During my talk on WW2TV someone asked the excellent question of why the archives were closed so long. And someone else asked the more philosophical but related question of why anyone would care if someone’s grandpa was a collaborator.

To protect living individual’s privacy, many archives close documents for a standard 60 or 75 years. Normally that does not include standardized reports on the potato crop as it did in France. The French simply put a blanket closure on all and any documents from the years 1939-1945. To vastly oversimplify the matter, it was a way of sweeping the war under the rug.

That attitude had a lot to do with Charles De Gaulle’s decision to pretend that everyone was in the Resistance except a few rotten Vichyites in order to demand a place with the Americans and British at the victory table and the UN Security Council. It served the interests of a lot of people, including civil servants, who had, indeed, been collaborators but wanted to move forward with their careers without anyone paying any attention to that unfortunate episode.

It wasn’t until their children were old enough to start rocking the boat that France as a society and culture began to wrestle with the facts of the war. It wasn’t until their grandchildren were old enough to be elected to public office and take up influential government positions that the archives were opened. The grandchildren wanted to know what really happened.
It was easier to ask the hard questions, of course, when most of that generation had died. It was also easier to open archives because a lot of the documents had been in the files of functioning bureaucracies instead of in archives until then.

Putting all the politics aside, the reason that the WWII archives were closed so long and that some of them – for example the trials of collaborators – are still closed is that most people absolutely care if somebody’s grandpa was a collaborator. They care about it in the same way that they care if somebody’s grandma was a resister or the queen.

The war and Nazi occupation were such catastrophes for civilians, especially in the hardest hit areas like the Netherlands or eastern Europe, that the trauma not only changed those who lived through it but shaped the way that their own children grew up. Collaborators betrayed their neighbors and worked with the enemy. They can be blamed for a great deal of suffering endured by so many. Their actions were so bad that the shame of it seeps down through the generations.

It would be nice if we all judged everyone else solely on his or her own merits, but we don’t. Our families matter. If not to us, then to others. And the others, the victims of the war’s deprivations if not its executions and starvations, care very much that it was some of their own neighbors who helped hurt them.