The Central Jewish Consultation (CJO) and the Centrum for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI) have filed a complaint against a man for organising a fair where Nazi memorabilia was sold, following a broadcast by the Dutch tv-show Kassa.
For sale at the fair held in Houten, near Utrecht were swastikas, SS badges, SS uniforms and two Star of David badges for several hundreds of euros. One of the yellow badges had the identity card of the original holder still attached.
“This is disgusting”, CJO chair Ronny Naftaniel told Kassa. “[paraphrased] It’s unacceptable that people would make a living out of the mass murder of their fellow citizens.”
The organiser of the military fair, Gaston Vrolings, said he can understand why people are upset but does not see the reason for stopping the fairs. “The war has happened. Do you have to then, hide everything that has to do with the war?”, he asked. Visitors do not hold any sympathies for the extreme right, according to Vrolings. “Officers regularly walk around here and they have never seen anything crazy. They’re just people into stuff related to the war.”
Eddo Verdoner, the Dutch government’s Coordinator on combatting antisemitism saw this differently. “It is naïve to think that this only concerns a number of musty collectors, especially if you look at the emerging extremism in Europe.”
Two people have been banned from attending such fairs in the past due to the behavior they displayed.
“The Nazi regime was an extremely criminal regime. The glorification of Nazi ideology through the sale of Nazi objects at fairs is undesirable and morally reprehensible”, Minister of Justice Ferdinand Grapperhaus said in reaction to the incident.
