The Dark Side of Amsterdam

Amsterdam sells itself on gabled canal houses, bicycles and tulips, and all of that is real. So is the rest: a public scaffold on the Dam, a gallows field where bodies hung until they fell apart, a city that owned a third of a slave colony, a theatre where Jewish families waited to be deported, and a cargo jet that came down on a block of flats in 1992.

Most of these chapters left something behind that you can still stand in front of: a carved gate, a single brick with a name on it, a tree that survived a plane crash. This guide goes through them in order, from 1535 to the 2020s, and tells you where to find each one. Several are memorials to people who died within living memory, so the last section has some notes on visiting them with care.

1535: Naked Prophets and a Bloody Town Hall

The violence starts with religion. In February 1535 a group of Anabaptists, radical Protestants who believed the end of the world was close, ran naked through Amsterdam's streets shouting "Wee, wee" ("Woe, woe"). They were arrested and executed.

Three months later, on 10 May 1535, about 40 Anabaptists seized the town hall on the Dam. When the civic militia stormed the building, Mayor Pieter Colijn, 20 militiamen and 28 Anabaptists were killed. The captured survivors had their hearts cut out while they were still alive. Their bodies were quartered and their heads were put on pikes at the city gates.

Where to see it today: Dam Square. The medieval town hall burned down in 1652, and the building that replaced it, the Royal Palace, was built as Amsterdam's new town hall. The Rijksmuseum holds a print of the naked runners on the Dam.

The Scaffold on the Dam and the Gallows Across the IJ

For more than two centuries, the space in front of the town hall doubled as the city's place of execution. Condemned prisoners were beheaded or garrotted on a scaffold in front of the building, in public.

Death was not the end of the punishment. Bodies were rowed across the IJ to the Volewijck, a spit of land on the north bank where the city's gallows field stood from around 1360 until 1795. There they hung on gibbets in full view of ships sailing into the harbour, a warning to anyone arriving in Amsterdam.

The best-known face from the Volewijck belongs to Elsje Christiaens. She was 18, from Jutland in Denmark, and had come to Amsterdam to find work as a maid. In 1664 she killed her landlady on the Damrak with an axe during an argument over unpaid rent. On the Dam she was struck with the same axe and then garrotted, and her body was taken to the Volewijck and hung up with the axe beside her. Rembrandt crossed the IJ and drew her there twice. Both drawings are now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Rembrandt's drawing of Elsje Christiaens on the Volewijck gibbet, 1664, with the axe hanging beside her. Image: Rembrandt, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

When the gallows field was abolished in 1795, its bone pit was never cleared, only covered over with sand. The city's archaeology service estimates that around 1,000 bodies were deposited there. It probably lies under Overhoeks, the new district of apartment towers next to the EYE Film Museum and the A'DAM Tower.

Where to see it today: take the free ferry from behind Centraal Station to Buiksloterweg, a few minutes across the water. You will be walking above the old execution ground; there is no memorial.

Criminals on the Dissecting Table

An executed criminal's body had one more use. On 31 January 1632, a robber named Aris Kindt (Adriaen Adriaenszoon) was hanged, and the same day his corpse was dissected in front of the surgeons' guild. The young Rembrandt painted it. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp made his name in Amsterdam, and Kindt is the pale body on the table.

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632). The body is Aris Kindt, hanged for robbery the same day. Image: Rembrandt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The painting now hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The building connected to Amsterdam's anatomy lessons is still on Nieuwmarkt: De Waag, a 15th-century city gate later turned into a weigh house. The surgeons' guild moved into its upper floors in 1619 and finished an octagonal anatomy theatre under its central tower in 1691. Kindt's dissection took place before that theatre existed, but the later public lessons there worked the same way.

Nieuwmarkt has its own execution story. On 15 June 1812, while the Netherlands was part of Napoleon's empire, three people convicted of murder, Hester Nepping, Adriana van Rijswijk and Gerrit Verkerk, were guillotined in public in front of the Waag. It was the only time the guillotine was used in Amsterdam.

Where to see it today: the Waag is now a restaurant and café on the ground floor, and you can sit outside on the square where the guillotine stood.

Houses of Correction: "Wild Beasts Must Be Tamed"

Amsterdam's Golden Age is sometimes credited with inventing the modern prison. In 1596 the city opened the Rasphuis, a house of correction for men, in a former convent. Inmates spent their days sawing brazilwood into powder with heavy multi-bladed rasps, and the powder was sold to make red dye for textiles. The public could pay to tour the building and watch them work. Parents brought their children along to show them what happened to people who misbehaved.

The building was demolished in 1892, and the Kalverpassage shopping centre stands on the site. Its gate survives on Heiligeweg, opposite Voetboogstraat. Above the entrance, a carved relief shows wild animals pulled along under a driver's whip, and the inscription reads "Wilde beesten moet men temmen": "Wild beasts must be tamed."

The Rasphuis gate on Heiligeweg. The building behind it is gone; the warning above the door is not. Image: MatteoNL97, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

You may hear about the Rasphuis "drowning cell", a flooding cellar where idle prisoners had to pump or drown. Historians have never confirmed it, and it is best treated as a legend.

