Dutch online archive identifies suspected Second World War Nazi collaborators

A Nazi eagle with its swastika removed on a pillar outside Berlin's Olympiastadion, Wednesday, July 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Ciaran Fahey)

A Dutch project called 'War in Court' digitally released a list of names of nearly half a million suspected wartime Nazi collaborators on Thursday after the expiry of a law that had restricted public access to the archive.

The archive, consisting of 32 million pages, includes about 425,000 mostly Dutch people who were investigated for collaboration with German occupiers during Second World War. The law restricting public access expired on New Year's Day.

Only a fifth of those listed ever appeared before a court, and most cases concerned lesser offences such as being a member of the Nationalist Socialist movement.

Although the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protects personal data, it does not apply to those who have died — the vast majority of those listed in the archive.

Initially, scanned files from the archive were set to be made available online on Thursday, giving users access to dossiers of suspects, which also includes their victims and witnesses.

However, following a warning from the Dutch Data Protection Authority, the decision was made last month to postpone the full release and instead publish only the list of names.

No date has been set for publication of those dossiers but people with a research interest - including descendants, journalists and historians - can make a request to consult them at the Dutch National Archives in The Hague.

(Reporting by Charlotte Van Campenhout, Editing by Gareth Jones)