Story Archive

Death and Taxes

Just because you were out of town and someone else was in your house doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay your property taxes. Not even, according to Dutch officials in the late 1940s, if you were a Jew who had been deported to a concentration camp and the people in your house had been Nazis who had seized it. Amsterdam rejected complaints from some Holocaust survivors and enforced back taxes against them. Now, thanks to Charlotte van den Berg, who was a 20-year-old part-timer in the city archives when she encountered the complaint letters, the issue has been reopened. The Netherlands’ Institute of War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies has recommended that certain back taxes paid by survivors be refunded. Other open questions: whether anything can be done about the bills that were also collected from some survivors for gas used by Nazis occupying their homes, and whether survivors who paid their back taxes without filing formal complaints should also get refunds. (AC/AP) ...And whether Amsterdam’s current leaders are as contemptible as their predecessors.