French President Jacques Chirac has laid a wreath for Holocaust victims at the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Chirac made the trip last week while in Germany for a French-German summit.
The visit to Buchenwald was not the French president’s first gesture toward the Jewish community.
Shortly after taking office in 1995, he became the first French president to acknowledge his country’s complicity in the persecution of French Jews during World War II.
A renewed debate in France about collaboration with the Nazis is expected to take place next month with the onset of the trial of former Vichy government official Maurice Papon.
Papon, now 87, is accused of having deported more than 1,500 Jews, many of them children, from the Bordeaux area when he was secretary-general of the region during the war.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
