PARIS (AFP).- Never-before-seen photos going on display in Paris this week shine a light on a dark moment in France's role in rounding up Jews to send to Nazi death camps during World War II.
The "green ticket round-up" was first carried out in Paris on May 14 and 15, 1941, with more than 6,000 foreign-born Jews summoned to town halls across the city for what was billed as routine registration.
Instead, the 3,747 men who showed up were arrested by the French authorities and shipped to camps south of Paris. Thousands more were rounded up in the following months.
They were held there for a year before being deported to the Auschwitz death camp.
By chance, a stash of 98 photos from the first green ticket round-up, taken by a German soldier on propaganda duty, were recently discovered by the Memorial de la Shoah, the Holocaust Museum of Paris.
Most were taken at the Japy sports hall in the city's 11th arrondissement, where close to 1,000 were arrested, and where the photos are being put on display from Friday, exactly 80 years on.
One shows SS officer Theodor Dannecker, who was in charge of implementing the "Final Solution" in France, alongside French police commissioner Francois Bard in the hall.
Others show couples embracing outside, unaware that they would never see each other again.
"These photos are important because we see the opposite of Nazi propaganda that tried to depict these people as sub-human 'parasites'," said Lior Lalieu-Smadja, who heads the museum's photography department.
Was that a deliberate move by the photographer? "One has to wonder," said Lalieu-Smadja, not least because the photographer was identified as Harry Croner, who was soon after kicked out of the German army after it was discovered that his father was Jewish.
The photos were bought years ago by an antiques dealer in Normandy who had found them at a flea market. He pulled them out of storage recently and contacted the museum, who informed him they were the only known pictures from the infamous round-up.
Little else is known about the photos' journey.
"The only thing we know for certain is that once they were taken, they were sent directly to Berlin. The photographer himself could not keep them, which makes this discovery even more incredible," said Lalieu-Smadja.
© Agence France-Presse
