A city in the Netherlands has renamed a park that was named after a World War II-era mayor who gave the Nazis a list of local Jews.
Hoogeveen, located in the Dutch province of Drenthe, changed the name of Mayor Tjalma Park to Municipal Park, the Jonet.nl news site reported.
Jetze Tjalma was the mayor of Hoogeveen, which is 80 miles northeast of Amsterdam, from 1927 until 1958.
In 2020, a Dutch historian found that Tjalma was the first mayor in the country during the Nazi occupation to provide a list of local Jews to the Nazis, the Jewish Chronicle reported.
According to the report from the Dutch news outlet, the city council has also decided that the former mayor will be posthumously deprived of his honorary citizenship.
Besides the park, a fire station named in his honor will also have its name changed.
Besides giving a list of the area’s Jews to the occupying Nazis, he also ordered a sidewalk constructed over park of the city’s Jewish cemetery.
During the war, there were rumors that Tjalma was involved with “Nazi-friendly acts” but no official investigation took place.
Mayor Karel Loohuis stated that enough evidence was collected to come to a definite conclusion about Tjalma’s wartime Nazi links.
"The honorary citizenship can only go to someone of impeccable behavior," Loohuis told RTV Drenthe.
"Without disclosure, that was not known in Hoogeveen and that is now emerging in the investigation."
He added that Tjalma wrote a list of personal data on the city’s Jewish residents in May 1940, and later provided the list to the Nazi occupying forces for use in deporting Dutch Jews.