A Dutch project publicizes the names of half a million suspected Nazi collaborators

The names of nearly half a million people suspected of collaborating with the Nazis during their occupation of the Netherlands have been published online for the first time, 80 years after the end of the Holocaust.

The Central Archives of the Special Jurisdiction (CABR) is the largest World War II archives in the Netherlands. It holds some 30 million pages of information about victims, resistance activities, efforts to hide Jewish residents and the names of over 400,000 individuals suspected of collaborating with Nazi Germany, which occupied the country from May 1940 to May 1945.

For nearly a century, those pages — all 2.4 miles of them — could only be viewed in person, at the National Archives in The Hague. But at the start of 2025, access restrictions expired and a digital archive went live with the names of the suspected collaborators.

That’s thanks to a consortium of humanities groups who started digitizing the records in 2022, with $18 million in funding from the Dutch government. They expect to complete another 150,000 scans per week to finish the project, called “War In Court,” in 2027.

“Without digital access, this archive does not exist for many, especially younger generations,” said the Huygens Institute, which contributed to the effort. “Only large-scale and easy access will keep this important archive with all facets of the war relevant, and allow us to continue learning from the past.”

The institute says the archive contains important stories for present and future generations, “from children who want to know what their father did in the war, to historians researching the grey areas of collaboration.”

The online archive, which is so far available only in Dutch, aims to make typed, printed and handwritten documents searchable. The CABR contains a variety of documents, from police reports to photographs to personal documents like membership cards.

But so far only the list of names has been published, after a recent warning from the Dutch Data Protection Authority indefinitely delayed the release of the full dossiers (which include more information about their victims and witnesses), Reuters reports.

Most of the people on the list are no longer alive, meaning they are not covered by the European Union’s strict data protections. Even so, the publication of their names could have ramifications for their descendants.

“I can’t imagine if it’s my grandparent and all of a sudden the book comes out about how they were a collaborator based on these documents,” says Amy Simon, an associate professor of history and Jewish studies at Michigan State University.

Simon says because of the timing, the archives aren’t likely to lead to court cases or legal consequences. But she suspects the impact will be hugely personal, both for individuals uncovering their family histories and for the Netherlands’ national identity.

“An archive of Dutch collaborators — that is not easy for any country to deal with,” Simon adds. “Once most of the people have passed, it’s more a question of collective national memory than it is about personal memory. And it’s a little bit easier with that distance, I think, to have those conversations.”

The story of Dutch collaboration is well-known but incomplete 

The last three decades or so have seen an uptick in research on Nazi collaborators, Simon explains, including both countries and individuals. The Netherlands, despite its active resistance movement, is considered a collaborating nation.

“Collaboration, in its most expansive definition, is about participating in some way in the destruction of European Jewry,” she says, from trading information to harboring Nazis to turning people in.

People had various motivations for participating, from antisemitism to self-protection, she says. Living under Nazi occupation meant making difficult decisions, she added, and a very thin line between cooperation and coercion.

Over 102,000 Dutch Jews — more than 75% of the country’s Jewish population, the highest percentage in Western Europe — were killed in the Holocaust.

After World War II ended, the so-called Special Jurisdiction investigated some 425,000 people suspected of collaborating with the Nazis in the Netherlands. Only a fifth of them ever appeared before a court, Reuters reports, with most cases concerning “lesser offences such as being a member of the Nationalist Socialist movement.”

The story of Dutch collaboration is not entirely unknown — one of the most famous Holocaust victims, Anne Frank, was betrayed by someone in her native Netherlands (her betrayer’s identity has long been a mystery).

But Simon believes the archive will shed more light on the extent and variety of ways in which people collaborated, which will help historians and the country come to terms with its past.

“We’re going to learn about the complexities of decision-making during the Holocaust, the complexities of individual cases and examples of people both collaborating and resisting, and the experiences of Jews kind of caught in the middle of all these people — the Nazis, the Dutch — and trying to find ways to survive,” she says. “So I think it will enhance our understanding of the complexities of the Holocaust in the Netherlands.”

Holocaust education is increasingly important 

CABR is one of several time-protected archives now becoming available in general and online specifically, making it easier for researchers and family members to access them from anywhere in the world.

Another recent example is Germany’s Arolsen Archives, a collection of some 30 million documents from concentration camps, details on forced labor and files on displaced persons. They have been accessible to researchers since 2007 but only started getting uploaded online in 2019 (and drew 100,000 views within the first two weeks).

At the same time, the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling: only about 245,000 were still alive as of January 2024, according to a survey from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference).

“It seems like a lot, but of course, compared to how many people actually survived, it’s a very small number,” Simon says. “So as we’re moving forward, and this is the discussion in Holocaust studies right now … what do we do with this moment where people aren’t around anymore?”

As distance from the Holocaust grows, mounting evidence suggests younger generations hold more misperceptions — and in some cases outright denial — about it.

A 2023 Claims Conference survey, for example, found that 23% of Dutch millennials and Gen Z believe the Holocaust is a myth or that the number of Jews killed has been greatly exaggerated, and another 12% were unsure.

That’s despite the Netherlands’ recent efforts to commemorate its history, including by opening its first Holocaust museum in March 2024.

Simon says it’s important to keep the lessons and memory of the Holocaust alive, especially in light of the worldwide uptick in antisemitism that has followed the Israel-Hamas war (including a November 2024 incident in which visiting Israeli soccer fans were attacked in the streets of Amsterdam).

“Teaching about the Holocaust also means teaching about antisemitism and understanding it in its complexity as well,” she adds. “As we’re trying to make sense of our world today in terms of Israel-Gaza and antisemitism, Islamophobia, we have to also look to the past to understand how we got here and what it all means. Because it’s not in a vacuum.”