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Dutch archives on accused Nazi collaborators to open to the public in 2025
(JTA) — The Dutch government is planning to throw open information about 300,000 people investigated for their collaboration with the Nazis, in a move that could accelerate a reckoning with the Netherlands’ Holocaust record.
For the past seven decades, only researchers and relatives of those accused of collaborating with the Nazis could access the information held by the Dutch archives. But a law guarding the data is set to expire in 2025.
In February, The War in Court, a Dutch consortium devoted to preserving history, announced that it would make the records available online when the privacy law expires. The effort drew additional attention this week when a New York Times article explored concerns the hopes and concerns held by people in the Netherlands who have an idea of what lies within the sweeping repository.
“It’s a sensitive archive,” Edwin Klijn, project leader of The War in Cort, told the Times.
“For years, the whole theme of collaboration has been a kind of taboo,” he added. “We don’t talk about collaboration that much but we’re now 80 years further and it’s time for us to face this dark part of the war.”
The Netherlands has world’s second-highest number of documented saviors of Jews, but it also had many collaborators who, aided by the topography and Holland’s proximity to Germany, helped the Nazis achieve the highest death rate there among Jews anywhere in Nazi-occupied Western Europe. Of 140,000 Dutch Jews, more than 100,000 were murdered. As is presumed to have happened with the most famous victim of the Nazis in the Netherlands, the teenaged diarist Anne Frank, many were given up by their neighbors and acquaintances.
The Dutch government investigated 300,000 people for collaborating with the Nazis and more than 65,000 of them stood trial in a special court system in the years after World War II. But it was only in 2020 that the Dutch government apologized for failing to protect Jews during the Holocaust, long after other European leaders and after local Jews had requested an apology; a town square was named for a mayor who handed Jews to the Nazis until last year.
The archive due to open in 2025 will offer widespread access to the files from the postwar investigations, which researchers who have used the files say are detailed — and also could contain false accusations made at a tumultuous time.
The 32 million documents contained in the archive stretch to nearly two and a half miles and include witness reports, Dutch National Socialist Movement membership cards, diaries, and petitions for pardons and photos. Currently, the archive receives between 5,000 and 6,000 requests a year and cannot accommodate more.
The documents will be digitized to allow searches by key words or names. “You will be able to type in the name of a victim and discover who was accused of betraying them,” Klijn said.
The effort will be second major digitization of a Holocaust document trove in the Netherlands, where an efficient collaboration machine made for detailed records. In 2021, the Red Cross transferred ownership of its Index Card Archive, a repository of nearly 160,000 cards with personal information of Dutch Jews maintained by the Jewish Council of Amsterdam, a body set up by the Nazis to govern the community ahead of its extermination, to the National Holocaust Museum in the Netherlands. The museum will reopen to visitors next year but has made the cards accessible online already.
Paul Shapiro, director of the Office of International Affairs at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., told The New York Times that the new Dutch database is unusual — and important — because of the planned ease of access.
“Genocidal crimes leave a very long legacy behind them,” Shapiro said. “For better or worse, the only way to resolve some of those issues is to have your eyes wide open and look at the past openly and accept what the history really was. One way to look at that is through the paper trail in the archives.”
In 2020, the Vatican unsealed its archives from World War II, sharing 2,700 files that revealed details about Pope Pius XII’s relationship with Nazi Germany. Those records showed that the Vatican fought efforts to reunite Jewish orphans with their relatives and also urged the Pope not to protest the deportation of Italian Jews.
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The post Dutch archives on accused Nazi collaborators to open to the public in 2025 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Jared Kushner Arrives in Israel for Gaza Talks with Netanyahu, Source Says
Jared Kushner listens as US Vice President JD Vance (not pictured) speaks to members of the media in Kiryat Gat, Israel, October 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
US President Donald Trump’s influential son-in-law, Jared Kushner, arrived in Israel on Sunday for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on implementing the US plan to end the Gaza war, a source familiar with the matter said.
Kushner was expected to meet with Netanyahu on Monday, said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity as the meeting had not been formally announced. The White House and Netanyahu’s office did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Trump announced a 20-point plan in September to end the two-year-old war in the Palestinian territory, starting with a ceasefire that came into effect on October 10 and the handover of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
The militant group has released 20 living hostages and the remains of 24 hostages from Gaza since October 10. There are four deceased hostages whose remains are still being held in Gaza.
The next phase of the ceasefire is supposed to see the standing up of a multinational force that would gradually take over security inside Gaza from the Israeli military.
