French Police & Anti-Semitism - New Files Released

"They came for the Muller family early one morning in July 1942. Along with thousands of other Jews, nine-year-old Annette, her younger brother and her mother were marched at gunpoint out of their Parisian apartment block and crammed into buses which took them on a five-hour drive to an internment camp 60 miles south.
There everybody waited, unsure of what their fate would be, until one day in August when everyone was ordered to assemble in the middle of the camp where they were told that all children under 12 were to be ‘sent east’ to work.
Unsurprisingly, the announcement caused terrible distress and panic, as the mothers refused to let go of their children. The guards started to prise them apart, using rifle butts, truncheons, and powerful hoses. Worse, the guards tore off the women’s clothing as they searched for valuables.
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‘There was wild scuffling, shouts, weeping and screams of pain,’ Annette recalled. ‘Then there was a great silence. On one side, hundreds of children and on the other side, the mothers and some older boys and girls.’
Annette and her brother would never see their mother again. Along with tens of thousands of other Jews from France, Madame Muller would meet her end in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Such stories from occupied Europe during the war are horrifically common and when we envisage such scenes, the guards are typically German SS troops. In this instance, however, the guards were not German, nor even members of the SS.
Instead, they were French, wearing the uniform of the Gendarmerie — the police. Instead of protecting their own people, the French police were in fact sending them to their deaths.
Although it has long been known that French police collaborated with the Nazis during the Occupation, the extent to which they did their conquerors’ dirty work has never been truly appreciated.
But now, thanks to the imminent release by the Paris police department of some 250,000 digitised files, the full story of how the police assisted not only in the Holocaust, but also in fighting the French Resistance, can finally be told.
In addition, a new exhibition at the National Archives in Paris, simply called Collaboration: 1940-1945 would further suggest that the French are finally coming to terms with one of the darkest periods of their history.
This week, Madonna dramatically compared modern France to Nazi Germany. Speaking out against anti-Semitism, she said of France: ‘It was a country that embraced everyone and encouraged freedom in every way, shape or form — artistic expression of freedom. That’s completely gone, the level of intolerance is scary.’
Speaking out: Madonna told a French radio station that intolerance against Jews in Europe had reached 'an all-time high'
She may have a point but in comparison to what we now know went on in World War II, today’s events must surely pale in comparison, for the extraordinary picture that emerges from both the archive and the exhibition gives the strong impression that the French effectively ‘occupied’ themselves.
In fact, the police were so effective at doing the Germans’ bidding that the Nazis were able to control a country of 30 million people with just 30,000 soldiers, police, and officials.
As the head of the German Security Police in France, Helmut Knochen, observed, it would have been impossible for him to have done his job without the assistance of the French police, which numbered 120,000 — a vast number compared to the mere 2,000 German police posted to France.
And furthermore, what made the police such an effective tool of the Nazi occupiers was that many of those the Germans wanted them to target, such as Jews and communists, were those the French police had already been pursuing throughout the Thirties."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2982030/Is-Madonna-right-singer-says-France-anti-semitic-Nazi-Germany-newly-unearthed-police-files-reveal-true-horror-wartime-persecution-Jews.html#ixzz3TcdqNRQ3