Exhibit Of Photos Showing French Loving Nazi Occupation Causes Embarrassed Outrage
(AFP) - Photos of carefree Parisians lazing in cafes, flocking to cinemas or enjoying a day at the races during the Nazi occupation have sparked embarrassment and outrage in Paris and calls for the exhibit to be shut down.
The 270 unpublished photographs by Andre Zucca, a French photographer who worked for the Nazi propaganda magazine Signal, are billed as the only major collection of colour pictures taken during the four years of the Paris occupation.
The photo exhibit showing women in polka-dot dresses strolling down Paris boulevards and children playing at the Luxembourg gardens is under fire for failing to mention that thousands of Jews were deported and countless other Parisians endured hardship during the 1940-1944 occupation.
A picture of an elderly woman dressed in a black coat emblazoned with the yellow star and a second one of a man also wearing the badge of shame in Paris’ Jewish quarter offer the only hint of Nazi persecution.
The head of cultural affairs at Paris city hall, Christophe Girard, called at the weekend for the exhibit called “Parisians under the Occupation” at the Paris City History Library to be shut down, saying he was “upset” by the photographs.
Zucca’s “outlook shows nothing, or very little, of the reality of the occupation,” said Girard.
But Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe stepped in the fray and said the exhibit would be allowed to continue as scheduled until July after ordering city historians to provide additional information to give visitors a fuller picture.
Visitors are now handed an information sheet, written in French, English and Spanish, explaining that Zucca “has opted for a vision that doesn’t show — or hardly shows — the reality of occupation and its tragic aspects.”
Jean Derens, the director of the library who commissioned the exhibit, said it would amount to censorship to shut down the exhibit and not show what he described as “exceptional works”.
“These photographs are very powerful,” said Derens, who shot back at calls for more detailed descriptions of each photograph to give context. “We need to give information on who took it and when, and then let the viewer take in the photograph.”
The Paris library decided to organise the exhibit after thousands of negatives from Zucca photographs it had purchased in 1986 were digitized, allowing much of the colour of the original works to be restored.
But for Parisian Gilles Perreault, who was caught on film by Zucca as an 11-year-old bespectacled boy, pushing his toy boat on the pond of the Luxembourg gardens, the exhibit shows a “false image” of Paris during those four years.
“Yes I was this easy-going boy who played with his boat, but I was also afraid,” recounted Perreault. “My parents were resistance fighters and I knew what it meant.”
Perreault said the exhibit is silent about the Nazi persecution of Jews and other campaigns of repression as well as the food rationing and poverty that plagued the city.
“I think if young people come to this exhibit and only see these pictures, they will come away with the wrong impression,” he said.
One of the photographs shows a large banner of the Nazi swastika hanging from a building on the boulevards while a sandwich-board sign below offers theatre tickets for sale.
Bevies of Parisian women are shown smiling with their beaus, putting on lipstick or wearing floppy hats at the Longchamp race track, while German officers look on in the background.
More than 10,000 people have flocked to the exhibit since it opened on March 20, most of them over the past days as the controversy over the show heated up.
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So the bitching is about not having pictures about the horrors of occupation? Fair statement to a point, after all, the guy was a shill for Signal, not the Saturday Evening Post. It is kind of strange to be surprised that people made the best of a bad situation and tried to go on with their lives as best they could. If the muzzies take over this country I will still go to work, take my children to the park by day, and plant bombs to slaughter the muzzies by night. Thats what the French did.
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:45 amthis is a falsh trial : actually I saw the report on TV, the mayor of Paris wanted to make an exhibition of a photograph that was a well known photograph during WWII.
At this time there were only black and white films.
He got colors films from the propaganda service, that asked him, in counterpart, to make pics showing how life in Paris was natural and nice.
They weren’t edited nor showed.
The administration still had them in the archives, and thought that would be a good idea to organise an exhibition.
though, the intitulé of the exhibition lacked of preparation, they forgot to say that they were “propaganda” pics, and that they ought to be shown only as historical documents on how the nazys worked out their occupation in France.
April 23rd, 2008 at 9:19 am“the role of Paris” by Goebbels: to be the front of a cultural strategy to win the elite in the “new Europe”. The music should play an important role, “for music lovers, writes Pierre Azema, Goebbels brought orchestras in Paris and heads the most prestigious Reich (…) For the man in the world, every Sunday the music of the Army played in the kiosks of pot pourri of military marches, folk songs and arias from operas, which included listeners. ” As can be seen on some photos of Zucca.”
” generally,the people don’t look look at the Germans. There are two worlds that intersect… people watching in a vacuum (void) I am also struck by the empty streets… Our parents and grandparents have told us they were leaving as little as possible because they were afraid “…
for those who understand french
http://www.rfi.fr/francefr/articles/100/article_65301.asp
André Zucca was also the “Paris-Match” photographer
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:10 amThere were plenty of collaborators to go arond: From Norway, Denmark, Spain, Holland, Belgum, Bosnia, the Ukraine, etc. Here’s a link to a summary of collaborator volunteers who joined the Waffen SS. It will give you a more “fuller picture”.
http://www.gutenberg-e.org/esk01/frames/fesk05.html
As a side note. Who was the most diehard German soldiers in the Battle for Berlin? If you guessed the Muslim and Hilter Youth units, you get a cookie.
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:13 amTo really complete the picture here…one would want to bring up the Russian Partisans, the Yugoslavian partisans, the underground in Greece, Poland, Hungary, Norway, Sweeden, France, Holland and Spain….all of whom rescued downed allied pilots and gave the Nazis holy hell.