An Israeli government spokesperson said earlier on Sunday that there would be “no Turkish boots on the ground” in Gaza as part of that multinational force.
Asked about Israel’s objections to Turkish forces in Gaza, US Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack said at a Manama security conference earlier this month that Turkey would participate.
Vice President JD Vance said last month there would be a “constructive role” for Ankara to play but that Washington wouldn’t force anything on Israel when it came to foreign troops “on their soil.”
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Netanyahu Faces Criticism Over Efforts to Block National Inquiry Into Oct. 7
FILE PHOTO: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives a statement during a visit to the site of the Weizmann Institute of Science, which was hit by an Iranian missile barrage, in the central city of Rehovot, Israel June 20, 2025. JACK GUEZ/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
i24 News – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met last Friday with Likud MK Ariel Kellner to discuss advancing a bill that would establish an alternative commission of inquiry into the October 7 massacre.
According to sources close to the matter, the legislative initiative has made no progress.
The meeting has drawn sharp criticism from opposition lawmakers. Deputy Vladimir Beliak (Yesh Atid) accused Netanyahu of “continuing to mistreat bereaved families and all the victims of the war,” asserting that a national commission of inquiry will be created, period.” Deputy Naama Lazimi wrote on X, “So Netanyahu is sending Kellner as a proxy to pass a law that will exempt him from all responsibility for the massacre that took place under his governance? Who would have thought that Hamas’s financier would act this way?”
The Knesset is scheduled to hold a debate on Monday, at the opposition’s request and in the presence of the Prime Minister, on the creation of a national commission of inquiry to examine the failures of October 7. Yesh Atid emphasized, “765 days after the outbreak of the October 7 war, the Israeli government refuses to create a national commission that would provide answers to bereaved families. We will not stop fighting for them.”
The debate comes just days before the government must respond to a petition filed with the Supreme Court calling for the establishment of a national commission. The court has noted that “there is no real controversy regarding the very need to create a national commission with broad investigative powers.”
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Hamas Says Fighters Holed Up in Rafah Will Not Surrender
Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard on the day of the handover of hostages held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, as part of a ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hatem Khaled
Hamas fighters holed up in the Israeli-held Rafah area of Gaza will not surrender to Israel, the group’s armed wing said on Sunday, urging mediators to find a solution to a crisis that threatens the month-old ceasefire.
Sources close to mediation efforts told Reuters on Thursday that fighters could surrender their arms in exchange for passage to other areas of the enclave under a proposal aimed at resolving the stalemate.
Egyptian mediators have proposed that, in exchange for safe passage, fighters still in Rafah surrender their arms to Egypt and give details of tunnels there so they can be destroyed, said one of the sources, an Egyptian security official.
Sunday’s statement from Al-Qassam Brigades held Israel responsible for engaging the fighters, who it said were defending themselves.
“The enemy must know that the concept of surrender and handing oneself over does not exist in the dictionary of the Al-Qassam Brigades,” the group said.
US special envoy Steve Witkoff said on Thursday that the proposed deal for about 200 fighters would be a test for a broader process to disarm Hamas forces across Gaza.
Al-Qassam Brigades did not comment directly on the continuing talks over the fighters in Rafah but implied that the crisis could affect the ceasefire.
“We place the mediators before their responsibilities, and they must find a solution to ensure the continuation of the ceasefire and prevent the enemy from using flimsy pretexts to violate it and exploit the situation to target innocent civilians in Gaza,” the group said.
Since the US-brokered ceasefire took effect in Gaza on October 10, the Rafah area has been the scene of at least two attacks on Israeli forces, which Israel has blamed on Hamas. The militant group has denied responsibility.
Rafah has been the scene of the worst violence since the ceasefire took hold, with three Israeli soldiers killed, prompting Israeli retaliation that killed dozens of Palestinians.
Separately, Al-Qassam Brigades said it will hand over the body of deceased Israeli soldier Hadar Goldin in Gaza on Sunday at 2 p.m. (1200 GMT).
Since the ceasefire, Hamas has handed over the bodies of 23 of 28 deceased hostages. Hamas has said the devastation in Gaza has made locating the bodies difficult. Israel accuses Hamas of stalling.
Israel has released to Gaza the bodies of 300 Palestinians, according to the territory’s health ministry.
Local health authorities said on Sunday that one man was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Bani Suhaila east of Khan Younis, south of the enclave. The Israeli military made no immediate comment.