In a recent interview with a major Dutch newspaper, a Dutch senator and former general stated that he had “always been intrigued by how it was possible that the Jews—such a courageous, militant nation—were chased like docile lambs into the gas chambers.” But this is not so, writes Manfred Gerstenfeld; indeed, the cooperation of Dutch officialdom with the Nazis did far more than alleged Jewish passivity to ensure the success of the Final Solution in their country:

Members of the Dutch police knew it was their task to arrest only criminals, yet they greatly assisted the Germans in arresting Jews, including babies and the elderly. Jews were transported by Dutch railways to the Westerbork transit camp, where they were guarded by Dutch military police. More than 100,000 Dutch Jews—over 70 percent of the prewar Jewish population—were sent to their deaths in the German camps in Poland.

A small percentage of the Dutch population—very courageous people—helped Jews. Twenty-four thousand Jews went into hiding. Of these, 16,000 survived. Many others were betrayed or caught by Dutch volunteer organizations—a civil and a police one—the members of which were rewarded monetarily for every Jew they captured.

In the Dutch resistance, Jews, who numbered less than 1.5 percent of the population before the war, played a disproportionately large role. This has been underpublicized by both media and historians. . . .

A few months after the end of the war, the minister of transport and energy Steef van Schaik . . . addressed a large gathering of railway employees at The Hague, and said: “With your trains, the unhappy victims were brought to the concentration camps. In your hearts, there was revolution. Nevertheless, you did it. That is to your honor. It was the duty the Dutch government asked from you because the railways are one of the pillars that support the economic life of the Dutch people.”

To Peter Berkowitz, the rot in American institutions of higher learning exposed by Tuesday’s hearings resembles a disease that in its early stages was easy to cure but difficult to diagnose, and now is so advanced that it is easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. Recent analyses of these problems have now at last made it to the pages of the New York Times but are, he writes, “tardy by several decades,” and their suggested remedies woefully inadequate:

They fail to identify the chief problem. They ignore the principal obstacles to reform. They propose reforms that provide the equivalent of band-aids for gaping wounds and shattered limbs. And they overlook the mainstream media’s complicity in largely ignoring, downplaying, or dismissing repeated warnings extending back a quarter century and more—largely, but not exclusively, from conservatives—that our universities undermine the public interest by attacking free speech, eviscerating due process, and hollowing out and politicizing the curriculum.

The remedy, Berkowitz argues, would be turning universities into places that cultivate, encourage, and teach freedom of thought and speech. But doing so seems unlikely:

Having undermined respect for others and the art of listening by presiding over—or silently acquiescing in—the curtailment of dissenting speech for more than a generation, the current crop of administrators and professors seems ill-suited to fashion and implement free-speech training. Moreover, free speech is best learned not by didactic lectures and seminars but by practicing it in the reasoned consideration of competing ideas with those capable of challenging one’s assumptions and arguments. But where are the professors who can lead such conversations? Which faculty members remain capable of understanding their side of the argument because they understand the other side?