Dutch online archive publishes Second World War Nazi collaborators [Video]

A Dutch project called ‘War in Court’ digitally released a list of names of nearly half a million suspected wartime Nazi collaborators on Thursday after the expiry of a law that had restricted public access to the archive.

The archive, consisting of 32 million pages, includes about 425,000 mostly Dutch people who were investigated for collaboration with German occupiers during Second World War. The law restricting public access expired on New Year’s Day.

• The information you need to know, sent directly to you: Download the CTV News App

Only a fifth of those listed ever appeared before a court, and most cases concerned lesser offences such as being a member of the Nationalist Socialist movement.

Although the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protects personal data, it does not apply to those who have died — the vast majority of those listed in the archive.

Initially, scanned files from …