Ed van Thijn
As a Jewish boy he survived eighteen hiding places; as mayor he led the city through the Bijlmer air disaster.
Ed van Thijn was born in Amsterdam on 16 August 1934, the only child of Jewish parents. In 1943 the family was arrested and taken to Westerbork transit camp. His father jumped from a train and later managed to get his wife and son out of the camp. Separated from his parents, young Ed then moved between eighteen hiding places.
On 26 November 1944 the Germans found him on a farm in the eastern province of Overijssel. They tried to make him admit he was Jewish, but he kept denying it. He ended up back in Westerbork, from where trains to the death camps were no longer running. Canadian troops liberated him in April 1945.
Politics and city hall
Van Thijn became a leading figure in the Labour Party (PvdA): a member of parliament from 1967 to 1981, parliamentary leader and briefly Minister of the Interior. He became mayor of Amsterdam on 16 June 1983. The city was struggling with drug problems, petty crime and violence linked to the squatters' movement. Squatters had turned the Staatsliedenbuurt into a near-autonomous zone. Van Thijn went there anyway and was greeted with a Nazi salute.
He chose firm authority and a strong police force, brought in Erik Nordholt as police chief and built ties with business. Bit by bit the city was won back from the squatters, drug nuisance fell and Amsterdam began to grow again. His bid to bring the 1992 Olympic Games to Amsterdam failed.
The Bijlmer disaster
On Sunday evening, 4 October 1992, just after 6:30 pm, an El Al cargo plane crashed into the Groeneveen and Klein-Kruitberg flats in the Bijlmermeer district. Forty-three people died: 39 residents and the four people on board. It remains the worst air disaster in the Netherlands. Van Thijn offered residence permits to undocumented residents of the stricken flats, and the next day 800 people queued at the population register.
In January 1994 he left for The Hague to become Minister of the Interior, after the sudden death of Ien Dales. A few months later he resigned over the IRT affair, about a police unit that had let large drug shipments through. A later parliamentary inquiry found he had done nothing wrong.
Van Thijn had asthma, rowed, played basketball, supported Ajax and loved the theatre. He was Amsterdam's longest-serving mayor since the Second World War. He died in December 2021, aged 87.
- 01As a boy Van Thijn hid at eighteen different addresses during the war.
- 02He served more than ten years as mayor, longer than anyone since the Second World War.
- 03The Bijlmer air disaster of 4 October 1992 killed 43 people.
- 04After the disaster 800 people queued at the population register the next day.
- 05He was a devoted Ajax fan.