Ordinary people were eager to help gendarmes

Auschwitz. She was effectively murdered by her countrymen.

The most infamous round-up was undoubtedly that known as ‘La Grande Rafle’ — the Great Raid of July 1942 — in which nearly 13,000 Jewish men, women and children were arrested by the French police.

They were taken to the Velodrome d’Hiver, where there were only six lavatories between them. For five days, the Jews were held without food, after which they were sent to internment camps, where the children, such as young Annette Muller, were separated from their parents.

In total that year, some 42,000 Jews were sent t o Germany, including 6,000 children, most of whom either died en route, or were gassed.

As if the complicity of the police needed any more emphasis, the men guarding the trains were not Germans but French gendarmes.

After the war, the Free French made some attempt to punish some of the guilty men but the French leader Charles de Gaulle was keen to promote a myth that the police were not institutionally collaborationist and that it was more a case of rotten apples than an entirely rotten system.

As a result, many who had spied on, tortured, killed and deported their countrymen were left to continue in their jobs, and to receive their pensions when they retired.

Because of this lack of will to accept this terrible reality, France has kept its dark wartime years just that — dark.

Thanks to the release of the massive police archive, the country will finally be forced to acknowledge its shame and will be able to trace the source of the undercurrents, identified by Madonna this week, that still flow through French society today.