AMSTERDAM (Dec. 14)
Dutch Finance Ministry employees purchased valuables looted from Holocaust victims at bargain prices during the 1960s.
The disclosure was confirmed by a former ministry official who said last week that in 1968 or 1969 “leftover” jewelry belonging to Jews who died in the Holocaust had been sold to his colleagues.
The goods had been held by the Nazi-owned Lippman-Rosenthal Bank and turned over to the ministry for restitution after World War II.
What happened to the proceeds of the sale remains unknown.
Dutch Jews returning from the camps or hiding places in 1945 spent years looking for lost family heirlooms and memorabilia.
The archives of the Lippman-Rosenthal Bank would have helped them discover the whereabouts of their belongings, according to representatives of the Dutch Jewish community, who are calling for a full-scale investigation into all of Holland’s postwar restitution procedures.
The disclosure came after the bank’s wartime archives were found by a group of students in an abandoned property in Amsterdam.
The archives detailed the names, addresses and goods confiscated from Dutch Jews during the war.
The archives also provide the names of the wartime purchasers of some of the looted property, including individuals, Dutch state institutions and Degussa, the German company that bought and melted down gold looted from countries overrun by the Nazis and from victims of the Holocaust.
The archives were believed to be lost, but Finance Ministry officials said after the list’s discovery that they had been “forgotten” when the ministry moved to another building years ago.