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In 2025, the Dutch will make available to the public a massive data base of more than thirty million documents on accused World War II Nazi collaborators. It includes most of the evidence used in past trials of collaborators “including police reports, witness depositions, material evidence and photos.” The Netherlands is not the first to make such files public. However, the ease of access to the public is new and something that is a cause for both praise and concern.

In a country notoriously slow to accept responsibility for mistakes and distance itself from its occupiers, a discussion on collaboration might soon take place in the open

The archive will be searchable by key words and names.

Historians and archivists are excited and concerned about providing unfettered public online access to investigators’ files that have been restricted since the end of World War II.

The archive, consisting of 32 million pages, includes 300,000 mostly Dutch people who The Netherlands investigated for collaboration with German occupiers.