Dutch forensic experts have finally identified the remains of a man executed 80 years ago by the Nazis as those of Bernard Luza, a Jewish resistance hero, investigators announced on Wednesday.
Luza, then aged 39, had been shot dead by a firing squad in 1943 after he and hundreds of other Jews and their families were arrested following a raid on a factory in northern Amsterdam on 11 November 1942.
Luza’s body had been discovered in 1945 in a grave with four other bodies, buried in a firing range near Schiphol airport. Two bodies were quickly identified, and a third in 2013, but the identity of the last two bodies, including Luza’s, remained a mystery.
“Now, thanks to DNA technology used in a kinship study, his remains have finally been identified,” Geert Jonker, head of the Dutch Ministry of Defence’s forensic unit specialising in the identification of human remains, told French news agency AFP.
Luza, a member of the Dutch Communist Party and the People’s Militia, joined the resistance after German forces invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940.
“Considered the leader of a resistance group, Luza was charged with distributing a banned underground newspaper and calling on people to commit sabotage,” the Ministry of Defence said in a statement. “He was sentenced to death after his arrest at the end of 1942 and a final appeal for clemency was rejected.”
He was executed on 15 February 1943 by firing squad.
More than 100,000 Dutch Jews were killed during the war.
