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| - Monaco will for the first time open access to its official archives covering the years 1942 to 1944, when dozens of Jews were arrested and deported by the principality despite its supposed neutrality during World War II, the government said Thursday. The move follows a request by the Simon-Wiesenthal Centre, whose researchers work to shed light on the Holocaust and its perpetrators. Serge Telle, the head of Monaco's government, met officials from the centre while attending ceremonies in Jerusalem to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. "These records have never been made available to anyone until now," a government official told AFP on condition of anonymity. Telle assured the centre of "the principality's desire for transparency and its total cooperation," the official added. On paper, Monaco was neutral in World War II under Prince Louis II but in fact was a vassal state of Vichy France, with a census of Jews ordered in July 1941 and a separate status imposed, though Jews were not ordered to wear yellow stars. The territory was occupied by Italian troops in 1942, before German soldiers took control from September 1943. In August 1942, 67 foreign Jews were detained in Monaco and 45 sent to the Drancy camp north of Paris, where they were then loaded onto trains for Auschwitz, where more than one million Jews died during the war. Roundups of Jews, both Monaco residents and refugees, increased from 1944. In 2015, the government revealed a list of Jews arrested during the war ahead of the inauguration of a memorial in a ceremony attended by France's chief rabbi, Haim Korsia. "We did not do enough to protect them, even though this was our responsibility," Prince Albert II said at that ceremony. "Saying this today, before all of you, is a request for your forgiveness," he said. clr/js/mlr/klm
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