{"id":30166,"date":"2015-12-30T09:02:30","date_gmt":"2015-12-30T17:02:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/french-public-gets-access-to-archives-of-wwii-regime\/"},"modified":"2015-12-30T09:02:30","modified_gmt":"2015-12-30T17:02:30","slug":"french-public-gets-access-to-archives-of-wwii-regime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/french-public-gets-access-to-archives-of-wwii-regime\/","title":{"rendered":"French public gets access to archives of WWII regime"},"content":{"rendered":"

PARIS \u2014<\/strong> Hundreds of thousands of files on members of the French resistance, communists and Jews hunted by the collaborationist Vichy government in France during World War II are now accessible to the public.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The order, which was signed on Dec. 24 and came into force Monday, will not only help the work of historians. It will also bring more citizens into the archives\u2019 lecture rooms to learn about what happened to their ancestors during World War II.<\/p>\n

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 investigation documents and proceedings of military courts.<\/p>\n

WWII archives are kept in different places all around France, depending on their geographical and administrative origin. 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.<\/p>\n

Now, anyone can come into a reading room, ask for a document and get it \u201cwithin a minute or 15 minutes, just the time needed to go and get it from the shelves,\u201d says the chief of Paris police archives, Pascale Etiennette.<\/p>\n

The decision by the French government to open the archives came in response to a call by French historians, including Gilles Morin, a WWII specialist.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Historians don\u2019t expect any major revelations, since the period has already been extensively studied, but hope to gain a more detailed understanding of events.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s be clear, there won\u2019t be any revolution in what we already know about WWII but we\u2019ll finally have the possibility to work, understand several things, the Franco-German relationships, between Vichy and the collaborationists, the people, the elites,\u201d Morin stressed.<\/p>\n

To the regret of the historians, documents classified as national defense are not covered by the new government order and most of the archives of the French intelligence services regarding the WWII period remain out of reach.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere we have a problem because everything, or almost everything, is top-secret,\u201d historian Francois Le Goarant de Tromelin said.<\/p>\n

He is currently working on the case of Adolphe Rosenthal, a Jewish jeweler murdered in Paris in September 1941 under unclear circumstances.<\/p>\n

Getting access to archives \u201cwill help some families but mainly, it will help them psychologically because it will tell them what really happened,\u201d the historian told the AP while studying the 91-page police report about Rosenthal\u2019s murder dating from October 1941. \u201cSome people, as this man here, have been assassinated but we don\u2019t know why, we don\u2019t know what happened (…) We might know it 70, 80 years.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PARIS \u2014 Hundreds of thousands of files on members of the French resistance, communists and Jews hunted by the collaborationist Vichy government in France during World War II 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":30167,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-30166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30166"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=30166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}