Up-to-date and reliable information from and about the Netherlands armed forces is available on Defensie.nl. If you are looking for older information or a document that was previously available on this site, please go to the web archive.
How to access information in the web archive
Every month defensie.archiefweb.eu makes a copy of the complete Defensie.nl website. The Dutch website can be accessed by clicking the following link: https://defensie.sitearchiefweb.nl. To view the English site, scroll to the bottom of the page and select the ‘English’ button.
You can use the web archive in two ways:
- By selecting a date on the calendar (in the grey bar on the left of the screen), you can navigate through the site as it was on a specific day in the past. You can go as far back as 16 September 2021.
- You can search through the site via the search field (below the calendar). The search field you may be familiar with on Defensie.nl is not available in the web archive.
Tips for searching in the web archive
- You will achieve the best search results with a computer, laptop or tablet.
- You can enter multiple words in the search field. Do not use inverted commas. The search feature searches all pages and documents in the web archive.
- Do not use special characters in your search term, such as - \ ? or accented characters, such as ë.
- In the list of search results, the blue title indicates the type of information; for example, a news item, brochure or report.
- PDFs can be recognised by the red and white Adobe Acrobat logo. All documents (PDFs) have an intro page on Defensie.nl. You can therefore also retrieve a document via a web page. You can recognise a web page by the logo of a white page with a green dot.
- The URL of the search results (the red text) gives an indication of the type of page found. For example, it is a download if the URL includes /download/, and a text page if the URL includes /subjects/.
- The original date of posting is also included in the URL. This is not 100% reliable, as sometimes a document has been replaced by a new version at a later stage.
Why do we have a web archive?
Government information must be widely available, both current as well as older information. Older information can be important for Dutch history or culture. Civilians and businesses can also derive rights from the information on government websites. In a court case, for example, information from a government website can be used as evidence. That is why we keep the previous pages of Defensie.nl. Do you want to know what was previously available on this website? Please go to https://defensie.sitearchiefweb.nl/.
Hosting
The web archive of Defensie.nl is available on the site of sitearchiefweb.nl.