Jewish groups file complaint over market where Nazi artifacts are sold

The Central Jewish Consultation (CJO) and the Centrum for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI) filed a complaint against a man for organizing a fair where Nazi artifacts were sold at the Military Fair in Houten. The Jewish groups filed the complaint after a broadcast by the tv-show Kassa.

For sale at the fair last Sunday were swastikas, SS badges, SS uniforms and two yellow badges shaped like a Star of David that Jews were forced to wear during World War II to identify them for several hundreds of euros. One of the yellow badges had the identity card of the original holder still attached.

“Disgusting”, CJO chair Ronny Nafantiel told Kassa. “The Second World War still lives in all the veins of the Jewish community. This really hurts.”

The organizer, Gaston Vrolings, said he can understand why people are upset but does not see the reason for stopping the fairs. “The war has happened. Do you have to then, hide everything that has to do with the war?”, he asked. Visitors do not hold any sympathies for the extreme right, according to Vrolings. “Officers regularly walk around here and they have never seen anything crazy. They’re just people into stuff related to the war.”

Eddo Verdoner from the National Coordination against Anti-Semitism saw this differently. “It is naïve to think that this only concerns a number of dusty collectors, especially if you look at the emerging extremism in Europe.”

Two people have been banned from attending such fairs in the past due to the behavior they displayed.

“The Nazi regime was an extremely criminal regime. The glorification of Nazi ideology through the sale of Nazi objects at fairs is undesirable and morally reprehensible”, Minister of Justice Ferd Grapperhaus said in reaction to the incident.