On 10 May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands, beginning five years of occupation. As antisemitic restrictions intensified, thousands of Dutch Jews sought refuge in secret rooms, private homes and underground networks. But in Amsterdam, a group of Dutch collaborators discovered that finding people in hiding could become a profitable business.
Known as the Henneicke Column, the organisation was led by Willem Henneicke, a former mechanic who had become involved in the confiscation of Jewish property. In March 1943, his men received a new assignment: locating Jews who had escaped deportation. For every person delivered to the German authorities, the collaborators received 7.50 guilders. The payment was identical for adults and children, and the money came from confiscated Jewish assets. Operating from a requisitioned school in Amsterdam, the Henneicke Column employed informants, interrogations and systematic searches to uncover hiding places. Its activities exposed entire families to deportation, often through Westerbork transit camp to Nazi camps in occupied Poland, including Sobibor. Among those affected were Jacoba Citroen and her three-year-old daughter Floortje, whose hiding place was discovered through a letter found during her mother’s arrest. By October 1943, the Column had been dissolved. Surviving records connected its members to the capture of 7,557 people, although historians estimate that the actual figure may have reached 9,000. As Germany’s position deteriorated, Henneicke unexpectedly approached the Dutch resistance, offering information about former associates. His motives remain uncertain. In December 1944, he was shot by an unidentified resistance member. This World History documentary investigates the Henneicke Column, Dutch collaboration during the Second World War, the persecution of Amsterdam’s Jewish population and the financial incentives behind Nazi deportations. It also examines the postwar trials and the troubling question of how ordinary citizens became active participants in the machinery of occupation.
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