Welcome to the website of Diplomacy and Persecution: the Auswärtige Amt and Jews in the Netherlands (1933-1945)

On this website you can access dossiers that document the role of the Auswärtige Amt (German Foreign Office) in the treatment of Jews in the Netherlands in 1933-1945. You will find descriptions of over 2,000 digitised sources – listed under 534 entries. The collection, though fragmented, shows that diplomats of the Auswärtige Amt were involved in Nazi policies of persecution, occupation and extermination at the deepest level. To them the so-called Judenpolitik presented a policy domain that could compensate for the decline in importance of foreign relations (originally the operational field of the Auswärtige Amt) in the Third Reich.