FRENCH TELEVISION AIRS BANNED FILM

PARIS —  French television has aired a controversial documentary about France’s World War II Resistance that so angered the Communist Party it was banned just before the original broadcast date.

The program, titled “Retired Terrorists,” accused the Communists of exploiting a group of immigrants, mostly Jews, and then “cynically handing them over to the Nazis” for execution.

The film originally was scheduled to be seen June 2, but the Communist Party managed to force a ban on its being aired, prompting a monthlong uproar that drew front-page headlines.

The ban, in turn, sparked an outcry over censorship and the state-funded Antenne Two network finally broadcast the film this week, followed by a televised debate among historians and former resistance fighters, including former Prime Minister Jacques Chablan-Delmas.

The film recounted the lives of a small band of immigrants who carried out some of the most spectacular acts during the French Resistance. The heros, now elderly men with heavily accented French, re-enact how as teen-agers they made bombs in their kitchens and planted them in occupied Paris.

But 24 members of the group, led by an Armenian Jew called Missak Manouchian, were executed by a Nazi firing squad in 1944 after allegedly being betrayed by the Communists in 1943 when the Gestapo was pursuing them.

The Communists reacted vehemently to the portrayal, issuing a statement that said: “The film throws into question in a defamatory way the role of the Communist Party in the Resistance.”

Historian Henri Amouroux commented during the televised debate, “The Communist Party has good reason to be emotional.”

The party, outlawed in 1939 just before the start of the war, became a powerful political force by 1945 after orchestrating many of the Resistance attacks against the Nazi occupiers.