Court cases constitute a formal platform where all manner of conflicts between individual citizens and social groups are settled – within the framework of the law. This makes them the yardstick by which we can determine what was deemed legally tolerated within a specific historical context. In February 1949, the court of Amsterdam held a remarkable session. A Jewish lawyer, one of the founders of the former resistance newspaper Het Parool, had filed a complaint against a – non-Jewish – Dutch Reformed resistance fighter. During the war, the Jewish lawyer Hans Warendorf (1902-1987) had managed to escape to England in time, but several of his Parool friends and resistance comrades had been arrested and killed. Among them were a number of Jews: Maurits Kann (1894-1942), Jaap Nunes Vaz (1906-1943) and Sieg Vaz Dias (1904-1943). The accused, Klaas Norel (1899-1971), for that matter, had an excellent reputation as a resistance fighter, committed to working for the illegal National Organisation for Assistance to People in Hiding (lo) and to publishing the Reformed former resistance newspaper Trouw. He was also the author of a very popular Second World War novel for young adults: Engelandvaarders [England paddlers] (1945).

Already during the occupation, rumours circulated about Jewish people in hiding betraying their protectors. Moreover, soon after the liberation, people were saying that the Jews had not put up any resistance to the Nazis. The latter view was also disseminated by Norel in a number of passages he had written in the eighth volume of the series ‘History of the Occupation Years’: De Tyrannie verdrijven [Dispelling the Tyranny].

In short, the Jews had left it to others to fend for them; they themselves had not been able to. As early as July 1945, the Jewish psychiatrist Coen van Emde Boas (1904-1981) wrote that people had started to consider Jews once more as Jews, among other things, due to the necessity to help them in that capacity against the Germans. Their elimination and isolation had led to estrangement, aversion and a sense of superiority.