It has long been a source of shame as much as curiosity.
Now, some 80 years later, the names of those suspected of collaborating with the Nazis have been made public in the Netherlands as the country goes to new lengths to document the extent of its complicity in the horrors perpetrated by the Third Reich.
In the country where teenage diarist Anne Frank is the most famous victim of the Holocaust, a historical research group funded by the Dutch government has for the first time published a list of nearly half a million people suspected of collaboration during World War II, after a law prohibiting its release expired on New Year’s Day.
The Huygens Institute’s “War in Court” project, which received an $18.5 million (18 million euros) grant from the three Dutch ministries that govern education, health and justice, has made public a digital archive that includes a list of 425,000 mostly Dutch people who were investigated for collaborating with the Netherlands’ Nazi occupiers.
The archive is “an extraordinary resource, and one that is very timely in terms of the Dutch debates about World War II and levels of collaboration,” said Dan Stone, a professor of modern history at Royal Holloway, University of London.
“At the very least, it shows that huge numbers of people were accused of collaborating with the Nazi occupier,” Stone told NBC News by email. “And the fact that relatively few were imprisoned probably tells us as much about postwar Dutch society as it does about the wartime facts.”
Of those in the database, only a fifth ever appeared in court, with most cases concerning more minor offenses such as membership in the Nazi party, Reuters reported. According to the Dutch central statistics bureau, in 1939 — the year World War II broke out — the country’s population was 8.7 million. That would make just under 5% of the country suspected collaborators.
Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940 and occupied the country until the allied liberation in 1945.
During that period, more than 100,000 Dutch Jews — around three-quarters of those in the country — were killed in the Holocaust, with approximately 6 million Jews murdered overall alongside the Nazis’ political opponents and members of other groups declared to be inferior, such as Roma and LGBTQ people.
Dutch citizens celebrate on Liberation Day in 1945.
With eight decades having elapsed since the fall of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, the steady flow of trials of those who perpetrated the Holocaust has slowed to a trickle as the last members of that generation die off.
Nevertheless, the newly publicized archive will give the study of the Holocaust new impetus, experts say.
“It’s a very significant resource for historians, it’s a very significant resource for family researchers, and it’s potentially a really useful tool for education, especially because the online element could provide resources for teachers,” said Dr. Toby Simpson, director of the Wiener Holocaust Library, a collection that was founded in the Netherlands in the 1930s before being moved to the U.K. on the eve of the war.
“It might be instructive to other archives to see the response to the publication of this kind of material,” Simpson told NBC News, adding that the only other example of a Holocaust archive of this scale being opened to the public is the Arolsen Archive — the world’s largest archive on the victims and survivors of the Nazi regime.
A 2023 survey carried out by the Claims Conference — a U.S.-based nonprofit that represents Jews in negotiating for compensation and restitution for victims of Nazi persecution and their heirs — found that despite efforts by the Dutch government that include a new memorial in 2021 and a new museum opened last year, the efficacy of Holocaust education in the Netherlands is waning.
The survey found that 23% of Dutch millennials and Gen Zers believe the Holocaust is a myth or the number of Jews killed during WWII has been greatly exaggerated.
While the European Union’s data protection regulations protect the information of its citizens, the law does not apply to those who are dead, and that exception covers most of those in the archive.
That has caused some disquiet in corners of the country, with local media carrying reports that the descendants of alleged collaborators are expressing concern about potential public backlash.
Nevertheless, an intervention last month by the Dutch Data Protection Authority meant that more detailed information on the victims and witnesses of those named in the list was held back, according to Reuters.
Still, those details remain available for people with a research interest, such as descendants and historians, to access in person at the Dutch National Archives in The Hague.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com