Support for victims

Pensions and benefits

Under a system of five acts of parliament, war victims suffering invalidity due to events during WWII receive financial support (pensions and benefits) to compensate for consequent loss of income. The Social Insurance Bank (SVB) administers these schemes on behalf of the state. The state also subsidises institutions providing psychosocial support for former resistance workers and war victims.

Sinti, Roma and the Dutch East Indian community

Two agencies were established to administer restitution funding to these communities. They did so under the supervision of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. The Sinti and Roma Restitution Fund (SRSR) and the Het Gebaar (‘The Gesture’) foundation (for the Dutch East Indian community) were both mandated to allocate money in the form of individual payments and collective project grants. In the case of the Dutch East Indian community, the money was made available by the government in 2000 in recognition of the cold-hearted, bureaucratic and inflexible way in which post-war restitution had, in hindsight, been implemented. The Het Gebaar foundation and the successor organisation established to wind up its affairs (Stichting Afwikkeling Het Gebaar) completed their work in 2009. By that time, SRSR had dealt with all the applications for individual payments from the Roma and Sinti communities, although it still had funds available for collective projects. Since 1 January 2010, its successor foundation (Stichting Afwikkeling RSR) has been using this money to fund a new Dutch Sinti-Roma Institute (NISR). Funding is due to continue until 2013.

Maror

During the Second World War, Jews and certain other sections of the population were systematically stripped of their legal rights and persecuted by the Nazi regime. In 2000, the Dutch government recognised the shortcomings in post-war restitution by making 400 million guilders (just over €180 million) available to the country’s Jewish community. The Maror foundation was set up on 1 December 2000 and given 350 million guilders (around €159 million) to allocate to individual claimants and for collective projects. The Foundation has allocated funds for collective Jewish projects in both the Netherlands and Israel. 

Het Gebaar

The Het Gebaar foundation was mandated by the government to help the Dutch East Indian community by distributing €160 million in the form of individual payments and €16 million in the form of collective project grants. The money was intended to make amends for the cold-hearted, bureaucratic and inflexible restitution policies of previous post-war governments. Individual payments were given priority and most of these were made in 2001 and 2002.
By 19 January 2010, the Stichting Afwikkeling Het Gebaar had also exhausted the funds available for collective projects and wound up its affairs.

See also:
Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD
To preserve public access to the fruits of the Heritage of War programme, the NIOD is to establish a ‘coordination point’ in the form of a network of war history sources. This will be tasked with preserving, developing and publicising the Netherlands’ WWII heritage. NIOD intends to use the results of the Heritage of War projects to create a digital infrastructure that will permit users to search all the national WWII collections via a single website, Netwerkoorlogsbronnen.nl, (in Dutch).