A long-lost file used by the collaborationist French police to turn Jews over to the Nazis for deportation during World War II may soon be transferred to the Memorial Foundation for Unknown Jewish Martyrs here.
The file disappeared after the war and for years French bureaucrats said it was “probably destroyed.”
But Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld discovered it last year, buried in the records of the Ministry for Veterans Affairs. The ministry apparently still used it to check the claims of Jewish former deportees.
The file reflects the zeal with which the collaborationist Vichy regime sought to please its Nazi masters after the fall of France. The file was compiled in 1940, at the initiative of the Vichy government, which issued a variety of anti-Jewish edicts.
Since Klarsfeld unearthed the file, the National Board for Computerized Files, an official advisory body, has recommended that the original should be turned over to the Memorial Foundation, and microfilm copies given to the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center in Paris and to the National Archives.
The government is expected to accept the recommendation.
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