The women's equivalent, the Spinhuis, opened in 1597 on Oudezijds Achterburgwal, where women convicted of offences such as theft and prostitution were set to spinning. Its 1645 facade still stands at Spinhuissteeg. Look at the gate in the alley: its relief shows two women being flogged, with verses beneath it by the poet P.C. Hooft. Today the building houses academic research institutes.

The Golden Age Ledger: Amsterdam and Slavery

The money that built the canal ring did not all come from spices and herring. In 1683 the city of Amsterdam became one of three equal owners of the Society of Suriname, alongside the Dutch West India Company and the Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck family. The Society ran the colony of Suriname, whose plantations were worked by enslaved Africans, until 1795. The Netherlands abolished slavery in 1863, but enslaved people in Suriname were forced into ten more years of state-supervised labour and only became truly free in 1873.

That history is written into the canal houses themselves. Herengracht 502, the official residence of Amsterdam's mayor since 1927, was built for Paulus Godin, a director of the West India Company who helped found the Society of Suriname and oversaw its trade in enslaved people. A plaque at the entrance now says so.

For a long time the city said little about any of this. That changed recently. On 1 July 2021, Mayor Femke Halsema apologised on behalf of the city's government for its role in slavery, making Amsterdam the first Dutch city to do so. Two years later, on 1 July 2023, King Willem-Alexander apologised at the national monument in Oosterpark.

The National Slavery Monument by Erwin de Vries in Oosterpark, unveiled in 2002. Image: RoMaVo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Where to see it today: the National Slavery Monument in Oosterpark, by the Surinamese artist Erwin de Vries, unveiled in 2002. The commemoration of abolition, Keti Koti ("the chains are broken"), is held there every 1 July with music, food and speeches, and visitors are welcome. Black Heritage Tours, founded by Jennifer Tosch in 2013, runs walking and boat tours that point out the canal-house connections you would otherwise walk past.

1940–1945: The City That Lost Its Jews

Before the war Amsterdam was one of the great Jewish cities of Europe: the 1941 census counted 79,410 Jews living here. By 1945, about three-quarters of them, between 60,000 and 70,000 people depending on the source, had been murdered.

It did not happen without resistance. In February 1941, German police rounded up about 400 Jewish men on Jonas Daniël Meijerplein and deported them. On 25 February, Amsterdam's workers, dockworkers and tram drivers among them, went on strike in protest. The February Strike was the first mass protest against the persecution of Jews in occupied Europe, and it was crushed within two days. The Dokwerker statue by Mari Andriessen stands on the square, and the strike is commemorated there every 25 February.

From July 1942, the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theatre on Plantage Middenlaan, became the assembly point for deportations. About 46,000 people passed through it on their way to the transit camp at Westerbork and from there to the death camps.

Jewish Amsterdammers being registered inside the Hollandsche Schouwburg in 1943, before deportation. Image: Stapf Bilderdienst, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The occupiers had help. The Colonne Henneicke, a group of Dutch bounty hunters, was paid 7.50 guilders for every Jew it handed over. Between March and September 1943 it arrested somewhere between 8,000 and 9,000 people. Its leader, Wim Henneicke, was shot dead by the resistance in December 1944.

Who betrayed Anne Frank and the others hiding at Prinsengracht 263 is still unknown. A 2022 book by a cold-case team named the notary Arnold van den Bergh. Historians challenged its evidence, and within weeks the Dutch publisher apologised and withdrew the book.

The war's last horror in the city came after the German surrender had been announced. On 7 May 1945, a crowd gathered on the Dam to welcome the liberators, and German soldiers in the Groote Club building on the corner opened fire on them. The early count was around 20 dead. Later research identified more than 30.

Dam Square, 7 May 1945: people shelter behind lampposts as German soldiers fire into the crowd. Image: Wiel van der Randen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Where to see it today:

• Holocaust Names Monument, Weesperstraat. Designed by Daniel Libeskind and unveiled in 2021, its walls are made of about 102,000 bricks, each carrying the name, date of birth and age of one Jewish victim from the Netherlands, along with 220 Sinti and Roma victims. A thousand bricks are left blank for victims whose names are unknown.
• Hollandsche Schouwburg and the National Holocaust Museum opposite it on Plantage Middenlaan, which opened in March 2024.
• The Dokwerker, Jonas Daniël Meijerplein, next to the Portuguese Synagogue.
• Anne Frank House, Prinsengracht 263. Tickets are sold online only, for a timed slot, and sell out weeks ahead.

One brick of the Holocaust Names Monument: Emanuel de Winter, born 21 June 1889, murdered at 55. Image: Ceescamel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The City Fights Itself: 1975 and 1980

Post-war Amsterdam had violence of a different kind, much of it over housing. In the early 1970s the city began demolishing the old Nieuwmarkt neighbourhood to build the eastern metro line. Residents and squatters refused to leave. On 24 March 1975, a day remembered as Blue Monday, about 800 police moved in to clear the houses, and the fighting went on until 8 April. The metro was built, but the city dropped its plans for more lines through old neighbourhoods.

