Author: Unknown
Published on: 10/01/2025 | 00:00:00
AI Summary:
A Dutch law restricting public access to the Central Archives of the Special Jurisdiction expired at the start of this year. Critics complain that the archive is still not truly open, as only the physical version in the Hague can be accessed. Online publication had been planned, but the process has been stalled because of concerns it would breach the privacy of living people who appear in the files. More than 102,000 Dutch Jews — three-quarters of the country’s Jewish population — were killed by the Nazis. NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies says both views should be taken seriously. “We are looking for the right balance between these two ideals and that’s an important ethical discussion,” he says. The National Archives, one of NIOD’s partners in the War in Court consortium, aims to digitise the CABR in its entirety by 2027. The CABR is the country’s largest archive on what took place during the German occupation from May 1940 to May 1945. In an intervention last year, the Dutch Data Protection Authority warned publishing the archive’s contents online would fall foul of privacy laws, which pertain to the living but not the dead. Recital 158 of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) allows members states to provide for the processing of archival data relating to information on “the political behaviour under former totalitarian state regimes,” Jeurgens says. The CABR consists of records made by more than 200 local police departments, political investigation units, tribunals and courts. Some of the original records are missing and the files are not all well ordered and well documented. In total, 40 of the 152 people given the death penalty were killed by the state for their crimes. Most of the 16,000 people whose cases were heard by the Special Courts of Justice were also jailed. The rest had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. “You can better address what happened in your own life,” Schuling says. Of the 153 forms returned to date, 16.3% believe the archive should be fully searchable online. 26.1% of respondents are against any digitisation. Eline Jongsma made an animated film about her great-grandfather’s crimes. Her family had shrouded his life in secrecy a decade ago. “My dad took on an attitude of silence and, I think, guilt and trauma,” she says. Jongsma says it is better for the truth to see the light. She says it’s time for a more collective and honest approach to what took place in the Netherlands between 1940 and 1945. “How are you supposed to learn from the past if you don’t know truly what it was like?”
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We cabt let the Swiss or Japanese off the hook either.
