Eight decades since the fall of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, the steady stream of trials of Holocaust perpetrators has slowed to a trickle as the last members of that generation die.
However, the newly released archive will give new impetus to the study of the Holocaust, experts say.
“It’s a very important resource for historians, it’s a very important resource for family researchers and it’s potentially a really useful tool for education, especially because the online element could provide resources for teachers,” said Dr. Toby Simpson, director of the Wiener Holocaust Library, a collection founded in the Netherlands in the 1930s before moving to the UK on the eve of the war.
“It might be instructive for other archives to see the response to the release of this type of material,” Simpson told NBC News, adding that the only other example of a Holocaust archive of this scale open to the public is the Arolsen Archive. the world’s largest archive on the victims and survivors of the Nazi regime.
A 2023 survey by the Claims Conference, a US-based nonprofit that represents Jews in compensation and restitution negotiations for victims of Nazi persecution and their heirs, found that despite Dutch government efforts including a new memorial in 2021 and a Although a new museum opened last year, the effectiveness of Holocaust education in the Netherlands is declining.
The survey found that 23% of Dutch millennials and Generation Z believe that the Holocaust is a myth or that the number of Jews murdered during World War II has been greatly exaggerated.
While the European Union’s data protection rules protect the information of its citizens, the law does not apply to those who have died, and that exception covers the majority of those on file.
This has caused some concern in corners of the country, with local media reporting that descendants of alleged collaborators are expressing concern about a possible public backlash.
However, an intervention last month by the Dutch Data Protection Authority meant that more detailed information about the victims and witnesses of those named on the list was withheld, according to Reuters.
Still, those details remain available for people with research interests, such as descendants and historians, to access in person at the Dutch National Archives in The Hague.
