Belgium's record during the Second World War has long been a matter of debate. Occupied from 1940 to 1944, its king pted to stay in Belgium with most senior civil servants and police, while the government fled to London.

Many Belgians allegedly helped the Nazis identify 25,257 non-Belgian Jews for deportation; 28 convoys were dispatched to concentration camps between 1942 and 1944, and only 1,207 Jews survived. Antwerp policemen allegedly helped the Germans and an SS regiment of native Flemish reservists carry out raids
and arrest Jews.





The extent of Denmark's collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War may be much greater than previously thought. A sealed national archive may contain the names of up to 300,000 Danish Nazis or Nazi sympathisers gathered by the wartime resistance, leading historians say.

Headed by Claus Bryld, professor of modern history at Roskilde University, they want the archive - subject to an 80-year rule - opened so that the truth can be gauged.

Denmark was occupied by the Germans from April 1940 until May 1945 and for much of the time King Christian X and a string of coalition governments ran the country "as usual", ceding only military power to the occupiers.

In Britain and elsewhere Denmark's wartime record has traditionally been portrayed in a positive light, but Prof Bryld says much of its industry and agriculture collaborated with the Nazis for the sake of the money, and 12,000 Danes fought in a regiment against the Russians.

He said: "I'm not talking about printing all 200,000 or 300,000 names, but historians and the public should have access to them.

”Big business figures may be compromised by its release and there may be revealing information in the files on the royal family.

"There were very intimate relations between leading German officials and leading Danish ones. They made no political considerations.

"They traded with the Germans as if they were normal people. A moral perspective was totally absent."

 


During the Second World War, 74% of the 140,000 Dutch Jews were murdered, a higher percentage than in any other Western European country. Due to the Anne Frank paradigm, the myth of the good Dutchman has persevered in giving the impression that large parts of the Dutch population resisted the Nazis and helped the Jews. Much attention is given to the remarkable Dutchmen who hid her and none to those who betrayed and arrested her.

The truth about Dutch collaboration with the Nazis is very different from what is commonly known outside the country. The Dutch authorities sent the Jews on their first steps to their extermination on German orders; the Germans required very few of their own people for this. Dutch policemen arrested the Jews. The policemen were well aware of the criminal character of their acts; it is the role of the police to arrest suspected criminals, not innocent citizens or babies.
 
Dutch railway employees transported the Jews to the transit camps. Dutch policemen guarded them there. There was a small minority of Dutchmen who helped hide the Jews and they deserve great respect. The numbers of Dutch Nazi collaborators during the war, however, exceeded those active in the resistance. Relative to the size of its population, the Netherlands had the most Waffen SS volunteers in Western Europe. Furthermore, out of the 24,000 Jews who were hidden, 8,000 were betrayed by Dutchmen for a reward which in today's money amounts to perhaps 30 Euro per victim. Almost all of them were murdered in the death camps.
 
The Dutch government-in-exile in London cared little about the fate of the Jews who were deported to Poland. It did not instruct the Dutch under occupation not to collaborate with the Nazis. After the war, the Dutch transport minister praised the Dutch railways for not striking when they transported the Jews because that would have been bad for the Dutch economy. In more than four years of radio speeches from London, the Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, devoted a total of five sentences to the Dutch Jews and their fate.

After the war, the surviving Jews were discriminated against in many ways by successive Dutch democratic governments. Though substantial evidence exists to the contrary, the Dutch government denies until today that many cases of this discrimination were intentional.