World War II

425,000 Nazi sympathizers named in Netherlands

80 years after the end of World War II, the names of nearly half a million people in the Netherlands suspected of collaborating with the Nazis during the war have been made public, Reuters reports.

The archive, which consists of a total of 32,000,000 pages, names 425,000 people who were investigated for collaborating with the Nazi occupiers. At the turn of the year, a law that prohibited the list from being made public expired. The majority of the people on the list are now dead.

Dan Stone, a history professor at the British university Royal Holloway, tells NBC News that the archive shows that a huge number of people are accused of Nazi sympathies.

“And the fact that relatively few were actually imprisoned is probably as revealing about Dutch society after the war as about the events during the war itself,” says Stone.

Relatives criticize list: “A social experiment”

The publication in the Netherlands of 425,000 people suspected of collaborating with the Nazis during World War II is causing concern among some relatives, the BBC reports.

Rinke Smeding’s father was part of the Nazi movement and worked at Camp Westerbork, from where people were deported to concentration camps. He believes the archive will provoke “very nasty reactions” in the country.

“You have to anticipate that. You can’t just let it happen, as a kind of social experiment,” he tells the Dutch online newspaper DIT.

Around 120,000 people on the list were also written off from the authorities’ investigations, says Hans Renders, a history professor in Groningen.

“So just because a name appears on the list doesn’t mean that person did something wrong,” he says.