Secret French report brands Hitler as 'German Mussolini'
Yellowing documents part of archive kept in Paris mansion
Paris : A rarely seen French secret report on Adolf Hitler is among thousands of documents on 1920s Germany that are about to emerge from obscurity as part of a major overhaul of the French National Archives.
The yellowed, hand-written note from 1924 features a photograph of Hitler in a suit and tie, sporting his trademark side-parting and moustache. It is part of a treasure trove that had been gathering dust in a Paris mansion for decades.
Cunning demagogue
"He is not an idiot but rather a very cunning demagogue," says the note on Hitler by an anonymous agent, seen by Reuters.
The agent presents Hitler as "the German Mussolini" and notes that he runs paramilitary groups "of the fascist type", but does not raise any particular alarm about the man who would go on to lead Nazi Germany and launch the Second World War.
Part of a huge archive from the period when French troops occupied part of Germany after the First World War, the Hitler report was stored separately from the rest of the papers in a metal cabinet where France keeps its most important documents.
Built in 1791 during the French Revolution, it contains 800 pieces including the diary of beheaded King Louis XVI, the last letter written by his doomed wife Queen Marie-Antoinette, Napoleon's will and France's successive constitutions.
Seen only by a very privileged few, the Hitler report has now been extracted from the cabinet and will soon be available for historians to study, along with tens of thousands of other papers dating back to the French occupation of Germany.
Those documents were transported to Paris in 1930 and have been stored ever since in the bowels of the National Archives, housed in a magnificent early 18th century residence in the heart of the historic Marais district.
The papers, which include everything from spy reports on politicians to details of German industrial techniques that the French hoped to appropriate, were not analysed or indexed. As a result, they remained hidden in more than 6,000 boxes.
