German units emptied the French Masonic headquarters in June 1940, the Red Army took the archives to Moscow, and France got them back in 2001

On 13 June 1940 German special units raided the Paris headquarters of the Grand Orient de France and the Grande Loge de France and shipped tons of archives and rare books to Berlin. At Nuremberg in 1946 Helmut Knochen said Heydrich sent him to Paris in July 1940 with about 20 men to find the papers of emigrés and Masonic lodges. Vichy banned secret associations in August 1940. In October 1940 an anti-Masonic exhibition at the Petit Palais showed reconstructed lodge temples and workshops; the German occupiers encouraged and paid for it. To escape bombing, seized French archives were moved from Berlin to Česká Lípa in the Sudetenland. In 1945 Soviet counter-intelligence found them, and 28 sealed trucks reached Moscow at the end of June 1945. They stayed in a secret "special archive" until Izvestiia revealed it in February 1990. On 14 November 1992 Le Monde reported that Moscow had agreed to return French documents. The Masonic archives came back to France in December 2001. Belgian lodges recovered theirs from Moscow in 2002. Books from Belgian lodges are still being found in Berlin libraries; one was returned to Ghent's Masonic documentation centre in 2025.