WWII

The sale of Dutch energy company Eneco to Mitsubishi has stalled due to the Japanese company's history of forced labor during the Second World War. The 44 Dutch municipalities that own Eneco want the Mitsubishi Corporation to enter into dialogue with the Dutch people who were forced to work for them during the war, Trouw reports. 

King Willem-Alexander is currently in Jerusalem, at the invitation of Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, for the World Holocaust Forum. On Thursday, the Dutch King will visit the Yad Vashem museum and the Dutch care home Beth Juliana, ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day next week.

Yad Vashem is the official Israeli memorial center for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The institute documents and commemorates the fates of European Jews during the Second World War and honors the people who worked to help the Jews at the time.

Fox Sports suspended Marco van Basten for a week after he made a comment referring to the Nazi salute on air on the program De Eretribune on Saturday night. The fee that Van Basten normally receives for appearing on the show will be donated to the Netherlands institute for war documentation NIOD, to promote awareness and knowledge about the history of the Second World War, Fox announced.

Five veterans of the Second World War were refused entry to the Airborne memorial in Arnhem on Friday night. Arnhem mayor Ahmed Marcouch called their refusal "extremely painful". On Sunday he offered them apologies and a gift. "Unfortunately, this went wrong. We should do better next time", the mayor said, RTL Nieuws reports.

Graves, walls and the chapel of the Second World War cemetery in Mierlo were vandalized overnight. A massive swastika was painted on the inner wall of the chapel, and 'MH17 lie' was written on the outside wall in large black letters. The white gravestones in the British plot were also vandalized, Omroep Brabant reports.

This is the second swastika to appear in the Mierlo War Cemetery in a week, a person present at the cemetery said to the broadcaster. Another one was spray painted there last week. It had just been removed when the new vandalism occurred. 

The 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands at the end of World War 2 is still over eight months away, and on Friday, Prime Minister Mark Rutte was scheduled to honor Canadian war veteran Don White at the parliament complex in The Hague. The two met face-to-face in April at the Keukenhof where a new tulip was named in honor of the Canadian.

Dutch Navy ship Zr. Ms. Zierikzee cleared away five naval mines from the North Sea this week. The explosives were found during preparatory work for new offshore wind farm Borssele Windfarm, which will be located 25 miles from Vlissingen, the Ministry of Defense said in a statement.

Construction on the wind farm will start early in October. Survey ships found the explosives while preparing the site for construction to begin.

The victims of the Second World War in the former Dutch East Indies were commemorated in the building of the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of Dutch parliament, on Wednesday. The presidents of the Eerste Kamer and Tweede Kamer, Jan Anthonie Bruijn and Khadija Arib, placed a wreath at the memorial plaque in the building, NOS reports.

The commemoration consisted of a short ceremony, with speeches by Arib and others, and a minute of silence.

The construction of a Holocaust Monument of Names on Weesperstraat in Amsterdam can continue, the court in Amsterdam ruled on Tuesday. Local residents objected to the monument, complaining that it is too large and should rather be built somewhere else, but the court rejected these objections, RTL Nieuws reports. 

The memorial will contain the names of 102 thousand Jewish, Sinti and Romani people who were deported in the Second World War and who have no grave. The names will be shown on walls arranged in a maze-like formation. The monument was designed by Daniel Libeskind.

Wednesday would have been Anne Frank's 90th birthday. The Jewish Dutch girl, whose name and diary have become a symbol for the atrocities committed in the Second World War and the call for an end to anti-Semitism and prejudice, was commemorated in various ways throughout the world.

Two of Anne's classmates, 89-year-old Albert Gomes de Mesquita and 90-year-old Jacqueline van Maarsen, spent the day at Anne's former home on Merwedeplein 37-2 in Amsterdam. There they spoke to school children of various ages, RTL Nieuws reports.

YouTube removed the Regionaal Archief Alkmaar video channel over "hate speech". The archive channel featured video footage of the Second World War and other archive footage of Alkmaar and its surroundings. The removal may have to do with the fact that Nazi symbols like swastikas can be seen on the WWII footage, NH Nieuws reports. The channel now seems to be back online.