Hacker News Reader

Do not forget it was a national hobby in Holland to sell information on (hidden) jews during WW2.

The initial price was 2,50 (Dutch Guilders) at the start of the war, it went up to 40 towards the end.

Dark numbers are said (no without discussion) to be up to 40% of the jews in hiding where sold out.

A third of the Jews that went into hiding were caught and deported, speculation is that these were betrayed but there isn't any solid proof for this, just a lot of circumstantial evidence, and the Germans were pretty rigorous with their house-to-house searches which would span entire neighborhoods. The very best case for this is one built by Ad van Liempt, but it definitely isn't uncontroversial, as is van Liempt himself, who has more than once been labelled 'careless'.

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_van_Liempt

To portray this as a 'national hobby' is beyond disgusting, a very small fraction (Van Liempt identified a band of about 50 individuals) of the Dutch population ended up collaborating with the Germans on this, the bulk did what they could under exceedingly dangerous circumstances risking their own lives and the lives of their families in order to help others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com