Eighty years since the end of World War II, the Mayor of Femka Halsem of Amsterdam apologized on Thursday for the role of the city in the persecution of its Jewish residents during the Holocaust, in a rare recognition of the collective moral failure of the city leader.

“The Amsterdam government was, when it was important, not heroic, not determined and not gracious,” she said. “And he left his Jewish residents terribly.”

Mrs. Halsema issued an apology in a speech in the Holocaust Commemoration at Hollandsche Schouwburg, the theater that turned the Nazis into a large deportation center from which many Amsterdam Jews were sent to concentration camps in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe.

Before the Holocaust, Amsterdam, the Dutch capital, had 80,000 Jewish inhabitants. The Nazis, with the help of local officials, deported and killed more than 60,000.

“Administrators and officials were not only cold and formalist, but even willing to work with the occupier,” Ms. Halsma said. “It was a necessary step in isolation, humiliation, deportation, dehumanization and murder of 60,000 Amsterdam Jews.”

The city government cooperated with multi -level Nazis; Municipal officials copied where the Jews live, and local police officers assisted in deporting their fellow citizens.

“Anti -Semitism brought the German occupier to the Netherlands to the Netherlands,” said Mrs. Halsem, “and after the liberation it did not disappear. It has always been hatred for the Jews – also in this city – and still exists.”

Ms. Halsma has announced that the City will invest 25 million euros (about $ 28.5 million) to promote Jewish life and visibility of Judaism in the city. The new Committee for six people will decide how to spend these funds.

“I didn’t expect that,” said Keren Hirsch, a woman’s wife in Amsterdam. Mrs. Hirsch, who is Jewish, added: “It is much unknown about Judaism and the history of Amsterdam.”

Throughout the Netherlands, the Nazis deported 75 percent of the Jewish population in the concentration camp during World War II, which is the highest percentage in Western Europe. Most of them lived in Amsterdam. City transit administration and other agencies have helped to remove 102,000 Jews and 220 novels, known as Roma and Sinta, from Amsterdam.

“You can’t bring back time, you can’t undo what the municipality did,” Mrs. Hirsch said. But, she added, “It is important to me to apologize. In that sense, the words are important to me.”

The official apology in the city comes five years after former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologized on behalf of the Government because he did not protect Jewish citizens in the country during World War II.

“With the last remaining survivors among us, I apologize on behalf of the Government for the then Government’s actions,” Mr. Rutte said at the Memorial -Opening of 2020.

The country as a whole has spent the last few years counting with the dark chapters of its past. 2023. King Willem-Alexander apologized for the role of his country in a slave tradeA rare direct apology for the historical injustice of the sitting European monarch. Mr Rutte apologized on behalf of the Government months earlier.

In 2022, Rutte also apologized to the people of Indonesia for the institutionalized violence of the Dutch army during the Indonesian War of Independence, which began in 1945. Also in 2022, the Dutch Minister of Defense apologized for the role of the Netherlands in 1995. A massacre of about 8000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.