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:21 amHere’s the fate of some collaborators:
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:24 amhttp://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/resource/gallery/AfterGal.htm
Dan, to be fair, today we know of all of Hitler’s crimes against civilians, Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and the rest, in the late 30’s and early 40’s we did not. The marketing behind the foreign Waffen SS recruits emphasized anti Bolshevism, this is from a Dutch recruiting poster:”Be a worthy Dutchman, up against Bolshevism!” Many non Germans enlisted to help keep Communism from taking over Europe, Britons and Americans too! They didn’t think they were joining evil organizations, they only found out later that they had. Just because someone was a member of the German Armed Forces doesn’t mean they were responsible for the crimes the same organizations committed. The Holocaust did happen, a very small percentage of Germans and non Germans actually participated.
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:03 pminteresting links, I remarck the percentage of collaborators proportionally to the number of inhabitants pro-country;;; does that explain the actual political frame of the quoted countries ???? !!!!!
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:30 pm@tedders
Quite a few non-Germans joined the Nazi party because the believed in it. Not just to fight communism, but because they themselves were also anti-semites.
To say that the anti-semetic views that had been boiling over in Europe since the late 1800’s weren’t also a reason for joining the nazis is just plain ignoring history.
There were plenty of true believers in the collaborators ranks.
Your view is pretty much the same as what German citizens used to say about the death camps that they lived next to. Oh we didn’t know what that smell was? Yeah sure you didn’t.
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:31 pmsorry to abond in tedders views :
I remember while I was still in high school, a friend and I were walking in our small city after the courses ; a man that looked like fifty years old and dresed like a SDF (sans domicile fixe : without a permanent home) accoasted us : first we thought that were a kind of perverse, and we prepared for running away; when he said, “don’t be afraid, I am a man that just returned from jail” and showed us his papers, (he wanted to ask us where was the police station, he had to register each week in a police bureau) ; “I was prisonner because I chose the wrong side of the army : he fight for the Vichy government, therefore for the germans and was a captain from the military academy, therefore an educated person. he was telling his story : he fought against the communists, that was his agenda. he would still do it if the situation was opportune…
so I guess that very few anti-semits were in the army, they prefered the milicias, that could directly harmed the Jewishes and steel them.
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:51 pmHey Franchie !!! Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of anti Semites in Germany and Europe at the time (an understatement if there ever was one!), there still are! I’m just saying that just because you were part of the German war machine does not mean you were anti Jewish or persecuted innocents, Hell Goering himself was raised by a Jewish step dad, Albert his brother did as much as he could using his brothers position to help oppressed people (http://www.auschwitz.dk/albert.htm). Believe it or not there were many German Armed Force members who were Jewish or had Jewish lineage, thousands of them, check out, “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers” by Bryan Mark Rigg, my copy is autographed by the author! It’s the untold story of men of Jewish descent in the German military during Hitler’s time. I’m not saying they were a majority, they weren’t, I’m only saying that there were plenty of Germans and non Germans who would have been disgusted at what was happening to non combatants had they known about it. The Hitler regime only broadcast the positive and neglected to tell much of the truth, I thought everyone already knew that!
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:21 pmtedders, I wasn’t mentioning the germans, but the french perspective ;
I think there are many things that we still ignore on WWII, cause of the covering of shame that followed the discovering of the concentration camps, people couldn’t explain why they fell in such a tragic trap ; most ofwhat we know about it come from American and Israel sources, except for the specialists ; if the subject isn’t one of our favorites then we dodn’t digg in it.
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:37 pmDan, I don’t believe very many people became NAZI’s just because of their anti Semitism, certainly some did but only a tiny minority. The end of World War I set the stage for WWII, some of the conflicts dating from then are continuing today. WWII started out of German discontent with the Treaty of Versailles, Adolf Hitler was able to gain popularity and power because of that and his chameleon ability to tell a crowd what they wanted to hear(sounds like Obama to me!). WWII was in part a continuation of the power struggle that was never fully resolved by the First World War; in fact, it was common for Germans in the 1930s and 1940s to justify acts of international aggression because of perceived injustices imposed by the victors of the First World War. The basic adherents of the NSDAP philosophy at the time came not from anti Semitism but from the defeat in WWI, hyper inflation, the myth that WWI German leaders had stabbed the army in the back and mostly the rise of Communism.
“To say that the anti-semetic views that had been boiling over in Europe since the late 1800’s weren’t also a reason for joining the nazis is just plain ignoring history.”
Go back and read what I wrote, I never said that. Anti Semitism was going on long before that, read some of Martin Luther’s thoughts on Jews. Religious anti Semitism was the usual type through the 19th century, it morphed into political anti Semitism in the 20th century and we all know the result of that, we see it today in Iran and Gaza.
“Your view is pretty much the same as what German citizens used to say about the death camps that they lived next to. Oh we didn’t know what that smell was? Yeah sure you didn’t.”
How many German citizens do you think lived near the death camps? Not many because all the death camps were far in in the east, to keep them away from the prying eyes of the citizenry who Hitler knew weren’t as radical as he was. Certainly some Germans who weren’t supposed to know about the plight of the Jews did know but it’s not like they could take out a page in Der Sturmer and announce what they knew. Your attempts to brush all German civilians and combatants as Jew hating death camp operators is simply not based on fact. All those atrocities did happen, all German military did not participate in them. Knowledge is better than ignorance; history is better than myth.
It is also a matter of history that when Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps, he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead. He did this because he said in words to this effect:
‘Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.
Eisenhower did that, quite simply because the vast majority of German citizens simply did not have the knowledge of what their leaders had done.
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:00 pm