The Central Archives for Special Justice (CABR), containing several hundred thousand Dutch people who collaborated with the Nazis in the war, will not be accessible online for the time being. Minister Eppo Bruins (Education, Culture and Science) postpones the planned digital opening of the loaded war archive on January 2 after a warning letter from the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) about privacy risks.
According to Bruins, the supervisory authority stated in a letter to him on November 26 that placing the archive online and making it searchable could violate the privacy of people who appear in the archive and are still alive. The AP would consider that unlawful. To make the CABR accessible online to everyone, Bruins wants to amend the Archives Act. This should make it possible to make a “balance of interests” between publicity and privacy, he says.
The CABR contains the files of approximately 425,000 Dutch people who were suspected of collaboration with the German occupier in the Second World War. On January 1, these will become fully public under the Archives Act and anyone can request the files. The intention was that the war archives would also gradually become digitally accessible and searchable from 2 January via a special website. For the first time, for example, the names of victims could also be searched for.
Those involved in the CABR, including the National Archives manager, previously announced measures to address any privacy issues. For example, the documents from the archive would soon not be findable via search engines such as Google. The files of suspects would also only be made available online if it has been established that they have died. For living witnesses or victims who appear in the suspects’ files, this was only possible upon request. There are therefore concerns about the personal data of those people.
Bruins will now talk to the AP about how the National Archives can provide access to the digital war archive from January, until the law changes. He says he regrets the postponement in view of the great social importance of the publicity and digital availability of the archive. “This makes it possible for the first time for relatives of victims to find information about the fate of their family,” the minister said. “Openness of archives is important for relatives, science, education and in this case also in the fight against anti-Semitism.”
The National Archives does not agree with the criticism of the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) on the digitization of the Central Archives for Special Legal Affairs (CABR). “This is especially a disappointment for all those people, especially the relatives of victims, who after 80 years finally hoped to find the answers in an accessible way about what happened to their family,” says Tom De Smet, director at the National Archives and responsible for services and (war) archives.