Prior to the database, the National Archive had originally been working to digitize and publish all 30 million pages of materials, from secret police records to witness statements.
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.
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. (more...)
Dutch delve into family pasts as the names of accused Nazi collaborators released
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