It was an exciting day for people with ancestors who collaborated with the occupying forces during the Second World War, or were suspected of doing so. The register with these names has been online since this morning.
Relatives and researchers can request files to view in the National Archives. Rinke Smedinga is one of them. His father Piet Smedinga was chief guard, a high guard, at Camp Westerbork during the war.
Rinke already read his father’s file after his death in 2001. But today for the first time he was also able to view the documents about a friend of his father, Klaas Carel Faber. “A notorious war criminal.”
Piet Smedinga was born in Smilde in 1921 and became a member of the NSB before the war. After training for the Waffen-SS in Munich, Piet worked as a chief guard at Camp Westerbork, and later at the Ordnungspolizei.
As a child, Rinke thought for a long time that his father was a victim of the Second World War. Until his father takes him to Camp Westerbork, when Rinke is thirteen years old. There Piet tells his son about an execution in Westerbork. Piet’s friend Klaas, who was in the Ordnungspolizei, had come to the camp to carry out that execution.