A monument to Dutch Jewish victims of the Holocaust at the site of the former Nazi camp Westerbork in the Netherlands. Photo: Wikimedia/public domain.

The municipality of Amsterdam has announced plans for a special support center to assist teachers educating school students about the Holocaust in the wake of two surveys that demonstrated the widespread denial or demeaning of the Nazi extermination program.

The center will be a joint project of the municipality and the Dutch National Coordinator for Combating Anti-Semitism (NCAB). Eddo Verdoner, the current coordinator, said in a statement that “Holocaust education is a crucial part of the fight against anti-Semitism, discrimination and exclusion.”

Verdoner added that this “dark period of our history should not pass by any student. It is therefore important to consider how we can organize assistance to teachers who request it as easily as possible. I am pleased that Amsterdam is the first municipality to take a pioneering role in this and I want to start discussions elsewhere in the country to offer local support there as well.”

A study released by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam earlier this month revealed that 42 percent of  Dutch teachers said they had been confronted with antisemitic rhetoric and the trivialization of the Holocaust in their classrooms. The study came on the heels of a separate study showing that 23 percent of Millennials and Generation Z respondents believed that the Holocaust is a myth or that the number of Jews killed have been largely exaggerated, leading Dutch Justice Minister Dilan Yeşilgöz to declare that the situation “is very serious…As a society, we have a lot of work to do.” The highest proportion of Jewish Holocaust victims came from the Netherlands, with more than 75 percent of the pre-war community of 140,000 having perished.

The purpose of the support center is to highlight different methods for teaching the Holocaust and managing the often febrile debates that arise from its study. “We cannot and do not want to look away if the horrific facts of the Holocaust are insufficiently known to so many people,” said Marjolein Moorman, an Amsterdam councillor who holds the Education portfolio, in a statement. “We must help the schools that need support with this. That is why the municipality wants to provide schools with the necessary support to make this subject a subject of discussion in the class.”

In common with other European countries, antisemitic sentiment has risen precipitously in the Netherlands, with a 10-year high in the number of incidents recorded in 2021.