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holocaust
February Strike of 1941: When Citizens Took to the Streets Against the Nazis
Remembering how Amsterdam's working class stood up against Adolf Hitler's extermination of the Jews.
Feb 15, 2025
In three days, Amsterdam organized the only general strike in Europe to protest the first roundup of Jews. People poured into the streets on February 25, 1941—an estimated 300,000 of the 800,000 total who lived in the city.
The first to march were the tram and dock workers. The civil servants followed and word spread through the whole city, even to the small sewing workshop where a woman named Mientje Meijer worked. She and her husband had talked about it, and he came to the window to let her know it was really happening. She stopped her treadle, rose to her feet, and said, “Ladies, all of Amsterdam has come to a standstill because they’ve been rounding up Jews and taking them away. We’ve got to join in.”
The ladies poured out, even the boss, and joined the multitudes: teachers, metal workers, factory employees, shop clerks, people from across the political spectrum. Some were furious that their fellow citizens’ rights had been violated, some wanted to protest the Nazi occupation, and some just hated the Germans. Whatever their motives, they stopped the city in its tracks.
How did they organize so fast? A road builder and a street sweeper who belonged to the banned but well-organized Communist Party decided to call a meeting and take action. They had heard that hundreds of Jewish men had been rounded up on the square between the immense Portuguese Synagogue and the four smaller Ashkenazi ones. The communists gathered with trade union representatives and others at the Noorderkerk in the workers’ part of the city. They enlisted political and moral allies. Soon, a mimeographed leaflet urged everyone to “Strike! Strike! Strike! Shut down all of Amsterdam for a day!” And they did. The Strike even reached a few other cities before the German occupiers reacted with force.
Only limited public protest was heard the year before, at the time when Jews were fired from the civil service, including professors from the universities. Therefore, the Germans were dumbfounded in February 1941 when the Dutch, their Aryan brothers and sisters, took to the streets en masse. But the Nazis recovered fast and ordered the use of rifles and hand grenades to stop the strike.
By the time it was over a few days later, about 200 people had been arrested, nine had been killed, and 50 injured. For the rest of the war, the February Strike remained the only general strike in Europe to protest the roundups. Tragically, it was futile: about 75% of the Dutch Jewish population was mass murdered. Yet the strike remains in our memories as one of the few times ordinary people stood together against the deportation of their Jewish neighbors. It meant something to many Dutch survivors as long as they lived.
I learned about the Strike at the time of its 60th commemoration in 2001. Every year, people gather to remember, right where the first roundups took place. They stand around the statue of the Dockworker who is the symbolic figure of the Strike. Sculpted by a resistance worker who survived, the hefty figure wears a worker’s cap, looking not at us but beyond us, his hands at his sides, open but ready to form fists.
In 2001, the square was crammed with people, some old enough to have been alive at the time, others young families, others men of all ages with yarmulkes, and individuals formally dressed in black who proved to be diplomats. Everyone was quiet, even little children. The commemoration began with a few short speeches and a poem, but the main event was this: people were invited, a few at a time, to approach the Dockworker, stand for a moment, and lay flowers.
The elders approached first, those who might have been present at the Strike. Next the Jewish organizations placed their big wreaths, often laid by children. Similar offerings came from the European Trade Union Federation, from the people of Sweden and the United States, and others. But the vast majority of the flowers were small bouquets tied with ribbons, like a dozen red tulips bound by aluminum foil with a bit of wet paper inside. Some were accompanied by a personal note written in ink in a scrawly hand.
It took an hour and a half on that frigid afternoon to lay all the flowers, and they stayed there unmolested for days. The flowers remained until they were all dead and had to be carried away.
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'He's Building a Concentration Camp': Fears Grow as Images Emerge of Offshore Prison at Gitmo
"There's no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don't think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It's easy to put tents in Florida. But they're putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why."
Feb 09, 2025
Fears are growing that the offshore U.S. detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are an ominous sign of what President Donald Trump has in store as he further disregards the rule of law and normalizes actions that previously would have been unthinkable or faces immediate, bipartisan opposition in Congress.
