Thursday, April 01, 2004
Letters, Mon Dieu, Do I Get Letters!
An Australian reader writes taking me to task for being a little hard on the French in my last post:
France was actively opposed. They
may not have done very well against the German tanks,
due to inferior tactics, but their heart was in the right
place.
Understand that when I say France could not manage a coherent opposition to Naziism and the German war machine, I'm referring specifically to Vichy France, and the phenomenon of collaborationism with Vichy authorities when it came to handing Jews over to Klaus Barbie and Adolf Eichmann.
As part of the Armistice agreement with Germany, France, now led by Henri Phillipe Petain after Renaud's resignation, agreed to hand over all Jews living in France to Germany.
In fact, tens of thousands of French Jews were actually betrayed to German authorities under color of French law.
The Vichy French regime started its own version of the Gestapo, the Milice, to help the Gestapo hunt down Jews and resistance fighters. At its peak, the Milice, or Service d'Ordre Legionnaire, employed 35,000 goons, whose singular and selfless devotion to multilateralism and international cooperation led them to practice the torture of Jews and resistance members right alongside their German counterparts.
I'm also referring to entire French formations--particularly the garrison of Syria, and naval garrisons at Dakar in Senegal and Mers el Kebir in Oran--switching sides and actually fighting against Free French and British soldiers on the side of the Nazis.
It should further be noted that Petain was NOT a hand-selected pro-fascist 'puppet' raised from obscurity by the by the Germans. He was actually the Vice Premier of France at the time of the German invasion.
He was joined in his grand sellout by Maxime Weygand--again no pro-fascist flunky before the war appointee: he was instead the remarkably nuanced commanding general of the French Armed Forces.
So it cannot be said that France was, in the whole, committed to the defeat of Naziism and Fascism. Rather, Despite the unbelievable courage of a few men like Jean Moulin and Charles Delestraint, and women like Odette Sansom, large swathes of French society and government even activelycollaborated with it, and did so to an extent unmatched in any of the Western occupied powers.
Splash, out
Jason
France was actively opposed. They
may not have done very well against the German tanks,
due to inferior tactics, but their heart was in the right
place.
Understand that when I say France could not manage a coherent opposition to Naziism and the German war machine, I'm referring specifically to Vichy France, and the phenomenon of collaborationism with Vichy authorities when it came to handing Jews over to Klaus Barbie and Adolf Eichmann.
As part of the Armistice agreement with Germany, France, now led by Henri Phillipe Petain after Renaud's resignation, agreed to hand over all Jews living in France to Germany.
In fact, tens of thousands of French Jews were actually betrayed to German authorities under color of French law.
The Vichy French regime started its own version of the Gestapo, the Milice, to help the Gestapo hunt down Jews and resistance fighters. At its peak, the Milice, or Service d'Ordre Legionnaire, employed 35,000 goons, whose singular and selfless devotion to multilateralism and international cooperation led them to practice the torture of Jews and resistance members right alongside their German counterparts.
I'm also referring to entire French formations--particularly the garrison of Syria, and naval garrisons at Dakar in Senegal and Mers el Kebir in Oran--switching sides and actually fighting against Free French and British soldiers on the side of the Nazis.
It should further be noted that Petain was NOT a hand-selected pro-fascist 'puppet' raised from obscurity by the by the Germans. He was actually the Vice Premier of France at the time of the German invasion.
He was joined in his grand sellout by Maxime Weygand--again no pro-fascist flunky before the war appointee: he was instead the remarkably nuanced commanding general of the French Armed Forces.
So it cannot be said that France was, in the whole, committed to the defeat of Naziism and Fascism. Rather, Despite the unbelievable courage of a few men like Jean Moulin and Charles Delestraint, and women like Odette Sansom, large swathes of French society and government even activelycollaborated with it, and did so to an extent unmatched in any of the Western occupied powers.
Splash, out
Jason
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