Germany gives £3.4m to Dutch Holocaust museum’s renovation
The museum will close down for two years so it can be redone, and will be turned into a single site with a larger capacity
Germany has said it will pay £3.4 million towards renovating the Dutch national Holocaust museum in Amsterdam’s Jewish cultural quarter.
The National Holocaust Museum of the Netherlands opened in 2017 across from a former religious seminary and theatre once used to smuggle hundreds of Jewish children to safety from an internment building across the street.
It is closing for two years to turn the two buildings into one single museum with a larger capacity and state-of-the-art displays.
Director Emile Schrijver told local media how the German government’s off er had surprised everyone, saying: “We expected a donation of half a million or maybe a million euros.”
Nazi Germany and its Dutch collaborators killed about 75 percent of the Netherlands’ pre-war Jewish population of approximately 140,000 Jews, the highest death rate in Nazi-occupied Western Europe. Today there are only around 40,000 Dutch Jews.
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