Child Withholding as Child Transfer: Hidden Jewish Children and the State in Postwar Netherlands

Abstract

The children's rights movement has led, among other things, to a focus by human rights scholars on nationally orchestrated child kidnapping, known euphemistically as “child transfer.” This article will focus on a little known case that I will argue can be considered child transfer, that of Jewish orphans in the Netherlands after World War II. Kidnapping these children was not initially involved in their movement from parents’ to strangers’ homes; however, after the war, the State often refused to return some of these children to surviving Jewish kin or to the Jewish community. In other words, against the wishes of the decimated Jewish community after the Nazi genocide of the Jews, the postwar Netherlands government withheld Jewish children from their kin and from their ethnic community, keeping them in Gentile homes. I argue that this child withholding constitutes a form of child transfer because of the manner in which it was done and the reasoning behind it.