Dealing with the holocaust and collaboration: The Dutch experience of criminal justice and accountability after World War II

This paper addresses the problem of "settling accounts'' after periods of a rmed conflict in a given society (be they civil war, insurrection or occupa tion by foreign forces), when those who took the losing side have come to b e defined as collaborators, a process now known as transitional justice. Mo re specifically, it looks at the way in which Dutch citizens who collaborat ed with the Nazi occupation forces in deporting and murdering about 80% of the Jewish population of the country, were dealt with after the Second Worl d War. There are generally assumed to be three ways of coming to terms with such traumatic events: prosecution and criminal trial, truth and reconcili ation commissions or a combination of both. Under present international law , states have a duty to use the criminal law and to prosecute and punish pe rpetrators of crimes againt humanity and war crimes, specifically because i t is felt that prosecution will bring some measure of recognition and heali ng to victims. After the Second World War in the Netherlands, the emphasis was indeed on criminal law and the manifest aim was swift and just retribut ion. The author shows how this was frustrated by political considerations; but - and perhaps this is a more important lesson for the future - also by the fact that criminal law, by its very nature, is unable to deal with the problems of collective guilt or to recognise the suffering of collective vi ctimhood.