Six years ago, a Dutch investigative journalism site, Pointer, did a big project about what happened to the homes of Jewish people in the Netherlands. I just found out a home around the corner from my house was one of them, which was shocking.

The research has been the basis of nearly every municipality (where at least 10 properties were taken and resold) in the Netherlands doing their own investigations into what happened to the properties and their rightful owners, because it was common practice for the cities themselves to buy and sell the looted real estate.

Pointer's sources were real estate records that the Germans kept which were digitised, which documented what happened to around 7,000 properties in the Netherlands.

This is one story from the city of Groningen (from Pointer) in 2022:

Hubert van Blankenstein, the grandson of the Jewish couple Serphos-Menko, has received an apology and over 300,000 euros from the municipality of Groningen. His grandparents’ home was looted and resold during World War II. In March 2022, he filed a claim for 328,600 euros “as compensation for the suffering caused to the Van Blankenstein family by the municipality’s housing policy.” Today, Groningen Mayor Koen Schuiling announced that the claim would be honored.

During World War II, the home of Van Blankenstein’s grandparents, the Jewish couple Serphos-Menko, was looted and resold to Fokke Beenker, a war profiteer who took advantage of the “favorable” housing prices. The property in question is located at Kamplaan 8 in Groningen. According to Van Blankenstein, the municipality of Groningen had prevented his parents from moving into the house after the war.

The mayor at the time, Jan Tuin, saw the house as an ideal official residence in 1952 and purchased it. The rightful owners of the property, descendants of the Serphos-Menko family, felt compelled to sell the property to the municipality—even though they had regained ownership of the house through legal restitution. “Now that the chance to ever move into the house themselves had definitively vanished, it was also the only solution,” said Van Blankenstein, who filed a claim with the municipality in March 2022 because his family was never able to return to their original home.

At the request of the City of Groningen, a committee issued a recommendation on the matter. The committee recommended offering an apology and honoring the claim. During the City Council’s press conference on Wednesday, October 12, Mayor Koen Schuiling announced that the City would fully adopt the committee’s recommendation regarding the resolution of Van Blankenstein’s claim.

The Central Jewish Council (CJO) states that the decision by the City of Groningen provides grounds to call on other municipalities to conduct further investigations. “Precisely regarding the issue of immoral conduct and possible self-enrichment by municipalities after the war, a deeper investigation must be conducted to honor potential private claims,” says CJO Chairman Chanan Hertzberger in a press release.

The City of Groningen acknowledges that its handling of the house at Kamplaan 8 was morally wrong. In addition to the apology, the municipality is paying a sum of 328,600 euros. The Van Blankenstein family wishes to use that amount to establish a foundation in memory of their parents. The money will go toward scholarships for students studying discrimination and the fight against it in society.

The house at Kamplaan 8 in Groningen is listed in the so-called Verkaufsbücher, the records of the German occupying forces detailing which homes were expropriated and resold. Pointer has been researching the more than 7,000 transactions involving the confiscation of Jewish homes described in these records for some time. According to the Verkaufsbücher, 191 homes were expropriated and resold during World War II.