Issued to mark the 1966 marriage of Crown Princess Beatrix to Claus von Amsberg, a former German diplomat and Wehrmacht conscript whose Dutch citizenship was contested well into the 1980s. The union provoked street riots in Amsterdam on the wedding day itself — smoke bombs were thrown at the procession. That a commemorative struck a quarter-century later still needed to navigate that fraught history says something about how slowly Dutch public opinion on Claus moved.
Issued to mark the 1966 marriage of Crown Princess Beatrix to Claus von Amsberg, a former German diplomat and Wehrmacht conscript whose Dutch citizenship was contested well into the 1980s. The union provoked street riots in Amsterdam on the wedding day itself — smoke bombs were thrown at the procession. That a commemorative struck a quarter-century later still needed to navigate that fraught history says something about how slowly Dutch public opinion on Claus moved.