Suspected Nazi collaborators named in the Netherlands
The Netherlands has named 425,000 people suspected of collaborating with the Nazis during World War Two as part of The Huygens Institute’s “War in Court” project,
It has long been a source of shame as much as curiosity.
Now, some 80 years later, the names of those suspected of collaborating with the Nazis have been made public in the Netherlands as the country goes to new lengths to document the extent of its complicity in the horrors perpetrated by the Third Reich.
In the country where teenage diarist Anne Frank is the most famous victim of the Holocaust, a historical research group funded 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, after a law prohibiting its release expired on New Year’s Day.
The Huygens Institute’s “War in Court” project, which received an $18.5 million (18 million euros) grant from the three Dutch ministries that govern education, health and justice, has made public a digital archive that includes a list of 425,000 mostly Dutch people who were investigated for collaborating with the Netherlands’ Nazi occupiers.
The archive is “an extraordinary resource, and one that is very timely in terms of the Dutch debates about World War II and levels of collaboration,” said Dan Stone, a professor of modern history at Royal Holloway, University of London.
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