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‘Who wants to buy a tank?’ asks French museum

Fancy buying a World War II tank? Then you need to go to a museum in Normandy, France, which is closing its doors and selling off its entire collection.

'Who wants to buy a tank?' asks French museum
File photo of an American World War II tank. Photo: Randen Pederson/Flickr

One of the star lots of the 130 being auctioned off by the Normandy Tank Museum is an American M4 Cadillac tank made in 1942 which is listed at between €80,000 and €140,000 (between $90,500 and $158,350).

A 1944 Jeep MB is also going under the hammer for an estimate of 25,000 euros, while a military Caterpillar D-8 bulldozer is available for between €4,000 and €6,000 in the sale on September 18th overseen by the Artcurial auction house.

For smaller budgets, dummies used in the museum dressed in the uniforms of tank drivers and US Navy pilots can be snapped up for around €200.

The museum, which opened three years ago in Catz near the D-Day beaches on the Normandy coast, is shutting because of a 30 percent drop in visitors this year which it blames on the terror attacks on France in the past two years.

“People are coming less because of the problems of terrorism in France,” the museum's founder Patrick Nerrant, a former Air France pilot, said. 

As a privately funded museum, it does not benefit from the same state assistance as larger institutions, he added.

Nerrant and his two sons began collecting World War II vehicles in the 1980s and have restored around 20 tanks between them. The museum houses more than 40 vehicles and thousands of objects from World War II and there is also an air strip on the site.

Nerrant admitted that the noise from the vehicles has prompted “several petitions from local residents”, but despite being forced to shut down he has retained a piece of land where he plans to open a smaller museum.

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TODAY IN FRANCE

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

France has paved the way towards paying reparations to more relatives of Algerians who sided with France in their country's independence war but were then interned in French camps.

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

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