“War in Court,” a Dutch project, released nearly half a million names of suspected wartime Nazi collaborators on Thursday after a law restricting public access to the archive expired on New Year’s Day.
The 32-million-page archive covers 425,000 mostly Dutch people investigated for collaboration with occupying German forces during World War II, Reuters reported.
Only one-fifth of those listed ever appeared before a court. Most cases involved “lesser offenses such as being a member of the Nationalist Socialist movement,” the news outlet said.
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protects personal data, but it doesn’t apply to dead people, which includes most of those listed in the archive.
At first, scanned files were to be available starting on Thursday with dossiers of suspects including victims and witnesses.
However, after a warning from the Dutch Data Protection Authority, a decision was made to publish only names and postpone the more detailed data release.
According to Yad Vashem’s website, 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands when Germany invaded in May 1940.
In the summer of 1942, the deportation to the death camps began. Transports left the transit camps of Westerbork and Vught, mostly for Auschwitz and Sobibor.
A total of 107,000 Jews had been deported to the extermination camps by September 1944. Only 5,200 of them returned after the war, with more than 75% of Dutch Jews perishing in the Holocaust.
