War in Court

Update 1 July 2025 – The Central Archive for Special Jurisdiction (CABR) holds files of more than 425,000 individuals investigated after the Second World War for (alleged) collaboration with the German occupiers. The CABR is the largest war archive in the Netherlands, containing approximately 30 million pages.

From 1 July 2025, one third is digitally available to anyone with a research interest via computers in the reading room of the National Archives. The complete archive is scheduled to be digitised by 2027. Approximately 150,000 pages are scanned every week! The digital CABR is continuously being updated.

The CABR contains important stories for many people. For instance relatives who want to know what happened during the war, and historians seeking to uncover previously unknown facts.

Digitisation opens the archive to a wider public and younger generations. By providing accessible digital access, this important period in 20th-century history shall remain alive and relevant.

Contribution of the Huygens Institute

The Huygens Institute is responsible for the technology that makes the CABR archive accessible and searchable. This includes text recognition, document classification, and document separation.

Not only typed and printed texts, but also handwritten documents are made digitally readable. This is done using Loghi, an open-source transcription software developed by the institute and tailored to the CABR in collaboration with the National Archives. Loghi recognises handwriting, which is important for the CABR because many documents, such as letters and reports, were handwritten.

The Huygens Institute also researches how the digital CABR can be made as user-friendly as possible. For example, by determining what information people need to better understand the archive. To this end, user research is conducted and explanatory texts, visuals, and videos are developed.

Expertise of the Huygens Institute

Digitisation, accessibility, and enrichment of important archives and other historical sources are specialties of the Huygens Institute.

With its contribution to War in Court, the Huygens Institute builds upon earlier digitisation projects such as Goetgevonden and GLOBALISE, in which handwriting recognition plays a central role. Digitisation enables researchers to perform automatic text analysis on millions of pages simultaneously, which is impossible to do by hand. This yields new facts and new insights.

Thanks to smart software, data from the CABR will eventually be linked to other digitised archives, which will also generate many new insights.

Timeline: from paper to pixels

September 2023 – Start of digitization
July 2025 – One third of the 30 million pages available in the reading room of the National Archives
2025–2027 – New scans gradually made digitally available
2027 – Complete digitisation finished

Partners

National Archives – Custodian of the CABR and responsible for digitization
WO2Net – Provides background and enrichment of the digitised CABR files
NIOD Institute – Provides substantive expertise to interpret the significance of the CABR in historiography and commemorative culture
Huygens Institute – Applies technical knowledge to make the scans digitally searchable
Spinque and Norday – Responsible for concept and realisation of the War in Court website