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These records were consulted in the departmental
archives of Loiret, Indre-et-Loire, Gironde, Pyrénées-Orientates,
Ariège, Haute-Garonne, Bouches-du-Rhône, Alpes-Maritimes, Marne,
Saône-et-Loire, and Rhône.
7. The Drancy master file
The Drancy master file was seized by the investigating judge at our demand
in connection with legal action against several Nazi war criminals.
8.
Other archives seized by French courts
Various archives have been seized by
the courts at our request, in connection with actions initiated in cases
against German criminals, including Brunner, Modest von Korff, and Klaus
Barbie; and French criminals, including Jean Leguay, René Bousquet's
police representative in the Occupied Zone, and Bousquet himself.
One
example was the research problem posed by convoy
77 of July 31, 1944, for which the original
deportation list no longer existed. That convoy included the victims of the
raids Brunner had directed at the UGIF centers for children in Paris from July
21-25, 1944, raids whose full toll I had been trying to reconstruct precisely.
The Veterans Ministry had prepared a data processing list for the convoy, which
was extremely helpful but incomplete. It had the names of those who died, but
not of the 283 survivors. The missing evidence was finally found in the files
of murdered deportees and the records of those who survived, seized by the
investigating judge in connection with the action filed against Brunner in 1988
for crimes against humanity. A new investigation of charges against Brunner
required evidence on his young victims. The investigating judge assigned to the
case and the research section of the National Gendarmerie gave me access to
documents that I had been trying to consult for a long time. As a result, in
1993 I was able to publish an almost definitive account of the personal
history, origins, and the fate of each of the 250 children taken from the UGIF
centers.
The archives of the Marne Department and lists of the region's
deportees and their addresses were obtained because of the case we initiated
against Modest von Korff, former Nazi police chief in the Champagne region. Von
Korff had been headquartered at Chalons-sur-Marne. He was finally tried by the
Bonn Circuit Court in 1988 and acquitted. It could not be proved that he knew
the children he arrested would be killed.
Other documents, such as the
deportation list for convoy 78 from Lyons
on August 11, 1944, were released during the long Barbie affair. When Klaus
Barbie, chief of the Gestapo in Lyons in 1943 and 1944, came to trial the legal
case against him was based heavily on the deaths of the 44 children seized on
his orders in a home in the village of Izieu. As the result of a multi-country
investigation, we found a plaintiff to act on behalf of each child. We
reconstructed the personal history of each child and the painful voyage which
brought him or her to Izieu, and we found a photograph of nearly every one of
them. The Barbie case gave us access to the secret military justice archives on
German war criminals. We also obtained access to the
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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