Germans, auxiliaries and collaborators

Germans, auxiliaries, collaborators: there is no shortage of terms to describe the enemy and those who worked for them. All are omnipresent in the special services archives: every piece of information about dangerous and harmful individuals, whether of French, German or other nationality, was recorded in several thousand individual files. That intelligence, which began to be collected from the outbreak of the war, came from a wide variety of sources: open documents (press), information from correspondents, reports from the networks, interrogation reports, inquiries, seized documents, etc. The services also took an interest in the collaborationist movements and organisations, hence laying hands on a set of archives of the Legion of French Volunteers (LVF), including member and applicant files. After the war, they would similarly seize and exploit the German archives, such as the files of Abwehr agents in Paris or the archives of the German consulate in Marseille. The latter provided exceptional intelligence that bore witness to the daily collusion of some French people with the occupier: requests for intervention, requests for passes, denunciations, information, applications for travel permits to Germany, etc.