The Dutch Collaborators

More Than We Knew: As Abq Jew has often mentioned (see January 2024's Escape From Amsterdam; June 2023's Amsterdam: Occupied City; and April 2023's Hiding During the Holocaust), he has become fixated on the travails of Dutch Jews during World War II. 

But then we New MexiJews celebrated Hanukkah and New Year's and other joyous events (see Welcome, Alana Lee!). No one was paying attention to the news shmews. And then Abq Jew caught this story on NBC News. 

The story almost slipped under the radar. In fairness, it was (lightly) covered by other news media, including Jewish news media. But Abq Jew caught David Hodari's more complete exposition on NBC News.

Half a million suspected Nazi collaborators are named as the Netherlands reckons with WWII past

Eight decades after the Holocaust, the list was made public in the country of Anne Frank as a law prohibiting its release expired on New Year’s Day.

By David Hodari

Dutch patriots guard townspeople accused of collaborating with the Nazis in Nijmegen,
Netherlands, after American airborne troops liberated the town in 1945.  Bettmann Archive

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.

Part of Abq Jew's fixation on the Dutch story is due to his family connection: the stories not told by Abq Jew's mechutan (his son's father-in-law), but told by other members of the family and by straightforward historical sources.

But a major part of Abq Jew's fixation is due to the overwhelming tragedy, which Nina Siegal shared in her recent book The Diary Keepers:

• Of the estimated 140,000 Dutch Jews, only about 35,000 survived World War II. Some 102,000, along with hundreds of Roma and Sinti people, died in the Holocaust. 
• That means that about 75 percent of the Dutch Jewish population was murdered in five years. 
• In a single generation, the Nazis had managed to wipe out four centuries of Jewish tradition and culture in Amsterdam and the Netherlands
• In France, 25 percent of Jews were killed during the Holocaust; about 40 percent of Jews from Belgium were murdered. 
• The Netherlands holds the dubious distinction of having the lowest survival rate of all the Western European countries.

Celebrate on Liberation Day in 1945. Universal History Archive /
Universal Images Group via Getty Images file

David Hodari's article continues:

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.

Why is this important now?

 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.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day
is Monday, January 27, 2025.