Measures taken to make files of alleged Dutch Nazi collaborators hard to find online

The archive with the files of Dutch people who allegedly collaborated with the Nazis in World War II will be made public in 2025. But the National Archives is taking extra measures to shield these controversial files, mainly to protect surviving relatives, Trouw reports.

This archive includes half a million files of Dutch people suspected of things like betraying the location of Jews in hiding or killing resistance fighters during the Second World War. The Archives Act requires the files to be made public next year, and that will happen. But the National Archives will be very careful in the process.

The publication will happen in phases. Only a quarter of the archive will be made available online immediately, and then there will be a six-month pause. The first published files will be the relatively well-known ones - cases that made headlines at the time. According to the Archive, these files are considered the least loaded.

“Not the pieces that hold the biggest surprises for the outside world,” project leader Edwin Klijn explained to Trouw. “This is the most loaded archive in the Netherlands, which is why care is required. We arrived at this conclusion after discussions with the ethical council, which includes relatives of both collaborators and war victims.”

The files will also not be findable on major search engines like Google, and they won’t be downloadable. Relatives of collaborators can request that the documents be taken offline if they feel that their privacy is at risk.

The National Archive is also adding videos explaining the context of the documents, especially stressing that these are files of suspected, not proven collaborators. “In our tests, we hear that users quickly think: it is in the archive, so it is true. That is not the case,” Klijn said. “We are going to provide explanation videos on the archive’s website. Something like: pay attention, this is an archive of suspects. Not all witnesses who were heard told the truth.”

Mayors and aid workers will also be informed in the course of this year about the unrest and reawakened traumas that the publication could cause. “I have never experienced this in a digitization project. But this is not just any archive,” Klijn said.