The government of former French president Charles de Gaulle held hundreds of foreigners in an internment camp near Toulouse for up to four years after World War II, according to secret documents.
The papers, part of a cache of 12,000 photocopied illegally by an Austrian-born Jew, reveal the extent to which French officials collaborated with their fleeing Nazi occupiers even as their country was being liberated. They also show that, when the war was over, France went to extraordinary lengths to hide as much evidence of that collaboration as possible.
The documents are in a mass of registers, telegrams and manifests which Kurt Werner Schaechter, an 84-year-old retired businessman, copied from the Toulouse office of France's national archives in 1991. They are uniquely precious: under a 1979 law most of France's wartime archives are sealed for 60 to 150 years after they were written.
"This is an untold story of the dark side of France's liberation 60 years ago," Schaechter, a former musical instruments salesman, said at his home in Alfortville, a Paris suburb.
"French functionaries were involved in a national scandal that continued until 1949: the despicable treatment of allied and neutral civilians interned during the war," he said.
Schaechter's activities -- last year he used some of the papers to try to force the French railway SNCF to admit its responsibility in shipping 76,000 Jews to Nazi death camps -- have infuriated some French historians, who say their privileged access to classified archives has been compromised. But others have backed the campaign for freer access to documents relating to a part of France's past that it has long preferred to ignore.
By far the most awkward of his recently unearthed documents are those that appear to show that Noe camp, south of Toulouse, continued to function secretly for several years after the war. Noe was one of 300 camps set up after 1939 to hold Jews, communists and other "anti-French" militants, Gypsies, common criminals and enemy aliens.
Many of its inmates were quickly shipped out as France was progressively liberated in the summer of 1944. But, said Schaechter, not everyone could be got out in time: "Allied bombing of the railway lines, and intensified fighting on the ground, meant many simply could not be moved."
Officially, the only camps still open after 1945 were a handful housing Romanies, stateless persons and French collaborators. But Schaechter says his documents indicate that a "special section" of Noe was active until at least 1947.
Among the papers is a letter dated Feb. 23, 1946 from the camp's director to the prefect in Toulouse. It seeks to "draw urgent attention" to Noe's "increasingly delicate financial situation," adding that sums seized from those "sheltered" in the camp "are no longer adequate to meet the costs of maintaining it, or of feeding [the inmates]."
Photocopies of the camp's regis-ters from 1945, 1946 and 1947 show that Noe's postwar inmates included citizens of Switzerland, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Brazil and the UK.
Schaechter believes they were not released at the end of the war because it would have been too embarrassing.
The papers also show that officials continued to deport inmates of all nationalities to a near-certain death in Germany even as France was being liberated.
A neat register shows that, in March 1944, Noe contained inmates of 25 nationalities, including three Americans and 13 Britons aged between 21 and 55, and one other Briton aged over 55.
Some of these Britons and Americans "regrouped" in Noe on the eve of the liberation were wealthy residents of the Cote d'Azur.
Many, without doubt, were on the last transport of aliens to leave Noe-Longages station on July 30, 1944. This "transfer" is referred to in a telegram from the camp commandant on Aug. 28 -- two days after a million cheering French men and women thronged the Champs-Elysees in Paris for Charles de Gaulle's victory parade. Schaechter believes most of them ended up in Dachau.
But what happened to those who stayed? Some are marked "transferred." Others were moved in 1947 to Pithiviers or Rivesaltes camps, both officially closed. Some are marked: "Agreed with Casse -- to be lost." And what that means, no one knows.
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