Lyon (AFP)
The Izieu Memorial Museum (Ain) presents on Friday a re-emerged and fully restored version of a photographic album of the Nuremberg trial, on the occasion of a conference devoted to the hearings of the historic international military tribunal.
Taken from oblivion and restored with financial assistance from the United States Consulate in Lyon, this historic document consists of 121 photos taken behind the scenes and during the hearings of the Nuremberg Tribunal, from November 1945 to October 1946.
This leather-bound album was put together by the American organizers of the trial and offered to the eight magistrates who made up the court responsible for trying the highest Nazi officials in the Bavarian town, including the French judge Henri Donnedieu de Vabres.
The libretto, autographed by the seven other American, British and Soviet judges, had disappeared from memory.
But the Donnedieu de Vabres family found the French copy of the album in their family home in the Cévennes.
We can notably see Hermann Goering hiding his face in front of the photographers in the courtroom, then surprised in the middle of a meal between two sessions alongside Hitler's designated successor Karl Dönitz and the "banker" of the Reich Walther Funk .
View taken on October 13, 2021 of a copy held by the University of Lyon 3 of a restored photographic album of the Nuremberg trial, which will be presented at the Izieu Memorial Museum PHILIPPE DESMAZES AFP
The magistrate's family chose to entrust its restoration to the Izieu Memorial Museum, located in the ultimate refuge of 44 Jewish children and their six educators, rounded up and deported in April 1944 by order of the Gestapo of Lyon, then ordered by Klaus Barbie.
"This donation takes on a deep meaning in Izieu. Klaus Barbie's telex claiming the roundup of Izieu's children was produced at the Nuremberg trial by Edgar Faure. This irrefutable evidence of a crime against humanity then applied to the trial Barbie, in Lyon in 1987 ", explains to AFP Dominique Vidaud, director of the Andinese memorial museum.
This donation is accompanied by the transfer of the personal archives of Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, including eighteen volumes of the official reports of the Nuremberg trial.
"The resurgence of the Nuremberg album and the transfer of these archives open up new perspectives for university research, which strengthens the vocation of the Izieu memorial to allow contemporary and living work on memory", Mr. Vidaud.
(left to right) Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess and Joachim von Ribbentrop at the Nuremberg trials.
Photo taken on October 13, 2021 of a copy held by the University of Lyon 3 of a restored photographic album of the trial, which will be presented at the Izieu Memorial Museum PHILIPPE DESMAZES AFP
During the Friday conference organized on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the end of the trial, historians will retrace the paths of magistrates Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, Robert Falco and Delphin Debenest, members of the French delegation.
International researchers and lawyers will also come back to the complex genesis of international jurisdiction during these debates, which will be broadcast live on the memorial's website (www.memorializieu.eu).
© 2021 AFP