Police and residents clash during the clearance of the Nieuwmarkt houses, 24 March 1975. Image: Hans Peters for Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Five years later the protests reached the monarchy. On 30 April 1980, Queen Beatrix was inaugurated in the Nieuwe Kerk on the Dam. (Dutch monarchs are never crowned.) Squatters protesting the housing shortage took to the streets under the slogan "Geen woning, geen kroning": "No housing, no coronation." About 10,000 police and soldiers were deployed and around 600 people were injured, in what is still described as the worst peacetime unrest in the Netherlands since the Second World War.

Rioters on Amsterdam's streets during Queen Beatrix's inauguration, 30 April 1980. Image: Hans van Dijk for Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Where to see it today: Nieuwmarkt metro station, which opened in 1980, is a small museum of the protest. Look for the wrecking ball smashing through a wall and the slogan "Wij blijven hier wonen" ("We're staying here"), and the floor tiles that read "Wonen is geen gunst maar een recht": "Housing is not a favour but a right."

Bijlmer, 4 October 1992

At 18:35 on a Sunday evening, El Al Flight 1862, a Boeing 747 cargo plane, lost two engines shortly after taking off from Schiphol and crashed into the Groeneveen and Klein-Kruitberg apartment blocks in the Bijlmermeer. The official death toll is 43: the four people on board and 39 on the ground. Many residents of the Bijlmer were undocumented migrants, so the real toll may be higher.

What happened next made it a scandal. It emerged that the plane had been carrying 282 kilograms of depleted uranium as counterweights, and, as only revealed in 1998, 190 litres of DMMP, a chemical used to make the nerve agent sarin. Residents and rescue workers reported years of health problems. A parliamentary inquiry in 1999 was sharply critical of how the government had handled the aftermath.

The tree that saw everything, at the heart of the Bijlmer disaster memorial. Image: Willem_90, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Where to see it today: the memorial on Nellesteinpad in Amsterdam-Zuidoost, built where the flats stood. It lists the victims' names and is built around a tree that survived the crash, known as De Boom Die Alles Zag, "the tree that saw everything". The disaster is commemorated there every 4 October.

The Red Light District Behind the Glass

De Wallen is the dark side most visitors come looking for, and the one most often misunderstood. Brothels and window prostitution have been legal in the Netherlands since 2000. Legal does not mean safe. In the Sneep case, the largest human-trafficking prosecution in Dutch history, a gang was convicted in 2008 of forcing about 120 women into prostitution in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

The city has spent two decades trying to change the district:

• 2007: under Project 1012, named after the area's postcode, the city closed more than 100 of the district's windows.
• 1 April 2020: guided tours past the windows were banned.
• May 2023: smoking cannabis on the street in the district was banned, with a €100 fine.
• 2023: the city launched a "Stay Away" online campaign aimed at young British men coming for a drunken weekend.
• 2026: a plan to move the windows into a purpose-built "erotic centre" outside the centre was reported to have been dropped.

Two other Amsterdam paradoxes belong here. Under the Dutch tolerance policy (gedoogbeleid), coffeeshops may sell small amounts of cannabis, but growing it and supplying them in bulk remain crimes. The front door is tolerated while the back door is illegal, and organised crime has profited from that gap for decades. And the canals that look so peaceful claim lives every year: a municipal health service study counted an average of 18 drownings a year, 80% of them men. Police have long said that a share of them are drunk men who fall in while urinating over the edge.

How to visit: walk through, but don't photograph or film the women in the windows. It is the district's firmest unwritten rule, and the workers object to it strongly.

How to See Dark Amsterdam Respectfully

A self-guided walk, about 5 km. Start on the Dam (the Anabaptists, the scaffold and the 1945 shooting), then walk south to the Rasphuis gate on Heiligeweg. Head east to Spinhuissteeg and the Waag on Nieuwmarkt, and go down into Nieuwmarkt metro station to see the protest art. From there it is a short walk to the Dokwerker on Jonas Daniël Meijerplein, the Holocaust Names Monument on Weesperstraat, and the Hollandsche Schouwburg and National Holocaust Museum on Plantage Middenlaan. Finish in Oosterpark at the National Slavery Monument.

Further afield:

• The free ferry from Centraal Station to Overhoeks, above the old Volewijck gallows field.
• Herengracht 502 on the canal ring.
• The Bijlmer memorial in Amsterdam-Zuidoost, reachable by metro.
• The Mauritshuis in The Hague, for Rembrandt's anatomy lesson.

Dates the city remembers:

• 25 February: the February Strike.
• 4 May: National Remembrance Day. Two minutes of silence fall across the country at 8 p.m., with the national ceremony on the Dam.
• 1 July: Keti Koti.
• 4 October: the Bijlmer disaster.

If you are in town on one of these days, joining quietly is welcome; treating it as a photo opportunity is not.

A few ground rules. The memorials from the 20th century commemorate people whose children and grandchildren still live in the city. Don't sit or climb on them, keep your voice down, and save the dark jokes for the bar. In De Wallen the rule is simpler: look, don't photograph.