“That cannot be justified, not even with time,” said Jacques Grishaver, chair of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee.

The predecessor of the General Intelligence and Security Service in the Netherlands (AIVD), called the BVD, regarded Holocaust survivors who were part of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee as extremists and spied on them in the 1980s. 

That’s according to an analysis of 71,000 declassified documents by the Amsterdam daily Het Parool.

The Dutch agency issued a statement that Holocaust survivors weren’t deemed a threat, but this particular group was “a communist front organization.”

“These were different times, but the fact that you are going to make a report about Auschwitz commemorations, about the people who came there to remember their family that had been massacred, to embed the BVD there? It defies any idea of civilization,” said Jacques Grishaver, who chairs the Dutch Auschwitz Committee.

“That cannot be justified,” he said. “Not even with time.”