A column of German Wehrmacht paraded in Paris

Image size: 1600 x 1226 pixel. 534 KB
Date: 1941
Place: Champs-Élysées, Paris, France
Photographer: André Zucca (French photographer from SIGNAL magazine)

A column of German occupation troops paraded in the streets of Paris after change of the guard ceremony. Please note the German precise in this pic: The front row looks like stair-steps, and when you look at the later rows, it appears that they are organized by size from left to right as well! In 1943 these brave men were sent to Russia to the Southern Front. After the warmth and French women, sparkling wines and brave marches they were in the steppes of Azov, in the trenches filled with dirt and lice. After many days of artillery attack, many of them are mad. Russian soldiers who fought here have told how they dragged these, after a breakthrough in the river Mius of dirt from the wild-eyed. They were killed or captured everything ... In the trenches there were many bottles of champagne and wines from France, greeting cards with attached pics of French women. “The French photographer André Zucca was not a Nazi,” Ian Buruma writes in his recent article on 'Paris during the German occupation', “but he felt no particular hostility to Germany either…. Zucca simply wanted to continue his pre-war life, publishing pictures in the best glossy magazines. And the one with the glossiest pictures, in fine German Agfacolor, happened to be 'Signal', the German propaganda magazine!” Born in Paris in 1897, Zucca worked for both French and foreign publications in the 1930s, and covered the Russian–Finnish War in the winter of 1939–1940 for Paris-Soir, before becoming a photographer for 'Signal' from 1941 to 1944. After the liberation he was arrested but never prosecuted, and spent the remainder of his career as a wedding and portrait photographer in a small town west of Paris. He died in 1973. Recently, a volume of Zucca’s controversial wartime pictures of Paris was published in France

Source:
Book "Les Parisiens sous l’Occupation: Photographies en couleurs d’André Zucca" by Jean Baronnet