In October 1948, the Amsterdam City Council discussed inappropriate police behaviour, including an incident involving an officer who had received disciplinary punishment for making ‘harmful antisemitic remarks to two Jewish girls’. These incidents were not isolated, the spokesman of the Communist Party said. During the German occupation, the police force had been eager to act against Jews, and it had not been able to rid itself of this tendency since. The incident had been raised by the former resistance newspaper Het Parool. The officer concerned had stopped the two cycling Jewish girls, and the following dialogue ensued:

Het Parool asked the police about the matter. Initially, the commissioner spoke of an ‘inappropriate joke’, but eventually, he promised disciplinary punishment. The two Jewish girls did not file a complaint. The remark was clearly antisemitic: the Jews were verbally sent to the gas chamber in retroaction. This was a new, post-Holocaust stereotype. The identification of Jews with gas and the gas chamber – ‘the Jew’ is there to be gassed – would remain an important item in the antisemitic repertoire. This chapter describes how the Shoah or Holocaust became something that could be held against the Jews in the postwar Netherlands.

Antisemitism had not disappeared from the Netherlands; it acquired a number of new dimensions. We will here elucidate the genesis and development of the curse ‘They have forgotten to gas you’. The next chapter will show how the historically developed stereotype of the ‘cowardly Jew’ acquired a new content and function. Important here are the concepts, developed in Germany, of secondary antisemitism and Schuld- und Erinnerungsabwehrantisemitismus [antisemitism as defence against guilt and unwanted memory]. By demonstrating that these concepts are also relevant for the Netherlands, psychology is granted its rightful place in the analysis of Dutch postwar antisemitism and the changing or unchanging image of ‘the Jew’. The victimhood of the Jews not only gave rise to astonishment and empathy, but also to aversion, aggression and competitive victimhood.