Father (”abbé”) Blanc, born on 21 June 1903 in Maillane (Bouches-du-Rhône), the former curate of Sorgues in Vaucluse and La Capelette in Marseille, managed to assemble a small mixed team of resistance members at the beginning of 1943. The special services documents about the Blanc case illustrate very precisely the methods of infiltration, investigation and then repression used against the Resistance.

The special services archives include documents discovered by the occupation troops in Germany after the end of the war. Among them are several hundred individual files in the names of French men and women, civilians and soldiers, prepared by section III F of the Abwehr in Paris. These agents helped the Abwehr to monitor and penetrate resistance organisations and the enemy special services. They were commonly known as V-Männer (Vertrauensmänner) or ”trusted men”.

The career of Hans Sommer, from the SS to the Stasi via the German army and the SD, illustrates a clear fact: German agents were very well trained. Real intelligence professionals, several of them recycled their experience after the war by working for intelligence agencies, which were always looking for talent to exploit.

The type of document presented here is quite exceptional. While its author wanted to produce a work of humour, he had no idea that his caricatures would serve to expose some of the Sicherheitsdienst agents in Metz and their French auxiliaries, the very same who had dealt heavy blows against the Resistance in Moselle.

”The Gestapo”! The Nazi political police generally sums up our vision of the German agents who operated in occupied France. And yet they came from many backgrounds, and many were a long way from our usual representations of them. First of all, very few members of the Gestapo were sent to occupied France, where repression was mainly the responsibility of the military administration and their rural police, the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP).

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.