Dutch Resistance Museum (Verzetsmuseum)

Museum · Plantage (Centrum)Amsterdam,Netherlands

An Amsterdam museum that asks what everyone else did under occupation, naming those who resisted, those who collaborated and those who looked away.

The Dutch Resistance Museum answers a question the city's other war museums leave aside: what did everyone else do? Its permanent exhibition is carried by more than 130 named people, and they include the ones who collaborated and the ones who looked away. The choices are put to visitors directly, projected on the floor — adapt or collaborate, strike or boycott, and at the liberation, take revenge or not. Former members of the resistance set this museum up in 1984, because they thought the far right was gaining ground again. The story at its centre is the February strike of 1941. Germans had seized hundreds of Jewish men on a square a few streets from the door, and the Communist Party called on Amsterdam to stop work. The tram drivers went first, and something like 300,000 people joined them. Nowhere else in occupied Europe did a population strike against the deportation of Jews. It was broken in two days. Walk those few streets when you come out and you are on the square where the raid began.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Answer the opening film honestly — it sets out the courses open to an ordinary person in 1940 and asks which you would take, and the rooms that follow show where each choice led.
Read the collaborators all the way through — they are given names, jobs, reasons and what happened to them afterwards, instead of being left as a category, and this is the hardest section in the building.
Look closely at the forged identity papers — the wartime Dutch card was deliberately hard to fake, and the forgers worked by bleaching names out and cutting away the letter J stamped on Jewish cards.
Do not skip the colonies rooms — a section added in 2024 covers the Dutch East Indies, Suriname and the Caribbean in the same years, which is a war most visitors arrive knowing nothing about.
Treat the children's museum as its own route — Resistance Museum Junior is in the same building and follows real children through the occupation, built for them rather than as a thinner version of the adult rooms.

Things to do

1
Sit with the underground newspapers
Find the case of illegal papers, typed, stencilled and passed hand to hand. People were shot for making them. One of the museum's letters was written by a man who worked on the illegal paper Het Parool. He wrote it in his cell in Scheveningen prison, on the back of the printed house rules.
2
Read the front of the building before you go in
Cross Plantage Kerklaan and look up at the facade: a plastered centre block, brick wings, a Star of David set in the pediment and the name Plancius above the door. A Jewish choral society built it in 1876. The museum of the occupation moved in in 1999.