Dutch Urged to Apologize for Jewish Deportations Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders is calling on the government to apologize for the country's "passive" response to the mass deportations of Jews by Nazi occupiers during World War II. The move is likely to re-ignite debate about Dutch attitudes to the wartime persecution of the country's Jewish population. Wilders wrote to Prime Minister Mark Rutte Wednesday asking if he would apologize based on comments by two former government ministers in a recently published book about postwar reparations to Jews. One of the former ministers, Els Borst, says in the book "Judging the Netherlands" that she believes the response by the Dutch wartime government in exile would have been tougher had Nazis been deporting Catholics or Protestants.