“I was not aware of the presence of this bust,” Senate president Gerard Larcher is quoted as having told reporters.
By World Israel News Staff
The French Senate said on Wednesday that it was investigating the discovery of a bust of Hitler, from the era of the Nazi occupation of Paris, in the cellar of the upper house of parliament, reports AFP, a French news agency.
The French daily Le Monde has been credited for revealing “that the 35-centimeter-high bust had been found along with a Nazi flag measuring two by three meters in the vault of the Senate.”
The newspaper is said to have launched an investigation after hearing “rumors” that the bust and “other traces of the Nazi occupation during the Second World War still remained in the Senate’s store-rooms 75 years after the Liberation of Paris,” writes The Telegraph.
“I was not aware of the presence of this bust,” Senate president Gerard Larcher is quoted as having told reporters, adding that he had ordered a thorough inventory of all the objects housed in the cellar.
“Between 1940 and 1944 the stately Senate palace in the Luxembourg Gardens was occupied by the Nazi Luftwaffe command staff for the Western front,” notes AFP, adding that “it was liberated by Allied forces and French Resistance members on August 25, 1944, after a week of fighting.”
Paris fell to Nazi Germany on June 14, 1940, a month after the German Wehrmacht stormed into France. Eight days later, France signed an armistice agreement with the German authorities.
A puppet French state was set up with Vichy declared as its capital.
Elsewhere, however, General Charles de Gaulle and the Free French kept fighting and the Resistance rose up in occupied France to resist Nazi and Vichy rule.