NYC removed plaque honoring Nazi ally on Broadway — and Jewish groups are outraged that it may be coming back

The city removed a plaque honoring a convicted Nazi collaborator on Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes after deeming it a “tripping hazard” — and Jewish groups are outraged over a plan to return it, sources said Friday.

“It’s like putting asbestos back in a building,” Menachem Rosensaft, General Counsel Emeritus of the World Jewish Congress, told The Post.  “It’s even worse than ignoring it.”

The ticker tape parade marker honoring Pierre Laval — a former Prime Minister of France responsible for sending 70,000 jews from France to Nazi death camps during World War II — was temporarily yanked in November due to safety concerns, according to Rosensaft and past reports.

The plaque, along with 28 others that were temporarily removed due to shifting and freezing pavement, is set to be put back in place on lower Broadway after repairs.

But Rosensaft and other advocates want the markers of Laval — along with that of Henri Philippe Pétain, a former high-ranking French military officer and Nazi collaborator —  removed once and for all. 

“These two are anything but heroes. They are the opposite: They are villains in the truest sense of the term,” Rosensaft said.

“They are knowingly complicit in the Holocaust,” he said.

“In 1942 and 1943, they were responsible for detaining, rounding up and deporting over 70,000 jews from France to their deaths in Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz.”

“There’s no ambiguity. After the war in 1945, they were tried and convicted as war criminals,” said Rosensaft, who is also an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School.

Their names were installed in the Canyon of Heroes in Manhattan in 1931, which honors esteemed champions, astronauts, and dignitaries, before they had openly collaborated with the Nazis.

But both men were plunged into international disgrace after they collaborated with the Third Reich in sending thousands of Jews to their deaths while respectively serving as the top leader and prime minister of Vichy France following the 1941 German occupation.

Mayor Bill De Blasio’s administration at one point agreed to install extra plaques next to the mens’ names to put their tributes in historical context, Rosensaft said. 

But that never happened.

“It is beyond comprehension how two convicted war criminals who were knowingly complicit in the perpetration of the Holocaust could be honored on a sidewalk in New York City today,” he said. 

“It’s a desecration of holocaust memory,” Rosensaft said.

“Simply remove them.”

In November, the pavement around the Laval marker popped up, rendering it a “tripping hazard,” Andrew Breslau of the Alliance for Downtown told the New York Times, which was first to report its removal.

A total of 25 more markers had to be taken out due to damage from recent snowstorms, which “really did a number on sidewalks,”  Breslau said.

Three more were removed in 2025 because of sidewalk or construction.

Laval was the French prime minister at the time of the Oct. 22, 1931, ticker tape parade in Manhattan.

He was later executed for his war crimes in 1945.

Pétain, meanwhile, died in prison in 1951, twenty years after his own ticker tape parade.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine also spoke out in support of removing their plaques in 2023, saying, “Nazi collaborators are simply beyond the pale.”

A City Hall spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to inquiries from The Post about the issue Friday.

A rep for the Alliance for Downtown didn’t return a request for comment.

-Additional reporting by Craig McCarthy