France eases access to sensitive WWII archives
PARIS— Hundreds of thousands of files on members of the French resistance, communists and Jews hunted by the collaborationist Vichy government in France during the Second World War are now accessible to the public. The French government has opened police and legal archives, allowing free access to documents from the regime that collaborated with the Nazi German occupiers between 1940 and 1944, as well as to investigative documents from the post-liberation government.
The order, which was signed on Dec. 24 and came into force Monday, will help the work of historians and bring more citizens into the archives’ lecture rooms to learn about what happened to their ancestors during the Second World War.
For instance, families of people arrested under the Vichy regime as well as descendants of collaborationists prosecuted after the war will be able to consult police documents and proceedings of military courts.
Second World War archives are kept in different places all around France. Many were already available to researchers, but they first had to file complex request forms and it could take months before they got an answer.
Now, anyone can come into a reading room, ask for a document and get it “within a minute or15 minutes, just the time needed to go and get it from the shelves,” says the chief of Paris police archives, Pascale Étiennette.
Marshal Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist government, which signed an armistice with the German occupiers in 1940, remains a sensitive issue in France. Some French people supported Pétain’s government while others engaged in the resistance movement led by General Charles de Gaulle.
The decision by the French government to open the archives came in response to a call by French historians, including Gilles Morin, a Second World War specialist.
“Many people who were doing research about their father or grandfather who had been deported for example, as we often see, were blocked by these administrative obstacles,” he said.
Historians don’t expect any major revelations, since the period has already been extensively studied, but hope to gain a more detailed understanding of events.