Student fought bureaucrats for Holocaust justice
AMSTERDAM (AP) – Charlotte van den Berg was a 20-year-old college student working part-time in Amsterdam’s city archives when she and other interns came across a shocking find: letters from Jewish Holocaust survivors complaining that the city was forcing them to pay back taxes and late payment fines on property seized after they were deported to Nazi death camps. How, the survivors asked, could they be on the hook for taxes due while Hitler’s regime was trying to exterminate them? A typical response was: “The base fees and the fines for late payment must be satisfied, regardless of whether a third party, legally empowered or not, has for some time held the title to the building.”
Kind of reminds me of the British invasion of Madagascar. First the Brits sent soldiers to seize an independent country by force, then after they conquered the island (killing some of the natives in the process), they imposed taxes on the victims to reimburse Britain for the cost of the invasion.