Dutch delve into family pasts as the names of accused Nazi collaborators released

An archivist opens a sliding file cabinet where documents, some regarding WWII collaboration, are stored at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Friday, Jan. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Aleks Furtula)

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — On Dutch Openness Day, this year’s release of secret documents from state archives suddenly left Peter Baas with fundamental questions about his father’s stature as a World War II resistance fighter.

While many were cleaning up the mess from New Year’s Eve fireworks on Jan. 1, hundreds of thousands of others in the Netherlands looked for their relatives in a new database containing the names of some 425,000 people investigated for collaboration with the Nazis from 1940-45.

Some looked out of curiosity, others out of concern.

A controversial topic

One of those names was Ludolf Baas, a resistance fighter who taped microfilm of Nazi atrocities to his body and smuggled it over enemy lines. “When I saw my father’s name, I was shocked,” Peter Baas told The Associated Press. He wondered if his father’s legacy was a lie and needed to find out if one of society’s ugliest stigmas would also stick to him.

“The publication of the list of names has caused great social unrest,” the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said in a statement Friday. The research organization, founded days after the Netherlands was liberated, has called for the government to intervene.

Nazi collaboration is a controversial topic in the Netherlands and much of Europe and is often shrouded in family mystery and stifled under a cloak of silence. Initially, the Netherlands was long seen as a welcoming safe haven for persecuted groups. Many Jewish families, like that of famed diarist Anne Frank, fled Germany in the 1930s for the relative safety of their Dutch neighbors.

That changed when the Dutch surrendered to the Germans in 1940. Only 27% of the Dutch Jewish population survived the war, significantly less than the survival rate in France and Belgium and collaboration made persecution easier.

Eight decades after the war ended, many still worry about what that legacy means.

“You see the bullying even now,” Holocaust historian Aline Pennewaard says. She described social media posts denouncing Dutch politicians as Nazis because they shared a surname with someone on the list.

Privacy concerns

Plans to fully open the archives would have provided answers but Baas, who lives in France, found out he would not be able to easily obtain detailed information about his father’s case.

Originally, the National Archive wanted to make much more than just the names of suspects public. The organization had been working to digitize and publish all 30 million pages of materials, from secret police records to witness statements, on a newly created website.

Just before Christmas though, after a formal warning from the Dutch privacy watchdog that releasing the records would violate EU privacy rules, Dutch education minister Eppo Bruins intervened. Now, only the names and corresponding file numbers are immediately available.

To see his father’s dossier and understand why and how he was investigated, Baas would have to request to make an appointment with the archive and travel to The Hague, a 650-kilometre (404-mile) drive, to read his father’s file.

“This is a very complicated way to get your family history,” Baas said.

Despite such complications, the Dutch are lining up.

“The interest has been incredible,” Werner Zonderop, who works at the archive, told AP. 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.

‘They should throw it open’

Documentary filmmaker Marieke van der Winden knows what it is like to confront the dark truth about family history. Her 2022 film “The Great Silence” showcases how taboo the subject of collaboration is for many.

Van der Winden found out at her mother’s funeral that her grandfather had worked with the Germans. After doing her own research, she discovered her grandparents, great-grandparents and several other family members had collaborated. “It was a family affair,” she told the AP.

The 58-year-old says it is important for later generations to understand what happened and supports putting the entire archive online. “They should throw it open,” van der Winden said.

Even many relatives of known collaborators have backed the publication of the archive.

“It is high time we discuss this with each other with openness and without reproaching relatives. We are part of this society, and the silence in our lives has had great and mainly bad consequences,” Jeroen Saris, the chairperson of the Recognition Working Group, said last year. His organization represents the family members of those who supported the Nazis during the war.

Deeply concerned about his father’s history, Baas managed to get a friend in the Netherlands to go and look up his father’s records, describing the cumbersome approach as “completely bizarre.”

According to the records, when his father was 19, he joined an organization that later merged with the Dutch Nazi party and he was investigated over that membership.

“A bad choice of a 19-year-old that was completely reversed by becoming an active member of the resistance,” Baas said.