When French police looks back at its past. An experiment in adult education.
(Mémorial de la Shoah – Paris, France)
25% of the Jews living in France before WWII have been deported to their death in Nazi exterminationcamps. Most of them had been arrested, and delivered to the German occupyer, by French policemen and gendarmes. Thus the question is raised of the latter‘s attitude in the field, either implementing the orders and thus contributing, probably without prior knowledge, to a crime of genocide, or disobeying and contributing to the survival of 3/4 of the Jewish population in the country. The Prefecture de Police of Paris, which was the main instrument of the round-ups, reluctantly opened its archives to historical research.
Eventually, it decided to organize, in partnership with the Memorial de la Shoah, half-a-day training sessions for all the new policemen it recruited (about 11000 to this day). A two-day complementary program has been included on a national level in the training of the commissars. Survivors oft he camps and academic specialists have been associated to those encounters. The French gendarmerie still has to imagine something equivalent about its own past.
