a top Foreign Ministry official, Joseph Luns, who later became the head of NATO, the book revealed, based on interviews with people who were told about it by Zwartendijk and other materials. Zwartendijk’s children said their father was deeply offended by the treatment he had received.

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