Who Betrayed Anne Frank? We May Now Learn the Answer.

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.

Comprising 32 million pages of files on more than 425,000 Dutch people who were investigated by a special court set up after World War II, the Central Archives of the Special Jurisdiction (known by its Dutch acronym, CABR) has been kept under restricted access for around 75 years. Several years ago, the Dutch government announced that the complete archive would be digitized and available to the public starting on January 1, 2025.

Many historians believe that the archive’s digitization is an essential step in bringing the Netherlands in line with the standards set by other European countries for maintaining and preserving wartime archives. “The archive holds a tremendous load of information on this era. It can and will bring out lots of stories and insights on the complexity of the history,” Gertjan Broek, a researcher at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, wrote via email.

In prior decades, researchers who wished to use the archive had to travel to The Hague and snag one of the limited seats available at the archive reading room; no photocopying or scanning was permitted. Until recently, they also had to prove that their subject was dead. And the only way to search the paper archive is by the name of a person accused of collaboration.

To be able to search the files online is “a historian’s dream,” Dutch historian Bart van der Boom said in an interview, explaining that digitization opens up the potential for cross-referencing. “If you could just enter the name of someone in the resistance who you knew was arrested, you might well find surprising information” on the circumstances of that arrest, he speculated.

The same could go for Jews arrested in hiding, including Anne Frank. On August 4, 1944, the Gestapo raided her hiding place and deported all the residents to camps; only Otto, her father, survived. The strenuous efforts of journalists, historians, and biographers notwithstanding, to this date there is no definitive theory of who or what triggered the raid. While researchers have already examined the dossiers of known suspects, digitization could allow people to search the archive by putting in the address of her hiding place, for instance.

Multiplying Anne’s case by 10,000—the number of Jews dragged from hiding and deported—gives a sense of the scope of the possible discoveries.

The potential impact on Dutch society should not be underestimated. In 1979, the reputation of then-NATO secretary-general Joseph Luns suffered permanent damage when it was revealed that as a student he had belonged to the Dutch Nazi party (NSB). Decades after the war, it was still common for people to refuse to do business or socialize with people whose family had collaborated. “It used to be said, ‘This cobbler, this shop where they sell shoes, don’t go there. They used to be NSB-ers,’ ” the Dutch Jewish novelist Arnon Grunberg said.

The announcement of the digitized archive met with opposition from Dutch privacy watchdog organization Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens. The names in the archive include everyone who was investigated for collaboration, regardless of whether or not they were convicted. “These files are chock-full of rumors and nonsense and revenge,” Van der Boom acknowledged. “Many people tried to whitewash their own past or tried to take revenge on someone they wanted to cross. So it does take some training to know what you’re reading.”

In response to these concerns, the Dutch government paused the digital rollout and instituted a compromise. As of now, only the names and file numbers of the people accused of collaboration are visible online; to view their complete files, it is still necessary to visit the archive in person. Some see this as muddying the waters even more. As Grunberg put it, “It’s so easy to look up the names of the neighbors”—but not to find out what they were accused of or whether they were convicted.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Dutch treated German Jews returning from the concentration camps as enemy aliens, interning some of them in POW camps alongside Nazi prisoners of war. For that reason, some of the names in the archive are Jewish. Natascha van Weezel, a columnist for the Dutch newspaper Het Parool, was furious to discover her Jewish grandfather, who survived the war by fleeing to Switzerland but lost his parents and brothers, listed among the collaborators. “Why was my grandfather a ‘wrong’ Dutchman?” she asked—a reference to the way the Dutch have traditionally judged the behavior of their compatriots during the war as “goed” (right) or “faut” (wrong), depending on whether they resisted or collaborated.

Black and white categories of guilt and innocence are starting to yield to a recognition of significant gray areas, casting a wider net of complicity over Dutch society. In a documentary called Lost City, which came out in the Netherlands last year and recently screened at American film festivals, filmmaker Willy Lindwer and historian Guus Luijters investigate the Nazi use of the Amsterdam public transportation system to deport Jews. While the Nazis were the architects of the destruction of Dutch Jewry, they were assisted by Dutch police, often drawn from the ranks of the demobilized Dutch army. Together, they rounded up the Jews of Amsterdam and herded them onto trams run by the city’s public transport company, which is still in operation today. In a revelation that shocked many, Lindwer and Luijters showed that the tram company sent bills to the Nazi occupiers detailing exactly when and where trams ferried Jews to their deaths and how much those journeys cost, so the Dutch company could be reimbursed by the Nazis with money stolen from their victims.

The film unspools against the backdrop of modern-day Amsterdam as the filmmakers travel around the city on one of those trams, stopping in different neighborhoods to interview people—mainly Jewish survivors—about the roundups and deportations that took place there. A non-Jewish Dutchman who was a child during the war remembers, with evident distress, seeing crowds of people to be deported lining up at the train station. “Everybody saw it, and nobody took action against it. . . . There wasn’t any form of resistance or even protest against it. Nothing. People looked away,” he says. Later, non-Jews moved into the empty houses that the Jews left behind and made clothing out of prayer shawls taken from synagogues.

