(Jewish Group) Dutch city renames square it had named for mayor who betrayed Jews to Nazis

A Dutch municipality has renamed a park that had been named for a mayor who helped the Nazis hunt his city’s Jews.

The municipality of Hogeveen, a city of about 55,000 roughly 80 miles northeast of the Dutch capital of Amsterdam, last month renamed Mayor Tjalma Park, according to a report Thursday on the news site Jonet.nl. The new name is Municipal Park.

In 2020, a local historian discovered that Jetze Tjalma, who had been mayor of Hoogeveen for 30 years until 1958, was the first mayor in Nazi-occupied Netherlands to hand over a list of local Jews after the German army invaded in 1940.

There were about 250 names on the list. In 1951, Hogeveen had only 27 Jews, according to the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam.

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