Names of potential German collaborators during WW2 to be published today

The project War in Court is going to publish a list on Thursday containing the identity of people who are now deceased and were suspected of collaborating with the German forces during the Second World War. The suspects have all been seen in the Central Archive for Special Jurisdiction (CABR).

The CABR is a detailed war archive that was planned to be open and partly digitally researchable for everybody, but that is currently not going ahead. It will be possible from January 2 to check online whether a suspect is in the CABR or not.

The rules regarding the CABR have changed several times in the last few weeks. The initial plan was for the war archive, which contains files on around 425,000 people accused of collaboration, to be made public in January. Everybody would have been able to request physical parts of the archive and take photos of it, for example.

However, this has now been changed. You now have to submit and be granted an official request, and although visitors can now underline certain parts with a pencil, they cannot take any photos or copy any documents. Another change was that millions of digitized pages from the archive would be put online on January 2, so that anyone could search for the names of suspects and, for the first time, also those of victims.

However, the digital project was obstructed after a warning from the Dutch Data Protection Authority about possible privacy risks. This eventually led to the Minister of Education, Culture, and Science, Eppo Bruins, postponing the publication of the paper archive and deciding that the online archive would soon only be available for consultation under certain conditions, from the reading room of the National Archives in The Hague.

It is unclear when this will be possible, but it will likely be during the first quarter of the year. Minister Bruins is still investigating whether the digitized archive can also be made available in other places, such as in the reading rooms of regional archives.

The National Archives is currently expecting a lot of people to come to the reading room. The number of places in the room has been expanded from 108 to 140, of which 61 are for people who want to view the CABR.

The National Archives, NIOD, Network War Sources, and Huygens Institute are working together on the digitization of the CABR for the War in Court project.