Asterdorp

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Gatehouse of the Asterdorp settlement

The Asterdorp was a settlement of the municipality of Amsterdam with 131 apartments in Amsterdam-Noord , which was built in 1927 and for " ontoelaatbare " (German: "Defiant") was meant families. During the German occupation in World War II , the settlement served as a German transit camp for Jewish people.

history

The Asterdorp settlement was built in 1927 and was surrounded by a wall with a gate. The families accommodated here, mostly with many children, were considered " anti-social " and should be "re-educated". But there were also families from the working-class Jordaan district who could no longer pay their rent. The houses were numbered under Asterdorp , which made the residents feel stigmatized. In 1932, at their request, the settlement was given a second entrance, the streets were given flower names and the houses were given new numbers. In 1940 the original residents of Asterdorp left the area, most of them moved to Floradorp , and Asterdorp was temporarily inhabited by Rotterdam residents who had lost their homes in the German bombing of Rotterdam on May 10, 1940.

After these residents returned to Rotterdam, the German occupiers used Asterdorp as a transit camp from 1942 to hold over 300 Jewish people prisoner before they were transported to the Westerbork transit camp . These were primarily Jews of German nationality, but also people from Czechoslovakia , Romania and Poland . The Joodsche Raad had an office at Blauwe-Distelweg 2.

The Jewish residents, of whom only around 80 survived the German occupation, had to pay rent to the Gemeentelijke Woningdienst for the now run-down accommodation , which was higher than for other community apartments . According to research by political scientist Stephan Steinmetz, the Amsterdam community benefited financially from the persecution of Jews, which made headlines in the Dutch media in 2016.

Since the Jewish town councilor Monne de Miranda , who was responsible for the urban housing industry, took care of the settlement at the end of the 1920s and installed his daughter Flora as administrator, the settlement was popularly known as “ het concentratiekampje van De Miranda ” (German : "The little concentration camp of De Miranda"). De Miranda himself was also a victim of the German extermination of Jews in 1942.

In 1943, Asterdorp was destroyed in a bombing raid on a nearby location of the Fokker aircraft company . In 1955 the settlement was demolished. Only the gatehouse remained and served the sculptor André Volten as a studio from 1950 until his death in 2002. Since 2016, after extensive renovation, the building has been used as Villa Volten for exhibitions by the André Volten Foundation and for events.

In 2016 the documentary film Het Vergeten Getto by Saskia van den Heuvel was released.

literature

  • Stephan Steinmetz: Asterdorp. Een Amsterdamse geschiedenis from heffing en vernedering . Atlas Contact, Amsterdam / Antwerp 2016, ISBN 978-90-450-3030-2 .

Web links

Commons : Asterdorp  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Asterdorp, een getto in Amsterdam. In: dedokwerker.nl. Retrieved November 18, 2017 .
  2. ^ Loe de Jong: Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog . tape 5.2 . Martinus Nijhoff, 's Gravenhage 1974, p. 1066 . Online: [1]
  3. ↑ Meindert Fennema: Asterdorp: het vergeten Joodse ghetto van Amsterdam. In: politiek.tpo.nl. February 18, 2016, accessed November 19, 2017 (Dutch).
  4. ↑ Gemeente Amsterdam quick earning aan de Jodenvervolging. In: nos.nl. February 18, 2016, accessed November 19, 2017 (Dutch).
  5. ↑ Asterdorp. In: Geschiedenis van Amsterdam Noord. June 14, 2020, accessed November 18, 2017 (Dutch).
  6. ↑ Nieuwsbrief stichting André voltes No. 1. June 2016 Retrieved on November 18, 2017 . (pdf)