Today I will be working on the Dutch ID card (Persoonsbewijs) again. Making a batch of Amsterdam and Haarlem version and maybe other cities too. Every town/city had their own number code. I also need to reproduce the rubber stamps for them.
Will be quite some work to draw the stamps and reproduce all of them. But it’s for the best result. Also need to work on the closing seal which goes over the back of the Photo. There were 4 versions of it.
So the cards will be available in the shop soon, with variations of cities.
A short story behind the Dutch ID card
During the German occupation of the Netherlands every Dutch person with the age of 14 and above had to carry an ID card. This card was developed in order of the occupier. It was a production from the nazi regime in the Netherlands, and much hated by the Dutch. It was not used before the occupation of Holland. In fact it was, on order of the Germans, prepared, along the lines of the German Kennkarte, by a high Dutch civil servant (named Lentz) and issued from april 1941 on. In fact, the Dutch government, just before the occupation, did refuse to prepare such an ID card. So Lentz was first blocked by the former Dutch government and was now happy to finish his work for the Germans. Unfortunately it was a superb technical accomplishment at the time by the firm of Johan Enschedé / Haarlem, and extremely hard to forge – the sealed picture & fingerprint were impossible to remove without damage.
The Germans made good use of this. They ordered that a copy of the fingerprints etc, would be centrally stored in the Hague. If the Germans suspected a shown card to be a fake, thay now could easily check in The Hague to see if it was a forgery (Later in war, for this reason, the allied even tried to bomb this central register at Kleykamp – The Hague).
The copy in the Hague made the card dangerous to Jews and resistance workers that wanted to fake a card. It would no longer be possible to obtain food-ration coupons without it, and people caught without on (e.g. onderduikers – people who were hiding) were subject to immediate arrest. The Jews would get a big black J on their ID card so they could be detected immediately showing their card.
But resistance workers managed to make fake ID cards on large scale. Also real blank cards were robbed from local city halls. These cards were extremely difficult to make and the resistance workers had a lot of trouble making them for their members and other people in hiding like the Jews.
Some young men were able to avoid the Arbeitseinsatz when their ausweis had a special stamp inside. Do you know what that special stamp was called, or what it looked like? Many students who worked in agriculture could stay in the Netherlands and thus avoided forced labor when they had this special pass.
Hi Kent, the stamp you referring to is called “stempel Bolle”, which came in the summer of 1942. But this stamp was only meant for Jewish people. An exemption granted by the German. This privilege of a minority of Jews facilitated the “Final Solution” that was pursued for the majority – and ultimately for the minority as well. This became the granting of the stamp “bis auf weiteres freigestellt vom Arbeitseinsatz” (Until further notice released from work) which were already distributed and after September 28, 1942 at a rate of 800 per day. But later even people with such a stamp were picked-up later and sent to the extermination camps.
For other young men you referring to needed a special piece of paper (Ausweis) explaining why this young man was exempt from work in Germany. This piece of paper, which contained the number of the identity card, had to be presented at the same time as the identity card.