During the war, when the Germans, who were the bad guys, captured France as their prey, they established their centre of operations in this large Ministry. It was the worst down in the basement, the secret place down under. They transformed it to a killing room. A place that is so scary and awful.
Their victims, were the heroic ones: the French Resistance. These men were struggling to have France emancipated, you see? When the Germans found you aiding the Resistance then this basement was invariably the place where your life was terminated.
They did not apply any fancy execution apparatus. It was simple, but very cruel. They used heavy wooden posts. He would tie their victims directly to the post. A party of German soldiers would then shoot them. It had been done in a super-fast manor, a savage method of ensuring that everybody was too terrified to give resistance.
In August 1944 the good guys who were the French and the Allies finally forced their way into Paris and liberated it, they discovered that room. It was among the earliest and the most horrible things that demonstrated everybody how actually cruel the German occupation was in Paris.
The evidence of the horror was actually evident on the posts. The heads of the wood posts were all destroyed, chipped and hacked to bits by all the bullets. This was one of the pieces of the evidence that right before one’s eyes demonstrated how many, many people the Germans had so secretly snowed down in that one room.
This is one of the locations, the hideous basement. It is a melancholy, significant lesson that there was nothing but pure violence and fear, and all of this, simply because the Resistance fighters wanted to have their own free France. It demonstrates their extreme high price.