The Netherlands releases names of more than 400,000 suspected WW2 Nazi collaborators

Around 425,000 names of people suspected of collaborating with the Nazis in the Netherlands during the Second World War have been released for the first time.

A Dutch project, called War In Court, released the list after the expiry of a law which had restricted public access to the archive.

It consists of 32 million pages and includes the names of mostly Dutch people investigated for collaborating with Nazi occupiers.

The Nazis invaded in 1940 and remained in the Netherlands until the allied liberation in 1945.

In those five years, more than 100,000 of the Dutch Jewish population were killed in the Holocaust.

Research group the Huygens Institute made the names available online in a move which experts believe will provide a “significant resource” for historians.

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

The vast majority of people are dead, meaning the EU’s general data protection regulation does not apply.

Scanned files giving more detailed information on the victims and witnesses of those on the list were initially going to be made available.

However, this was postponed after a warning from the Dutch data protection authority.

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A date has not been set for publication, but people with a research interest – including descendants, journalists and historians – can make a request to consult them at the Dutch National Archives.

Dan Stone, a modern history professor at Royal Holloway, University Of London, told NBC News the archive provided an “extraordinary resource, and one that is very timely in terms of the Dutch debates about the war and levels of collaboration”.

“The fact that relatively few were imprisoned probably tells us as much about post-war Dutch society as it does about the wartime facts,” he added.