Occupation police records go online
Major project to digitise police archives from occupied France - including details of Gestapo and Special Brigade work
EVERY police document from France's time under Nazi occupation is to be digitised and published online.
Thousands of cardboard boxes of documents currently stored in a basement in the Musée de la Police in Paris are to be scanned and uploaded to a website.
They include every police daybook from the period under German occupation, from 1940 to 1944, plus details of arrests, fines, notes from questioning and official reports.
The documents will shed further light on the Gestapo's work in France and the role of the Brigade Spéciale, the force responsible for tracking down resistance workers, dissidents and Jews.
The archives also include full records from the épuration légale, the wave of official trials for collaborators following the fall of the Vichy regime in 1944.
The Paris préfecture de police will begin the major operation to digitise the records in the coming weeks.
It will take several years and the scanned documents will be published in batches from 2015, as they are legally protected for 75 years.
The final batch should therefore be ready by late 2019, to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of France.
As well as improving transparency, the project will also help preserve the archive - the paper used by the police during the Occupation was of a poor quality and some of the documents are beginning to fade.
Photo: Leader of Occupied France Marshall Philippe Petain meets Adolf Hitler in Montoire-sur-le-Loir in October 1940.