After the first pictures emerged Saturday of still unidentified persons transferred to the island from the U.S. mainland by immigration officials, progressive journalist Nathan Robinson was among those raising the alarm, accusing Trump of "building a concentration camp and deliberately putting it where it is hardest to monitor or enforce the law."
The New York Times, alongside pictures of newly-erected tents taken by photojournalist Doug Mills, reported Saturday that the administration had already "moved more than 30 people described as Venezuelan gang members to the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, as U.S. forces and homeland security staff prepare a tent city for potentially thousands of migrants." Mills was traveling Friday with Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, as she made her first visit to the offshore site.
According to the outlet:
Ms. Noem visited the nascent tent camp, where the administration has suggested that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of migrants who pose lesser threats could be housed. She watched Marines rehearse how to move migrants to the future tent city, and she was shown a tent with cots and a display of basic items to be provided each new arrival — T-shirt, shorts, underwear and a towel — and then got an aerial view of the mission from a Chinook helicopter.
"The Trump administration," the Times reported, "has not released any of their identities, though they are believed to all be men, nor has it said how long they might be held at the island outpost."
According to critics like Robinson, "There's no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don't think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It's easy to put tents in Florida. But they're putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why."
On Friday, a coalition of more than a dozen rights groups—including the ACLU, National Immigration Law Center, and others—sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Defense (DoD), and the U.S. State Department demanding Trump officials provide immediate access to those who have been transferred out of the country to the offshore facility.
In addition, the groups demanded to know:
- The immigration status of the ten noncitizens detained there
- Who does the government intend to transfer to and detain at Guantánamo, including what criteria, legal or otherwise, the administration is or will be using to decide who to transfer and detain at Guantánamo
- Which government agency has custody of the transferred noncitizens at Guantánamo
- What authority is the government invoking to transfer noncitizens from the United States to Guantánamo and what authority is the government invoking to hold them at Guantánamo
- The length of time that the government will be holding these noncitizens at Guantánamo and plans for them after
"Sending immigrants from the U.S. to Guantánamo and holding them incommunicado without access to counsel or the outside world opens a new shameful chapter in the history of this notorious prison," said ACLU deputy director of immigrant rights Lee Gelernt. "It is unlawful for our government to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole, yet that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing."
Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of Detention Watch Network, said Friday that the expansion of operations at Guantánamo "is especially alarming given its remote location and the decades-long documented history of abuse and torture there, which will only be exacerbated by the well-documented abuse inherent to the ICE detention system, including abuse, unsanitary conditions, and medical neglect. In no uncertain terms—lives are in jeopardy."
While previous administrations have exploited the land seized by the U.S. in Cuba to detain and process asylum seekers and migrants in the past, those were individuals interdicted at sea or before having ever set foot on American soil. The facilities have not been used to hold noncitizens deported from the U.S. mainland.
Last week, Slate's Mary Harris interviewed journalist Andrea Pitzer, author of "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps," who acknowledged that while many immediately think of Nazi Germany's death camps under Adolf Hitler when they hear the term "concentration camp," it is not wrong to describe the U.S. prison facilities at Guantánamo that way and for important reasons.
In her questioning, Harris posed to Pitzer how the existence of Guantánamo "doesn’t mean it’s going to become Auschwitz" necessarily, but that it does make "the road to Auschwitz more possible."
And Pitzer responded:
That's exactly right. And so what it means is even to do the most horrible things that humans have done takes time. It takes sort of a space and imagination and tools and resources. And the more of those kinds of tools and resources we line up in one place, the more room there is for the obscene or the perverted imagination to work. And even Auschwitz—keep in mind that it was 1933 when Hitler came to power and they started with concentration camps right out of the gate. So within the first weeks, Dakau is opened, though not quite in its final form, but it is already a camp and it takes almost a decade to get to even this final solution. And so, yes, absolutely, the Holocaust as we know it, as we remember it, has never been repeated. Nothing has come close to that. But you do not get to the death camps without having several years of Auschwitz, of Buchenwalds, of those beforehand.
