France has decided to publicly display one of the ugliest relics of its wartime past: a register documenting the role of French civil servants in the deportation of Jews during the Nazi occupation.
After a three-year probe, a commission of historians set up by former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur found in July that the register, known as the “index of shame,” confirms in great detail the enthusiasm with which bureaucrats and police of the Vichy collaborationist regime aided the Nazi persecution.
Prime Minister Alain Juppe said in a statement that after consulting Jewish organizations, he had decided that the archives should be exhibited at the Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation.
Jean Kahn, president of the Consistoire, the body responsible for the religious needs of France’s Jewish community, said the prime minister’s decision “recognizes the specific and exceptional nature of the tragedy of the Shoah.”
Before going on display, the archives will be put on microfilm and filed in the National Archives, where Holocaust survivors or relatives of deportees may consult them.
During the Second World War, 76,000 Jews, about a quarter of those living in France, were deported to Nazi death camps. About 2,500 returned.
The archives were uncovered in France’s Ministry of War Veterans in 1991 by Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, who has played a major role in forcing France to come to terms with its wartime past.
“The index concerns about 70,000 Jews, most of them in the Paris region,” Klarsfeld said, adding that “150,000 Jews were registered with Vichy’s police.”
The index contains records of the first 53 convoys that left France for concentration camps starting in 1941 as well as registers from the transit camps in Drancy, Pithiviers and Beaune la Roland, the notorious way stations for Jews on their way to Auschwitz.
Until Klarsfeld’s discovery, the War Veterans Ministry had long denied that the archives were in its possession.
Last year, President Jacques Chirac became the first French leader to acknowledge Vichy’s role in persecuting Jews. His predecessor, Francois Mitterrand had rejected demands by Jewish groups for a public apology.
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