Report: List of French who collaborated with Nazis to be published

Thousands of French citizens who collaborated with the Nazis during the World War Two will be exposed when police reports from the 1940s are finally made public and published online, the Daily Telegraph reported Wednesday.

According to the British daily, the details of the collaborators have been kept hidden in cardboard boxes in the basement of the police museum in Paris.

But now, the report said, all of the files - which include information passed on to the Nazis by those who lived during the occupation of 1940 to 1944 - will be scanned and published online.

The Telegraph said the plan to reveal the names of collaborators - many of whom have successfully covered up their wartime work - follows a dramatic ruling last year in France’s highest court, which found that Nazi officials did not force the French to betray their fellow citizens, and that anti-Semitic persecution was carried out willingly.

The released archive will also shed new light on the work of the Gestapo across France, the report said, adding that the files will clarify the role of the Brigade Speciale, which tracked down resistance fighters and other enemies of the Nazi regime.

At least 77,000 Jews were deported to their deaths from French transit camps between 1942 and the end of German occupation, in December 1944. Of these, around a third were French citizens and more than 8,000 were children under 13.

According to the Telegraph, in 1995, then President Jacques Chirac spoke for the first time about France’s responsibility for the deportation of Jews, saying, “The criminal folly of the occupiers was seconded by the French, by the French state."

The report said the Vichy government not only helped exterminate Jews but murdered thousands of other “undesirables” including socialists, homosexuals and gypsies, and some Frenchmen joined the German army. Its soldiers were among those who fought for Hitler to the last, right up until the final Battle for Berlin.

The British newspaper said the material from 1940 will be published in 2015, with the subsequent documents to follow over the next four years.