"And right now," Pitzer said of Gitmo's legacy and the new purpose that Trump is giving it, "we have a place where there has been torture, we have a place where there has been riots, we have a place where there have been people held without trial for more than 20 years. And those are some of the most dangerous seeds that humanity can plant."
"The Holocaust as we know it, as we remember it, has never been repeated. Nothing has come close to that. But you do not get to the death camps without having several years of Auschwitz, of Buchenwalds, of those beforehand."
In a weekend column, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch warned that even as much of the Trump administration's targeting of immigrants and refugees thus far should be seen as a "propaganda" exercise designed to titillate his base and antagonize his liberal opponents, the danger present by the Gitmo policy and others are very real.
"The bigger worry, " writes Bunch, "is that just because the cruelty of mass deportation is largely performative doesn’t mean these performances won’t scale up dramatically in the months ahead. Trump reportedly is already badgering his border czar, Tom Homan, and ICE to meet ambitious arrest targets, which would probably require crueler and more legally dubious measures that would fill those empty tents at Gitmo. If the president needs his phony war against a nonexistent border invasion to distract the American heartland from the coming evisceration of government services, the cruelty will become a bigger and bigger point."
Referencing the great Russian playwright's famous quote about the introduction of a gun onstage, Bunch opined that Trump's performative brand of governance does not mean the threat isn't real.
"You don't need Anton Chekhov," noted Bunch, "to understand that you don't build empty tents at Gitmo in Act One of your presidency unless you plan to fill them in Act Three."
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European Leaders Condemn Musk's 'Ominous' Push for Germany to 'Forget' Holocaust
"We must not forget the tragic lesson of our past," said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. "Evil, violence, and contempt cannot triumph anew."
Jan 27, 2025
Billionaire enterpreneur Elon Musk insisted at a far-right rally in Germany over the weekend that the European country must move "beyond the past" and leave behind the memory of one of the deadliest genocides in history—but as leaders on the continent marked the 80th anniversary of the Auschwitz concentration camp liberation on Monday, several made clear that Musk's advice was not welcome.
Musk's comments on "'the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes' sounded all too familiar and ominous," said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Sunday. "Especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz."
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on the social media platform X, "I couldn't agree more."
The country's ambassador to Israel said that while Musk claimed German children are treated as "guilty of the sins" of the Nazis during World War II, the government simply wants "them to grow up informed and responsible and to apply the lessons of Germany's past."
As Common Dreamsreported, the Tesla CEO and key adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump made the remarks at a rally for Alternative for Germany (AfD) on Saturday, five weeks before Germans are set to vote in federal elections.
AfD is currently polling at 19%, trailing the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which is in first place at 28%. But leaders across Europe, including Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Scholz have warned that Musk appears to be angling for the spread of far-right ideologies—including neo-Nazism—in European countries.
The AfD has been designated a "suspected extremist" group by Germany's domestic intelligence agency, and one of its candidates for public office last year said that "not all" Nazis who worked for Adolf Hitler's government were criminals.
The party has been ostracized in Germany, with other political groups including the CDU ruling out the formation of a coalition government with the AfD, but last week CDU leader Friedrich Merz said he would push for tougher anti-immigration proposals even if they were submitted by the AfD.
Scholz, who represents the Social Democrats, toldStuttgarter Zeitung in response to Merz's comments that "the firewall to the AfD must not crumble."
As Tusk oversaw the liberation of Auschwitz anniversary on Monday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, he alluded to Musk's comments at the AfD rally.
"We must not forget the tragic lesson of our past," he said on X, which is owned by Musk. "Evil, violence, and contempt cannot triumph anew."
Musk's comments came days after he appeared to flash a Nazi salute twice at an event for Trump's inauguration.
In the U.S. on Sunday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker addressed Musk's remarks at the AfD rally on CNN, asking why Trump hadn't spoken out against them.
"President Trump ought to be calling that out," said the Democratic governor. "If he doesn't agree with Elon Musk, if he doesn't agree with two Sieg Heils at his own rally, and backing a party that backs Nazis, then he ought to say so. Why isn't Donald Trump speaking out?"
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