It has long been a subject of both fascination and embarrassment.
The identities of people accused of working with the Nazis have now been made public in the Netherlands, around 80 years later, as the nation goes to unprecedented measures to prove its involvement in the atrocities committed by the Third Reich.
After a law that forbade its publication expired on New Year’s Day, a historical research group supported by the Dutch government has for the first time published a list of nearly half a million people suspected of collaboration during World War II in the nation where teenage diarist Anne Frankis was the most well-known Holocaust victim.
A list of 425,000 people, mostly Dutch, who were investigated for collaborating with the Nazi occupiers in the Netherlands is available in a digital archive made public by the Huygens Institute’s War in Court project, which was awarded a $18.5 million (18 million euro) grant by the three Dutch ministries that oversee education, health, and justice.
According to Dan Stone, a professor of modern history at Royal Holloway, University of London, the archive is a remarkable resource that is highly relevant to the Dutch discussions around World War II and the extent of cooperation.
According to Stone’s email to NBC News, it at least demonstrates that a great number of people were charged with working with the Nazi invader. Furthermore, the fact that so few people were imprisoned likely reveals as much about Dutch society after the war as it does about the reality of the conflict.
According to Reuters, only 5% of the people in the database ever went to court, and the majority of these cases included more minor infractions like belonging to the Nazi party.The Dutch Central Statistics Bureau estimates that 8.7 million people lived in the Netherlands in 1939, the year when World War II broke out. Just under 5% of the nation would thereafter be considered suspected collaborators.
In 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, which it controlled until 1945, when the Allies liberated it.
Over 100,000 Dutch Jews—roughly three-quarters of the nation’s population—were murdered during the Holocaust, and an estimated 6 million Jews were killed overall, along with Nazi political opponents and members of other groups deemed inferior, like Roma and LGBTQ people.
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