Digital archive of WWII forced laborers in the works

If you want to know where a family member or other acquaintance had to work during the Second World War, it will soon be a lot easier to get this information from the National Archives. The organization is working on making data on forced laborers available digitally.

According to the National Archives, approximately 500,000 Dutch people had to work in Germany or countries occupied by Germany during the Second World War. About 27,000 men and women died during this forced labor. Relatives' question of what happened to their loved ones is now challenging to answer, said the National Archive. "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack because you can't search by name in the current archive." After digitizing, all available data will be available "with one mouse click."

The archive needs volunteers to enter all the information online, for which it launched a recruitment campaign on Thursday. All documents were scanned one by one in recent months.

Previously, the National Archives made documents from, among other things, the time of slavery available digitally.