Of the 140,000 Jews who lived in the Netherlands at the outbreak of the Second World War,107,000 were transported to Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
Of these, only 5,200 survived. The Nazis murdered a total 102,000 Dutch Jews.
Thus, of the 140,000 Jews who lived in the Netherlands at the outbreak of the Second World War, only 38,000 survived.
All these numbers add up to the shocking fact that, of all the countries in Western Europe, little Netherlands suffered the highest percentage of Jewish lives taken by the Nazis during the Holocaust: A staggering 75 percent of its pre-war Jewish population!
Of course, the Dutch people fought valiantly to protect their Jewish fellow citizens — sometimes at the risk of their own lives.
But there were also those who callously and cowardly collaborated with the occupying forces, betraying thousands of Jewish men, women and children, often sending them to their deaths.
The famous story of Anne Frank – “The Diary of Anne Frank” – perhaps best illustrates the two sides of this tragic coin. How for two years the young Jewish girl and her family successfully hid from the Nazis, helped and protected by ordinary Dutch people, only to be later betrayed by others.
Just like Anne wrote and rewrote her now-celebrated diary, thousands of other persecuted Dutch Jews, brave members of the resistance, and ordinary Dutch citizens kept detailed diaries or meticulous notes.
Many diaries, however, were also written by traitors. men and women who collaborated with the occupying German army.
In her haunting book, “The Diary Keepers,” Nina Siegal includes extensive excerpts from one of those diaries. It is from a whopping 3,300-page, 18-volume diary, complete with photos and newspaper clippings, kept by Douwe Bakker, a collaborating Dutch Nazi police chief who wrote in his diary nearly every day of the War.
Bakker’s infamous diary was a piece of vital evidence presented during one of his trials after the war when he was sentenced to life in prison in 1948.
Bakker is just one of more than 400,000 Dutch people who were investigated for collaboration with the Nazis after the War. More than 65,000 accused collaborators ended up standing trial. Twenty percent of them were eventually convicted by a special court or tribunal, and almost 1,900 of them were jailed for ten years or more, according to Oorlog voor de Rechter.
Bakker’s diary is one of the more than 2,000 diaries written during the war and now housed at Amsterdam’s Instituut voor Oorlogs-, Holocaust- en Genocidestudies (Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.)
The diaries are but a small part of the information preserved by the Centraal Archief Bijzondere Rechtspleging (Central Archive of Special Jurisdiction) or CABR, the largest World War II archive in the Netherlands. An archive that holds some 30 million pages of information “on people suspected of collaboration with the German occupiers. In addition to witness statements, personal letters and stories of victims.”
For nearly 80 years, those files (and names) could only be viewed by select groups and individuals, only in person, for specific reasons, and under several restrictions.
In February 2023, the Dutch government decided to make the archive digitally accessible to a wider audience under a project called Oorlog voor de Rechter (“War in Court”).
Initially, a much wider array of files and information was to be made available to the public on a newly created website, but “following a warning from the Dutch Data Protection Authority, the decision was made [last December] to postpone the full release and instead publish only the list of names.”
Thus, on January 2, 2025, Oorlog voor de Rechter made accessible the names of approximately 425,000 people suspected of having collaborated with the Nazis.
However, there are restrictions on and formalities for accessing the underlying dossiers.
There has been significant interest among the Dutch people in searching for names on the list, as well in accessing the underlying dossiers. The website is experiencing extremely high traffic. “Slots for the reading room are booked until the end of February. Every day, new appointment times open at midnight and fill up within minutes” said a worker at the National Archive.
How do the Dutch people feel about it, in particular Dutch Jews and descendants of the collaborators? An easy question. The answer is not so easy.
The Huygens Institute, part of the consortium that contributed to the project, believes that large-scale, easy access to this information will “allow us to continue learning from the past,” as it contains important stories for present and future generations, “from children who want to know what their father did in the war, to historians researching the grey areas of collaboration.”
Even before the list was published, Rinke Smedinga knew what his father “did in the war.” Rinke was about 12 years old when his father, the late Piet Smedinga, confessed to him his involvement in the Holocaust.
Now that the list is public, Rinke said in an interview, “It has been a great burden. It was very heavy for me to deal with that, and it also put me in a kind of crisis, personally.” He added, “It has been in my life all of the time, and it’s still a vulnerable part of my identity and existence.”
When the project was first announced, Dutch journalist and author Sytze van der Zee, whose father had been a Dutch Nazi, compared it to “opening up a Pandora’s box” and would have liked to “wait another 50 years or so” before opening files with things in them “that are so horrible and disgusting — things that people did to survive, things you don’t want to know about your grandmother.”
In his 1997 book, “Potgieterlaan 7,” describing the trauma of learning his father’s role during the Holocaust, the now-deceased Van der Zee wrote “But there is nothing I can do about what happened then. I was a child three, four, five years old!”
In a recent article on the reaction of some descendants of suspected collaborators, The Guardian describes the feelings of three sisters (Connie, Jolanda and Mieke) whose grandfather had a building company that did work for the Nazis, and whose father also worked there:
“It’s a bit uncomfortable,” said Connie…I don’t know what could come out of it eventually, if people Google our surname.”
While Connie is concerned, Jolanda, 70, said she did not mind and Mieke, 68, said she was keen to see her grandfather’s dossier…
“But he was 18,” said Jolanda. “I don’t know what other things my grandfather believed, but Dad believed in a better world, not in Nazi ideology … But you can make choices, like my father’s family. Sometimes it’s a bad choice.”
Even as antisemitism is on the rise in the Netherlands, the country is starting to come to terms with this dark chapter in its recent past.
Eppo Bruins, the Minister of Education, Culture and Science, recently commented on the Oorlog voor de Rechter project. Referring to the opening of the archives he said, “Openness of archives is important for relatives, science, education and in this case also in the fight against anti-Semitism. This archive is a silent witness to the Holocaust.”
A Dutch Jewish relative whose family lost several members to the Holocaust simply says, “I’m glad the archive is now accessible, although it is not yet available in its entirety. At this moment it is not yet possible to look for those who perhaps betrayed my family members.”
As fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors are left, they deserve to know.
