France – The only known photographs of French Resistance fighters facing a Nazi firing squad at an execution site on the outskirts of Paris have gone on display for the first time.
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The three pictures were taken by a German soldier who hid in the bushes on February 21, 1941 and secretly captured the executions at Mont-Valerien.
Despite more than 1,000 ‘hostages’ being killed at the site, it was thought no pictures existed as Nazis prohibited the taking of photographs for fear they would be used as anti-propaganda
Taken only months after the French surrendered to the Nazis in June 1940, members of the Resistance fought the Nazi occupation as well as the collaborationist Vichy regime.
After four years of occupation, France was liberated by Allied forces in August 1944.
The photographs are being permanently exhibited at Mont-Valerien – the 19th-century fort in a Paris suburb that was the Nazis’ largest execution site in France during the Second World War.
The condemned, who were captured in revenge for the death of German soldiers and tried by military tribunals, were driven in lorries to the remote fort in western Paris and held in a chapel before they were executed.
Some scrawled their final messages on the walls of the chapel, which have recently been restored.
Men were blindfolded and tied to wooden poles in a clearing before being shot by a group of 60 soldiers. Women were usually sent to Germany and beheaded.
Clemens Ruter, who provided a motorcycle escort to the prisoners, took the photographs with his Minox camera.
The non-commissioned soldier never told anyone about the shots and the film was left in the camera for 40 years.
Shortly before his death, while on a pilgrimage, Roman Catholic Mr Ruter confided his secret to a fellow German pilgrim.
Mr Ruter’s confidante worked for the Franz Stock association, who developed the negatives, although the pictures were not made public until France’s most famous Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfield took an interest in those members of the Resistance captured in the photographs.
Mr Klarsfield identified those being executed as members of a network led by Missak Manouchian, a French-Armenian poet who ran an anti-Nazi force in Paris.
Yimach Shmom! It’s a shame only 60 yrs later and someone better hide in those bushes again.
Let us never forget what the human race is capable of – we may be one of the most intelligent species on this planet but we are by far the cruelest.
We shall never forget them .
who knows what other pictures did surface as of yet, like from jews ect. maybe kept under lock by america.
Who needs pictures . i can describe the most barbarous atrocities i witnessed with my own eyes . They are more vivid in its minutest horrors than any leica -camera could have captured .On second thought ,why bother .
Go to the Spielberg Film Archives online to see the most horrifying films ever. I have never been the same since watching a video of a firing squad shooting a group of Yidden. A girl gets up after getting shot and a Nazi YMSVZ takes out a pistol and shoots her again. I pray for all those harugai Kadoshim and that precious girl who could have been any of our relatives. May HKBH comfort their neshamas and give them a norahdik chelek of Olam HaBah in Gan Eden M’Kedem. Amen.
#2 WE ?? u compare yourself to these ymach shmom behaymos??????