Open France

From the BBC:

"France opens archives of WW2 pro-Nazi Vichy regime"

 

France is opening up police and ministerial archives from the Vichy regime which collaborated with Nazi occupation forces in World War Two. More than 200,000 declassified documents are being made public on Monday. They date from the 1940-1944 regime of Marshal Philippe Petain. During the war the Vichy regime helped Nazi Germany to deport 76,000 Jews from France, including many children. France is also opening files from its post-liberation provisional government. The Vichy documents come from the wartime ministries of the interior, foreign affairs and justice, as well as the police.  Some of the archives relate to war crimes investigations conducted by the French liberation authorities after the defeat of Nazi Germany.  Previously only researchers and journalists could see some archives, with special permission. But public access is provided after 75 years have elapsed, under French law - and that is now the case, for 1940-dated documents. The current mayor of Vichy, in central France, told The New York Times that he was concerned about the enduring stigma attached to his city. It was where Petain - a World War One hero - established his collaborationist regime. Former French Resistance fighter Lucien Guyot told the paper that the Petain government "went far beyond the Germans' expectations, in particular with the deportation of 'foreign' Jews, including children, to concentration camps, and they chased us down with a vengeance". In 1995, then French President Jacques Chirac officially recognised the French state's responsibility in the deportation of Jews. "These dark hours forever sully our history and are an insult to our past and our traditions," he said. "Yes, the criminal folly of the occupiers was seconded by the French, by the French state."

^ I know there were numerous collaborators throughout German-occupied Europe, but France was one of a few where the government officially collaborated.That is why I never understood why France was given part of Allied-occupied Germany and Austria after the war. The Free French should have been too busy combing there own country and territories of those that helped the Germans. I remember when my French class went to Vitry (outside of Paris) for a week on an exchange. We were in a history class in the local school and the teacher decided to discuss Vichy France (it was clearly aimed at us as the students were given copied sheets rather than reading from their textbooks.) Everything was conducted in French and at the time I wasn't fluent (it was in April and I had just started learning French that past November) but some of the other American students told me what it was about. I also took the copied page with me and still have it today. It basically says that France collaborated with the Germans to save the French nation and its' people. It didn't mention the fact that the French did in a few months what took the Germans years to do - strip the Jews and Gypsies of their rights. It also didn't mention that the French made the Germans deport foreign and French Jewish children to the death camps because the French Government didn't want to house and feed  them. I worked at the Holocaust Museum and have since learned a lot about France's role in the Holocaust. This archive should have been made available to the public years ago (as should every other Holocaust archive around the world.) It is 70 years since the Holocaust ended and the few survivors along with their relatives deserve to know the full truth  - as does everyone else. ^

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35188755