The Holocaust by Jeremy Black

Author:Jeremy Black [Black, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253022189
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

FRANCE

The situation in France exemplified the room for contrasts. Once conquered in May–June 1940, France was largely divided between a German-occupied zone under military governance and a zone, about 40 percent of the country, left under the control of a pro-German French government, voted into office in July 1940 and based at the town of Vichy. In the German-occupied region, the trajectory seen elsewhere in occupied Europe was followed, with a move eventually toward large-scale deportation to the extermination camps in Eastern Europe. These roundups were entrusted to the French police, and they focused on foreign Jews. In addition, Alsace-Lorraine was annexed anew by Germany, and Jews were deported from there in October 1940, while Italy gained control of part of France.

From the outset in Vichy France there was a willingness to discriminate against Jews, and it did not require much German prompting, let alone pressure. Within the Vichy elite, there was only limited support for Fascism, as opposed to a more broadly based conservative nationalism that was particularly open to Catholic activism. The religious, cultural, political, and social fault lines of the Dreyfus Affair, which had begun in 1894 with the unwarranted conviction for treason of a Jewish army officer, re-emerged. The agrarian, ruralist, Catholic values advocated by the government of Marshal Pétain were directed against metropolitan and liberal values with which Jews were associated, as Vichy strove to create an ostentatiously Christian France. In doing so, it took forward the late 1930s anti-Semitic revival in France, which had been linked to opposition to Jewish refugees.17 In 1940, the citizenship of many naturalized Jews was revoked, and foreign Jews were interned. There was also legislation to define who were Jews and to exclude them from government posts, including teaching. The issue of definition, not least the competing criteria of race and religion, led to fresh legislation in 1941, as did further limitations on employment and commerce. In both zones, Jewish property was subject to confiscation, with the relevant measures introduced in Vichy in July 1941. The separate Police for Jewish Affairs was established by the Vichy Minister of the Interior. Such measures were intended to demonstrate a desire to cooperate with the Germans. Vichy attitudes were displayed in France’s colonies, where German oversight was very limited. Thus, there were major purges of Jews in Guadeloupe, which was under Vichy from 1940 to 1942, and in Madagascar, under Vichy, 1940–42.18

In 1942, Vichy handed over foreign Jews for deportation to the camps. Having rounded up on July 16 over 27,000 non-French Jews in Paris and its suburbs, about 10,000 were sent to Auschwitz between July 17 and August 31, including, in the first transport, children who had not been requested. This was very different to the restrictions on immigration displayed pre-war, not least because now the policy was explicitly anti-Semitic (as well as being murderous in effect). The extent to which these deportations were handled by the French authorities was concealed postwar, but most of those deported in 1942 were not under German control until handed over for movement out of the country.

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