
From Monday, the public can access the police and legal documents from the Vichy regime's collaboration with the German invasion from 1940-44.
A culture of secrecy surrounds this period in France's history, when the government worked with the Nazis in France to round up and deport Jews.
The archives had been sealed until today. Documents relating to the period from September 1939 to May 1945 can be accessed. More than 200,000 documents have been made public.
When Germany invaded France in 1940, the two countries signed an armistice. The German army occupied northern and western France, while the French collaborationist Vichy government ruled the rest of the country. The Vichy regime worked with the Germans and introduced anti-Jewish laws, banning Jews from public life and restricting the jobs they could have.
The Vichy government introduced Aryanization in 1941 to take assets from Jews, who were then sent to detention camps. The first deportation saw more than 1,000 Jews go to Auschwitz on March 27, 1942.
German officials and French police rounded Jews up and separated children from their families, sending the adults to camps first.
The archives will reveal the names of those who betrayed the Jews and sent them to their deaths, and include documents on the prosecution of war criminals by the French government after the war.
In 2009, France's Council of State said the Vichy government held responsibility for the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews and that the Germans were not solely to blame.
Before then, the French had refused to acknowledge their role in the Holocaust.



Just take note how the stooges for the system still did what they were told . Defenseless they were slaughtered by their own gendarmerie. and of course France was such a civilized society wasn't it? America too is becoming civilized thank to the overthrow of the Bill of Rights by traitors. Just remember that when they come for you, when you see them coming for the neighbors, when people begin to disappear whom aren't even homeless.
There's a lesson in there somewheres for the aware.