Leading rabbis, invited to attend today’s wedding ceremony of Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands to Claus von Amsberg, a German commoner who was a member of the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany and served with the German Army in World War II, refused the invitation and were absent today from the ceremony.
The Jewish community refrained from protesting the wedding which was widely and sharply criticized in the Netherlands. Some 250,000 Dutchmen, including 165,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis, many of them in Nazi extermination camps. Demonstrators opposed to the German consort clashed with police. The first demonstration today took place at a memorial to Dutch victims of Nazism in the Jewish district of Amsterdam where more than 1,000 students assembled.
Amsterdam police were refused permission to use the Anne Frank House today as a canteen in connection with their duties for the wedding. The request to use the Anne Frank House was rejected on grounds that a memorial to a Jewish girl who was murdered with other members of the family by the Nazis should not be used as a police post, whatever the occasion.
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