France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise

The amazing theme of this book is that it really gets to the basic psyche of the French. The old adage of "The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing" is the ultimate lesson of this book. There are numerous examples of how the French really aided and abetted the Nazis, with a political landscape of real chaos and a kind of moral relativism which has only gotten worse since WWII. While there were a few courageous members of the resistance who were very active at the beginning of the war, the movement really did not take off until it was obvious that the Nazis were going to lose. But the Vichy army killed thousands of Allied troops who were fighting the Nazis in the French colonies, and they were not forced to do so under the gun. The silly references by the French to their support of the US revolution ignores other more important and recent attacks on the US by their installation of Maximillian in Mexico, their duplicity during the Cold War, their bribery by Saddam, and many other stabs in the back. Their opportunistic support two hundred years ago is really irrelevant to today's world. For anyone suffering the delusions that the French are a friend of the US, this book will go a long way to setting the record straight.

One of the most bizarre and unexpected ironies of modern history was the capitulation, collaboration, and compromises made by the French to the Nazi forces that so quickly overwhelmed them with the blitzkrieg assault against Western Europe in the summer of 1940. In this thoughtful, scholarly, and compelling book, noted historian Phillipe Burrin examines the issues surrounding this otherwise puzzling twist of national fate that so contrasted with the patriotic fervor and courage the French had displayed during the exhausting confrontations of the First World War. The issues are indeed troubling to historians, ranging from the quick and nearly bloodless capitulation to the shocking enthusiastic collaboration in the systematic arrest, torture, and elimination of so-called "enemies of the state" to the compromise of so many of their values, cultural traditions, and social customs. How and why did this happen?The outlines of that troubled time is fairly easy to determine; from 1940 to 1944 the French adapted in a variety of ways to extraordinary existential situation presented by the fact of total military domination by the Wehrmacht. This work is a definitive study of that period in France, and of the choice made by French citizens in face of the circumstance of Nazi occupation, and the stunning degree to which they indeed collaborated. Of course, not all the French capitulated or cooperated. Some joined a very active and energetic underground resistance movement, one that was effective and energetic right up to D-Day. Others fled as best they could, trying to avoid the hell on earth they feared France would become when dominated by the Nazis. Yet others did cooperate, collaborate, and participate in the unspeakable violence the Nazis visited on the non-Aryan members of French society.While this book lacks the kind of thoughtful retrospective look at the forces within France leading up to the war and placing the Vichy regime in historical perspective described so brilliantly by William Shirer in "The Collapse of the Third Republic", it is a terrific examination of life inside the Nazi regime after the fall. The author employs a number of previously unused sources such as French business archives, those of the Vichy police, and records of telephone conversations to document the degree of French collaboration. His findings are stunning and shocking. Burrin reveals, for example, that French heavy industries became key partners contributing significantly to the production of Nazi war materials, devoting ever-increasing percentages of its total output to war support until it became virtually an exclusively war-oriented activity by the end of the war. Burrin also reveals, in a scholarly yet absorbing narrative, just how complete the eventual degree of betrayal to self, country, and any meaningful notion of right or wrong became under the occupation. This is a compelling analysis examining the ways in which ordinary