Think of the Holocaust in the Netherlands and a single image likely comes to mind: a smiling teenage girl, her dark hair tucked behind her ear, her eyes expressive. Published in more than 70 languages, Anne Frank’s chronicle of the two-plus years she and seven others spent hiding in the back rooms of an Amsterdam building, sustained by non-Jewish friends, is a global phenomenon. Thanks in large part to Anne’s story and iconic status, there is a general perception that the Dutch were a nation of resisters who protected their Jewish neighbors.
The truth is more disturbing. Anne was among more than 100,000 Dutch Jews murdered by the Nazis, who exterminated around 75 percent of the prewar population—the highest rate anywhere in Western Europe. (For a comparison: 25 percent of French Jews and 42 percent of Belgian Jews were murdered.) Explanations for how this happened range from the geography of the Netherlands—a low-lying country bordered by Germany that lacks mountainous or heavily forested regions where people could have hidden—to the Dutch culture of obedience and faith in bureaucracy: When the Nazis told Jews to register with the authorities in 1941, they largely did, supplying their persecutors with a ready-made list of names and addresses.
But what if the behavior of the Dutch themselves was a significant contributor to the low survival rate of their Jewish compatriots? The unveiling in January of a newly digitized postwar Dutch archive, which makes public for the first time the names of people investigated for collaboration with the Nazis, offers an opportunity to answer that question. It has also generated enormous controversy in a country that in many ways has failed to fully examine its complicity in the genocide of its Jewish community, preferring a national mythology that stresses tolerance and resistance. With evidence to the contrary now a keystroke away—not to mention a recent surge in antisemitism that manifested in a shocking attack on Israeli tourists last November—the long-delayed reckoning may be at hand.