How France uncovered the mystery of the forbidden photos of Nazi-occupied Paris

PARIS — The search for the unknown photographer began in the summer of 2022, with the discovery of an old photo album at a flea market in the town of Barjac, in the south of France.

Documentary producer Stéphanie Colaux had long enjoyed looking through old photos, haggling over the price of an album and imagining the stories behind the weddings and birthdays of the everyday past.

But this time she found something extraordinary and precious — and it came with a challenge.

“As I flipped through the pages I realized, my God, it’s all scenes of [Nazi] occupied Paris. And I knew I’d found a treasure,” she says. “And then I read the little note in the front. ‘If you find this album,’ it said, ‘take care of it and have the courage to look at it.’ I thought, someone sent a message in a bottle and I just found it.”

Inside the album were 377 black-and-white photos taken between 1940 and 1942. They included street scenes with civilians and ubiquitous German soldiers, going about the business of Occupation near some of the most recognizable landmarks: Montmartre, the Place de la Concorde or the Champs-Elysées.

But there was no indication of who had taken the pictures, and with good reason.

During the German Occupation of France, the Nazis strictly prohibited outdoor photography; taking pictures without an official permit was punishable by imprisonment or death.

Colaux told NPR she felt compelled to learn who had snapped the mysterious photographs. So she called her friend Philippe Broussard, an investigative journalist with the respected daily newspaper, Le Monde.

Together, they embarked on a four-year search for the unknown photographer.

“It's obvious that they were taken by someone who was an amateur, not a professional,” says Broussard, speaking at Le Monde’s headquarters in Paris. “It was someone who I would describe as a kind of shadow behind the back of the Germans. And you have to imagine the risk he was taking.”

Adding to the intrigue were the captions on the back of the photos, written in block letters as if someone were trying to mask their handwriting. Not only was the location, date and exact time of day noted, but there was also often a snarky caption about the German soldiers, whom the photographer referred to, pejoratively, as “Fritzes.”

One read: “After 10 months of Occupation, the Fritzes still can’t find their way around Paris.”

“The words are very sarcastic,” Broussard says. “There is a kind of irony. For example, he says ‘our protectors.’ ”

Julien Blanc, a historian of the Nazi Occupation and French Resistance, says the photographs are different from the propaganda shots taken by Nazi-authorized photographers.

“These photos let us see the real city,” he says. “A city emptied of most of its inhabitants, with deserted streets, no cars. They are hard, gray and sad.”

Broussard’s investigation unearthed more photographs by the same photographer in two other collections.

One collection was at the Museum of National Resistance, outside Paris. The images were donated in 1999 by a man who had found them in his father’s belongings after he died.

Again, however, there was no indication of who the photographer was.

The second batch of photos belonged to a woman who worked at the perfume counter of Paris department store Le Printemps during the war. She had passed the pictures on to her son.

But he had no idea who had taken them either.

As the investigation dragged into its fourth year, Broussard says he felt like a cop confronting a cold case: both discouraged and obsessed.

“There were moments when I would say, ‘Well, it’s time to give up, you’ll never find him.' ”

Broussard kept looking, until a phone call changed everything.

The archivist from Le Printemps store, still a Paris landmark, got in touch with him to say she had found an internal store newsletter from the 1960s with a photo showing German troops using horses to pull cannons through the French capital.

Broussard and Colaux had already seen the same photo in a collection. But the four-page document, meant to be read only by store employees, provided something new: a caption saying the picture had been taken by “our very own Raoul Minot.”

Broussard couldn’t believe it.

“So on that famous Friday, April 12, I will remember all my life, I discovered the name of the man who took the photos,” says Broussard. “His name was Raoul Minot, and he was an employee of Le Printemps. He was not a professional photographer, but someone who decided to take his own camera and to go in the streets of Paris and to take as many pictures as possible.”

Broussard discovered Minot had taken the photos along with his wife, Marthe, who also worked at Le Printemps. They printed them in the store’s professional studio, which explains how they got the hard-to-find photographic paper during wartime rationing.

Broussard says he believes this was all much more than a hobby.

“There was a small group of people who worked together and knew there was a kind of resistance through the pictures,” he says.

But he says among the resistants at the store, there must have been at least one traitor, because in early 1943, someone denounced both Raoul and Marthe Minot in an anonymous letter to the police.

Broussard found a copy of it.

“It was terrible,” he says. “It was written, ‘Oh you should have a look at a couple working at Le Printemps. They are taking photos and developing the film at the store.’”

The police went to their apartment and seized hundreds of photos and a camera, a small Kodak Brownie that, Broussard thinks, Raoul Minot hid under his coat to take pictures. The couple was arrested. Minot was interrogated by the Gestapo and deported to a Nazi concentration camp.

He never came back.

After the war, Marthe Minot searched for him — in vain.

Raoul Minot would have been forgotten in the grand sweep of history until that photo album turned up, and the quest to identify him began.

Broussard says this is more than just a story about about one man taking pictures during World War II.

“It’s the story of a normal man who tried to fight, even if he was in front of the biggest army of that time, in front of colleagues who could be traitors," he says. "It’s the story of courage, of the love of his wife who wanted to know what happened to him. So it’s a universal story.”

Broussard’s four-year investigation appeared as a series of articles in Le Monde in September.

His stories recounting his sometimes frustrating search raised Minot out of obscurity. The late camera-slinging department store employee has now been officially recognized by the French government as a “résistant” — a high national honor — who died for France, bearing witness to the reality of Nazi Occupation.

It was a quest that also led to the discovery of another photo — Minot’s own.

The ID shot was found with the help of a reader of Broussard's articles in Le Monde. It was on a document from France's postwar Ministry for Deported Prisoners and Refugees, and it sketched out the final steps in Minot's life: deportation to Buchenwald, Germany — the site of a Nazi concentration camp — and, after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, a forced "death march" to Eastern Europe, which he somehow survived, before dying in a U.S. military hospital in Cham, Germany.

The file was put together by his wife, Marthe, and helped Broussard piece together the life of a man he described as a "shadow of the shadows" during Occupation.

Minot was born in 1897 into a family of modest means, was a decorated veteran of World War I, and started work at Printemps as a handkerchief salesman. He later became a manager at the store. Records made by the Paris police, collaborating with the Nazi authorities at the time, say he told fellow employees curious about his photography hobby that he had permission to take photos of public scenes and Occupation troops — a lie.

In truth, the Printemps store was used by members of the Resistance to take shelter from the Germans, or organize their escape or that of Jews or communists out of occupied France. It was also a place where some employees viewed the German Occupation with favor: In short, it was the tiny image of France itself.

In the Minot file, his wife mentions he has a small birthmark on his back. All that's seen in the photo is a middle-aged man, father of a teenage girl, his black hair gone white over the years.

Broussard, however, thinks he sees more.

"It's a face that radiates goodness," he says, adding that he is convinced he can see the outline of a slight smile.

Whether it's the smile of a man with something to hide, or maybe nothing to be ashamed of, the archives don't say.

Eleanor Beardsley reported from Paris. Nick Spicer reported from Washington, D.C.