It seems yes, and here's the proof with a vintage stamp, representing the left profile of Hitler - however not his best. Duly cancelled by the French postal services, it makes us wonder if the public company has duly freed itself from its WWII period of Collaboration...
The dates have been hidden so that no employee is charged with negligence.
Why did I do this? First, because it's funny.
Yes it is.
But also to remid us that between 1940 and 1944
Vichy France actively collaborated with the Nazis, thus offering to History the bitter memory of the
roundups of Jews and the
imprisonment of gypsies,
Spanish Republicans and
Resistance fighters. Vichy has of course delegated the production of his base works to public services;
SNCF for example, the French national railway company, organized the departure of convoys for
Auschwitz.
But a lesser known collaboration is that of the
PTT, the French Post, whose direction once purged of all of its Jews and Freemasons ordered to intercept, on behalf of Vichy France and for the Nazis, written or phone communications. This was widely accepted by the employees, even if a fair number of them entered the Resistance.
Enlightened by the dark hours of history and at a time of rising extremisms -
brown or
platinum blonde with an absurd styling - it may seem interesting to wonder if French Public Services have learned their lesson from the past.
Last time I checked, all Jews traveling by train to Germany do so on their own free will, and
Jacques Chirac apologized for the State responsibility
in 1995.
Guillaume Pépy, lip-service like and a little constrained, presented
the excuses of the SNCF in 2011. (But perhaps he found it rude that the Jewish associations had not noticed that these trains were, for once, perfectly on time...). French Post apologies are still pending in 2020, and I take the opportunity of this article to suggest that a declaration would not hurt anyone; neither to today's management, nor to the still living victims of this collaboration.
Of course, the French Post of 2020 is far from the actions of the PTT at the time of WWII, aberrant cancellation of this stamp is only a mistake - your complaints will unlakely be better received if you visit your neighborhood post office with a
Panzer. But this Nazi stamp case highlights another problem: if it went through like a letter in the post, it is because it did not go through anyone's hands.
In the Post just as in the others public domains automation, subcontracting, opening to competition and reduction of workforce are a must; a fashionable corporate policy of our era. This time, instead of adapting the present to prepare the future, as the Liberals say, this policy has opened a window to a 75-year-old dirty past.
With a moronic stamp as the joke for now. But what if totalitarianism comes back up to date?
As in China, it will be a reign of dematerialization and cold algorithms that execute orders without delay, mistake, and also without question.
On this day, of course, the letters will arrive faster than with Monique and André, our good old traditional civil servants. But if there are only robots without conscience and without principles... who will be there to resist?
Translated to proper English with the kind help of Laila Emily.
