Search by keyword in millions of war documents
The CABR, the war archive about people who were investigated for possible collaboration with the occupiers during the Second World War, can now be searched digitally in eleven regional archives, reports Trouw. Bert Niemeijer, Trouw’s correspondent in Groningen, took a look at the Groningen Archives.
From the article:
In the past, war researchers had to comb through requested paper files, but now they can search millions of documents themselves, using keywords.
One day after opening, the locations in Groningen are fully booked for the next two weeks. The search term ‘Robert Lehnhoff’ on the CABR search page War before the Court yields 1,238 hits, Van Donk shows [Renske van Donk, employee of the Groningen Archives]. Lehnhoff, ‘the executioner of Groningen’, was Hauptscharführer at the Scholtenhuis on the Grote Markt, headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst. In that “antechamber of hell”, as the people of Groningen called it, resistance fighters were interrogated and tortured, after which they were shot outside the city.
Read the entire article here (behind a paywall, Dutch only).
Within the War in Court project, 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.
Visit the National Archives website for locations and registration.
