Dr. Jeroen Kemperman

Biography

Jeroen Kemperman is a researcher and at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He studied History at Utrecht University. He has published on the Japanese camps in the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, the policy of the Municipality of Amsterdam with regard to Jews who returned after the war, and the fall of the ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica. His book, Oorlog in de collegebanken; Studenten in verzet, 1940-1945 [War in the lecture hall: students in the resistance, 1940-1945], was published in 2018.

In 2025, he obtained his PhD with a thesis on the role of the Amsterdam municipality during the Second World War. This led him to write the book Een kwestie van uitvoering (A Matter of Implementation), which, based on meticulous archival research, reveals the choices made by Amsterdam's administrators and civil servants during the occupation and how they justified them. In a nuanced manner and with an eye for moral complexity, he shows how deeply the Amsterdam civil service was involved in the exclusion and persecution of its own citizens.