Were the tram drivers collaborators or simply ordinary people doing their jobs? What about the people who looked away or the neighbors who exploited Jewish resources? If collaboration is defined as anything that aids the Nazi government, then “all of the Dutch were economic collaborators,” argued historian Johannes Houwink ten Cate, who served as a researcher on Lost City. He continued, “We only punished political collaborators. Nobody dreamed of punishing a simple Amsterdam man who had driven a tram with Anne Frank’s family to the train station.” If the logic of collaboration is followed to its end, then “the only good Europeans were the approximately 1 to 3 percent who had Jews hidden in their own homes. The other 97 to 99 percent in some way were accomplices,” Houwink ten Cate concluded.

Indeed, some of Lindwer and Luijters’s Jewish interviewees tell harrowing stories about the indifference—or worse—with which their Dutch neighbors met them on their return from concentration camps. Jewish returnees were spit on or verbally abused; many had difficulty reclaiming possessions they had left with neighbors for safekeeping. One man recalls finding a new family living in his former home: “We threw out your photo albums because we figured you wouldn’t come back,” they told him. No one is suggesting that such “collaborators” should suffer recriminations now. But an acknowledgment of the pervasive antisemitism that enabled such attitudes is long overdue.

After the war, the tram line that the Nazis used to deport Jews—number 8—was taken out of service. But removing the evidence does not make a problem go away. In a survey of Dutch Jews released last year by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 76 percent of respondents said they considered antisemitism a “big problem in their lives,” and 83 percent said it had gotten worse over the last five years. Many Jews are afraid to display visible signs of their religion such as yarmulkes or mezuzahs.

In November 2024, Israeli soccer fans were targeted by Arab cab drivers and others in an outbreak of violence that some Dutch officials initially referred to as a “pogrom.” According to timelines of the incident put together by the Dutch and international press, on the afternoon and evening of November 6, Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam chanted incendiary slogans about the war in Gaza, vandalized property, and tore down a Palestinian flag. The next day, after the soccer match, groups of Arab taxi drivers used the messaging app Telegram to coordinate attacks against Israeli tourists, which some apparently referred to as a “Jew hunt”—the same term used by Nazi collaborators who ferreted out Jews in hiding. “That is so shocking and despicable that I cannot get over it yet,” Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema said in a statement. “The police are not ready to help,” one of the victims texted to a chat group. In the end, five Israelis were hospitalized.

The historians I spoke to about the collaborator archive were quick to disavow any comparison between the November violence and the events of the Holocaust, noting that the scale of the attack was relatively small and also that the behavior of the Israeli soccer fans should be taken into account. But others do make the connection, including King Willem-Alexander—whose great-grandmother Queen Wilhelmina fled to Great Britain with her family days before the Nazis marched in. “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II,” he told Israeli president Isaac Herzog, “and last night we failed again.” Evidence introduced in the trials of the perpetrators demonstrates that the analogy is not overblown. One man who tracked and reported Israeli soccer fans’ locations shared a picture of Anne Frank alongside the text “Laughing gas is for the weak, I use Zyklon B,” referring to the poison gas used in the Holocaust.

Grunberg pointed out that for years Dutch right-wing politicians have sought to scapegoat Muslims as the source of antisemitism in the Netherlands as an excuse for deporting them. According to this line of argument, “the nice white Christian people are Jew-lovers and have always been Jew-lovers,” he said. The mere existence of the collaborator archive exposes the fallacy of that belief. But the chaos over its digital rollout suggests that contemporary Dutch society is still very far from recognizing its own culpability—then and now. If the tram driver who drove the Franks to their deaths can be considered a collaborator, the same goes for the people in the crowd who held up their cameras as mobs beat and kicked Jews and the taxi drivers who shared the location of Jews and watched the violence unfold on their Telegram channel, even if they declined to personally take part.

In an interview with the BBC, Chanan Hertzberger, chairman of the Central Jewish Committee in the Netherlands, blamed the violence on an atmosphere in which “antisemitic rhetoric has gone unchecked.” Esther Voet, another Dutch Jew, spoke of the emotional stress of the last year and a half. “It’s an exaggeration to say that the Netherlands now is like the 1930s, but we must pay attention and speak out when we see something that’s not right,” she said.

And what about those who don’t speak out? How will history judge them? No one was accused of collaboration for standing idly by while the Nazis brutalized their Jewish neighbors. Still, 80 years after Anne Frank took her final ride on a Dutch tram, it’s worth remembering that silence can speak as loudly as endorsement.

Ruth Franklin is the author of The Many Lives of Anne Frank, which was recently published by Yale University Press.

For more on Yom HaShoah, read Haviv Rettig Gur’s piece:

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