Van zwarte bladzijde naar zwartboek. Vijfenzestig jaar beeldvorming over naoorlogse interneringskampen

From black page to black book: 65 years of representation of post-war internment camps

Over 100,000 collaborators were imprisoned in internment camps after the liberation of the Netherlands on 5 May 1945. During the first few months many wrongs happened in these camps, which is why this episode was very soon characterized as a 'black page' in Dutch history. More than sixty-five years later this image of a 'black page' has hardly changed, quite the contrary. Repeatedly the internment camps have been rediscovered as a taboo in Dutch history. Films, documentaries and publications about the internment camps that were made in recent decades gave them an even worse image, that of a 'black book'. Remarkably, these representations of the internment camps were always based on the same source: a highly biased 1949 pamphlet by a former collaborator disclosing the abuses in the camps for the first time. In this article Grevers discusses how different actors persisted in using this image in the media during six decades and what they tried to achieve by doing so.