PARIS — Hundreds of thousands of files on members of the French resistance, communists and Jews hunted by the collaborationist Vichy government in France during World War II are now accessible to the public.

The French government has opened police and legal archives, allowing free access to documents from the regime that collaborated with the Nazi German occupiers between 1940 and 1944, as well as to investigative documents from the post-liberation government.

Records stored in a temperature-controlled room in Paris could contain disturbing accounts of Nazi collaboration during WWII. The Associated Press

The order, which was signed on Dec. 24 and came into force Monday, will not only help the work of historians. It will also bring more citizens into the archives’ lecture rooms to learn about what happened to their ancestors during World War II.

For instance, families of people arrested under the Vichy regime as well as descendants of collaborationists prosecuted after the war will be able to consult police investigation documents and proceedings of military courts.

WWII archives are kept in different places all around France, depending on their geographical and administrative origin. Many were already available to researchers, but they first had to file complex request forms. Now, anyone can come into a reading room, ask for a document and get it “within a minute or 15 minutes, just the time needed to go and get it from the shelves,” says the chief of Paris police archives, Pascale Etiennette.

Marshal Philippe Petain’s collaborationist government, which signed an armistice with the German occupiers in 1940, remains a sensitive issue in France. Some French people supported Petain’s government while others engaged in the Resistance movement led by General Charles De Gaulle.

Historians don’t expect any major revelations, since the period has already been extensively studied, but hope to gain a more detailed understanding of events.

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