Long known as the ”Bureau central de renseignements et d'action collection”, the archives of the French special services during the Second World War arrived at the Château de Vincennes following long tribulations, passing from hand to hand and from one shore to the other of the Channel and the Mediterranean. Finally donated to the Army Historical Service by the Directorate General of External Security in December 1999, and undergoing classification work since 2013, the archives had actually been deposited in secure premises in Vincennes for longer than that.

In his pioneering book France in Hitler's Europe, the German historian Eberhard Jäckel recalled a conversation during which Pierre Laval, ”one day when a German negotiator indicated that the Reich was an authoritarian state, replied, very much to the point: 'And how many authorities!'.” Because there were a multitude of services of German repression in occupied France. Their organisation and prerogatives evolved over time.

From the BCRA to the DGSE, from yesterday to today… The French intelligence services have successfully evolved to adapt to new missions. While this has meant reforming the organisations to keep them efficient, the principles that guide them have remained intact. Subject to political power, the intelligence services have seen their capacities evolve to ensure they can carry out their missions and face an ever-changing sequence of threats. The organisational principles and strategic choices are still there, but the resources deployed and the missions themselves have changed. Evolutions in France's geopolitical context and the challenges it faces, the decolonisation process, the end of the Cold War, technological revolutions and the development of terrorist threats have led the Service to keep changing in response to security needs. At the same time, the choice to conserve a single, integrated structure has been constantly confirmed, and continues to offer France a high level of clandestine obstruction and operation.

Only in thriller novels do the Nazis live under the threat of discovery, trembling at every creak of the door in far-flung Patagonia. The reality is quite different. Apart from the arrest of Eichmann, which was organised and executed by the Israeli services, the actions against Nazi criminals were taken based on files, not clandestine manhunts. Following a painstaking inquiry, the brutal Kurt Lischka was confronted with his crimes and condemned at the Cologne trial in 1980.

On 30 August 1944, Henri Chamberlin alias ”Henri Lafont” and several of his accomplices of the ”French Gestapo of Rue Lauriston” were arrested in Seine-et-Marne. The BCRA had been accumulating information on the man who had reigned over the Paris underworld during the Occupation for over three years. The file conserved by the SHD tells us much about the hidden aspects of the case, and sheds new light on the process that led to the execution of one of the most feared individuals of the period.

The deaths of three members of a resistance network in July-August 1944 intrigued the police. The investigation, conducted a few months later by agents of Commissioner Clot's ”special section”, revealed the strange role played by the thugs of the ”Gestapo of Rue Lauriston” and certain agents of the ”Marco Polo” network.

After the French Communist Party (PCF) joined the ”armed struggle”, the occupier reinforced its policy of repression. The judicial process became more radical. From summer 1941, arrested members of communist armed groups were judged by German military tribunals and sentenced, usually to death. This was the context in which the trial of the young communist irregulars of the 11th arrondissement took place.

The German services had been on the trail of senior Armée secrète officers since spring 1943. The investigation quickly took them to the La Muette metro station and to Caluire as they reached the top of the ”shadow army”'s leadership structure. After the arrests of General Delestraint, the head of the AS, and Joseph Gastaldo, the deputy chief of staff and head of the 2nd bureau, in Paris on 9 June 1943, the telegram from Claude Bouchinet-Serreules to London reveals the scale of the latest haul by the SIPO-SD and the Abwehr twelve days later, in Caluire.

In the national memory, Klaus Barbie has two faces. From the Occupation to the 1970s, he was the man who decapitated the French Resistance by arresting Jean Moulin on 21 June 1943. Between 1970 and 1980, he was seen more as a cog in the Final Solution in France, who had deported thousands of Jews from France, including the children of the Izieu children's home, a crime against humanity for which he was finally tried and condemned in 1987.

Le Gouillonneys, mine clearers on the dunes, 1946. © Ministry of equipment

Lorient. ©Private coll. - Dunkirk, 20/07/1945. - Brest, Visit of General de Gaulle, 26/07/1945. ©ECPAD