oa Echoes of Nazi Propaganda in a Collaborator Diary: The Case of Dutch Police Investigator Douwe Bakker

The diary of Douwe Bakker, a 3,600-page, 18-volume diary is the longest document in the NIOD Institute for War Holocaust and Genocide Studies’s 2,100-diary collection. It is a very rare piece of collaborator ego-documentation that gives an intimate, daily record of his life, work and thoughts. Douwe Bakker read, quoted and echoed N.S.B. propaganda, and clipped articles and pasted them into his journals. How did Bakker interpret this material? How did it help him develop personal beliefs and justify his work with the Sicherheitsdienst? How did reading and writing down this propagandistic information foster the formation of his identity as a “comrade” in the Nazi “movement?”