The mayor of Amsterdam has apologised for the role the Dutch capital played in the persecution of its Jewish citizens during the Second World War, saying the government at the time “let its Jewish residents down terribly”. Speaking at an event marking Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Mayor Femke Halsema said that civil servants in Amsterdam played an active role in the murder of thousands of Jewish citizens of the city. Advertisement Of the estimated 80,000 Jews who lived in Amsterdam at the outbreak of the Second World War, only some 20,000 survived. Among those deported was teenage diarist Anne Frank...