France and the Holocaust

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France and the Holocaust
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Historical Information

• In 1940, the Germans invaded France. It was a
  swift defeat.
• The Vichy Regime was set up. Vichy is a city in
  France where the government was formed. It
  lasted 2 years until 1942.
• Marshal Henri Phillippe Petain was the head of
  the Vichy Regime, a fascistic government.

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The Vichy Regime

• The Vichy Regime collaborated with the Nazi
  government.
• At first Petain had overwhelming popular support.
• He was a hero of WWI and the people trusted him.
• Most of the French believed it was better to be
  controlled by the Germans than by the communists
  or the Jews.
• There is a comment to this effect in Goodbye
  Children.

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The Vichy Regime

• The Vichy government controlled unoccupied France
  (the south-eastern two fifths) and the colonies
  of France.
• Over time it yielded more and more to German
  demands and grew unpopular.
• Also evident in Goodbye Children
• The restaurant scene shows that the Vichy
  soldiers were unpopular.

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The Vichy Regime

• In 1942, Petain lost power to Pierre Laval.
  Laval remained a figurehead only. He collaborated
  even more. He was an outspoken collaborator.
• In 1942, Hitler seized all of France. He needed
  security in the west.
• Hitler was dealing with the war against the
  Soviets in the east.

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Pierre Laval

• He had dictatorial powers.
• He basically followed the orders of Hitler.
• He agreed to draft labor for Germany.
• The reign of terror begins. The French began to
  be sent to Germany for forced labor (not just the
  Jews, but the general population).

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Forced Labor in Germany

• The French forced labor was not treated as badly
  as the Jews or other undesirables.
• Germany saw them as a valuable work force while
  the Germans fought on the front.
• In Goodbye Children, the topic comes up only
  when the kitchen boy says they will not take him
  for forced labor because of his leg.

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French Forced Labor

• The policy to force the French to labor in
  Germany was a disaster.
• As the policy was implemented, the people began
  to join the resistance movement against the
  Nazis.
• In the movie, Julians brother speaks of joining
  the resistance.

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Klaus Barbie

• Famous Nazi war criminal who committee horrible
  crimes in France during the war.
• Known as the butcher of Lyon.
• He committed his most horrible crimes in Lyon.
• He was a dedicated sadist, responsible for many
  individual atrocities, including the capture and
  deportation to Auschwitz of forty-four Jewish
  children hidden in the village of Izieu.

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Klaus Barbie, Butcher of Lyon

• His postwar notoriety is primarily due to one of
  his cases, the arrest and torture unto death of
  Jean Moulin, the highest ranking member of the
  French Resistance ever captured by the Nazis.
• Hitler himself awarded Barbie with the First
  Class Iron Cross with Swords.

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Klaus Barbie after the War

• He was convicted in absence and given the death
  penalty.
• From 1945-1955, he was protected and employed by
  American intelligence agents because of his
  police skills and anti-Communist zeal.
• With their protection, Barbie, together with his
  wife and children, escaped to Latin America.
• He had a long and prosperous career there.

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Barbie in Latin America

• He established a residence in Bolivia and became
  a citizen in 1957.
• He lived under an alias (Klaus Alttman).
• He worked as an interrogator and torturer for
  dictatorships both in Peru and in Bolivia.

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Barbies Fate

• He was wanted in France, particularly for the
  torture and death of Jean Moulin.
• He was, however, responsible for the torture and
  death of more than 26,000 people.
• He was identified in Bolivia in 1971 by Nazi
  hunters, but was protected by the Bolivian
  government.
• When a moderate leftist government came to power
  in Bolivia, he was deported to France in 1983.

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Barbies Fate

• He was tried in Lyon in 1987.
• He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
• He died in prison in 1991.

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Why did it take so long?

• He could incriminate too many French to put him
  on trial.
• The French did not push hard to get him.
• After the war, the French propagated the legend
  of the French resistance.
• Fragmented French society need to be unified. The
  legend helped to heal the wounds of war.
• Klaus Barbie endangered this legend because he
  could show how many French helped him. He would
  have stirred up animosities and forced the French
  to confront their culpability.

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The Allied Invasion

• Occurred late in 1944. D-Day in Normandy.
• Began liberation of France by the Allies.
• 1945 Laval surrendered to the Allies.
• He was executed for treason (the trial was highly
  criticized).
• Petain was also convicted of treason, sentenced
  to death.
• His sentence was commuted by Charles de Gaulle to
  life imprisonment.
• He died in prison in 1951.
• Still a figure of controversy in France.

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French Resistance

• More legend than fact.
• It did not have the honorable motivations
  attributed to it thereafter.
• The resistance was interested in antagonizing and
  thwarting the Germans more than in protecting the
  Jews.
• Young men fled to the hills to escape German
  labor camps.
• That was the real resistance.
• Escape was a major motivation.

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The French Resistance

• The myth of the French resistance is so strong,
  because Charles de Gaulle wanted to unite the
  country after the war.
• Charles de Gaulle the leader of the resistance.
• He fled to London in 1940.
• He organized the Free French Forces from there.
• He was elected provisional president of France in
  1945.
• He moved back to France after the Allies invaded.

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France and WWII

• France took a long time to come to terms with the
  past.
• The truth started to come out in the 1970s.
• France has produced most of the films on the Jew
  as Child in the Holocaust.
• The 1970s film The Sorrow and the Pity points
  out that thousands of children were rounded up in
  France in WWII.
• 75,000 French Jews were deported.

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France and WWII

• An important work on this subject is Robert
  Paxtons Vichy France and the Jews.
• He points out that France and Bulgaria were the
  only partially sovereign states that actually
  suggested to the Germans that they round up the
  Jews.
• At the time that Petain was in power there was a
  well-attended anti-Semitic exhibition in a Paris
  museum.

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The Anti-Semitic Exhibition

• The exhibit explained why collaboration was
  necessary and right.
• In the pamphlet from the exhibition This
  exhibit shows the racial characteristics of the
  Jews. You will be enlightened about their
  penetration into our culture . . . . You will now
  understand why so many French are dead.
• Shows anti-Semitism was alive and well in France.
  Shows collaboration in the ideology that lead to
  the Holocaust.