Find at a flea market: Secret pictures of the Nazis in Paris | EUROtoday

Twice a 12 months, at Easter and mid-August, collectors from throughout France meet for a weekend within the southern French city of Barjac. Located away from all railway traces and within the northernmost tip of the Département du Gard, they’re attracted by the “brocante de Barjac”, an open-air combination of antiques truthful and flea market. This brings with it the promise of small and enormous finds; and anybody who has learn the most recent e-book by the French journalist Philippe Broussard will even consider that the spectacular ones are potential.

In August 2020, Stéphanie Colaux, documentary filmmaker and collector of historic pictures, discovered an album with virtually 4 hundred pictures in Barjac. They present Paris occupied by the Wehrmacht and permit a beforehand virtually unknown view of the years between 1940 and 1942. Despite all prohibitions, a anonymous photographer got down to systematically doc the German occupation together with his digicam.

Broussard devotes the biggest a part of his e-book to the gradual decision of the thriller that he already presents within the title: Who is the photographer to whom the visible reminiscence of occupied France owes such an essential new addition? The query is clear as a result of the unknown individual was not content material with the dangerous hunt for photos within the Parisian city space.

The prints of the pictures had been fastidiously numbered on the again and captioned with biting feedback. In this fashion, an archive was created that dates and describes the captured conditions, typically right down to the minute. These feedback go away little doubt in regards to the injustice of the occupation – “les Fritz”, because the Germans are often referred to as right here, are proven within the pictures as ruthless masters of the scenario.

In the very first sentence of the e-book, Broussard makes a shocking confession: he would not truly know a lot about pictures, and all of the technical elements even appear a little bit unusual to him. But the next chapters present much more how a lot the investigative journalist, who has labored as a reporter for numerous magazines and newspapers for many years, understands thorough analysis.

Readers can participate in a meticulously described seek for clues to make this spectacular, but nameless supply converse. For 4 years, largely below the tough circumstances of the pandemic, Broussard carried out the basic enterprise of all historic analysis: he researched archives, carried out interviews with up to date witnesses and descendants, wrote lots of of emails, and, final however not least, leafed by means of previous tackle and phone books.

It is not possible to not discover that Broussard enjoys stylizing these on a regular basis analysis strategies right into a detective story. But it is not simply the gripping report, written like against the law novel, that proves him proper, however above all of the end result on the finish of his years of analysis. Where precisely was the unknown photographer in a position to get his movie materials on such a big scale? And the place might it’s developed and withdrawn with out hazard? Was it truly conceivable that this occurred in an improvised darkroom at residence? Broussard’s analysis ultimately led him to Boulevard Haussmann and there to the posh division retailer Printemps. Raoul Minot had labored right here as a saleswoman for girls’s clothes since 1911 earlier than being promoted to division supervisor. Equally essential, nonetheless, is that Minot was a passionate newbie photographer.

Broussard vividly describes the cosmos of the division retailer as a spot of on a regular basis resistance in opposition to the German occupation. In this fashion, Minot’s systematic photographic documentation may be understood as a microhistory of the Resistance. It exhibits a sophisticated interaction between accomplices and supporters. The photographer relied on them to have the ability to take and course of greater than a thousand photos together with his Brownie Kodak at nice danger. Only since Broussard’s analysis has it develop into clear how giant this photographic manufacturing truly was. It has since been expanded to incorporate further archive holdings and new finds.

Unfortunately, solely a very good fifth of the album present in Barjac is reproduced in Broussard’s e-book. Nevertheless, this excerpt additionally makes it comprehensible why these photos precipitated an unlimited stir in France after they had been first revealed. Broussard introduced his analysis intimately for the primary time in a five-part collection of articles revealed in “Le Monde” in the summertime of 2024. It was already clear on the time what’s now confirmed within the considerably expanded model of the e-book: It was notably essential to the reporter to search out the writer of those photos.

In photograph analysis, anonymous flea market finds are additionally known as “orphan images”. In this sense, because of Broussard’s analysis, the photographs are now not orphaned. The excerpted view that his e-book offers of those pictures additionally exhibits {that a} wealthy topic has been gained for future historic and image-critical analysis, which has but to be totally explored.

Minot himself paid for his photographic resistance together with his life. Arrested because of a denunciation, he was deported to Mauthausen, Buchenwald and eventually Flossenbürg in 1943. Although he survived his two-year imprisonment within the focus camps, he was already so weak after his liberation in April 1945 that he died in hospital shortly afterwards. The rediscovery of his pictures additionally goes hand in hand with that of the photographer. Just just a few weeks after the collection of articles appeared in “Le Monde,” Minot was honored by the French state with the title “Mort pour la France.”

Philippe Broussard: „The Unknown Photographer of the Occupation“. Éditions du Seuil, Paris 2025, 304 S., Abb., €27.90.