Two Affairs Flanking a Larger Complex

Golson, Richard J. Memory, The Holocaust and French Justice: The Bousquet and Touvier Affairs. University Press of New England, Hanover and London. 1996.

Two Affairs Flanking a Larger Complex

The compartmentalization in Memory, the Holocaust, and French Justice by Richard Golsan is commendable. Complicity of the French with the Germans in the prosecution of the Jewish is referred to as affairs, and the book culminates in the trial of Paul Touvier. This is particularly intriguing because he was among the last of the men who tortured and persecuted the Jews of France to be tried. He was ultimately freed.

It is useful to look for comparisons in his trial to that of René Bousequet. He died due to his involvement as the head of Vichy police. The argument he attempted to run was that he was unaware of the actions of the Germans in exterminating those who were deported (127). Touvier had a role more distinctly personal to the Jewish question.

As the head of the Milice, in trial a great part of the discussion lies on the veracity of the claims made against Touvier. Reminiscent of the larger question that lingers among all French, is the role assassinations and political repression enacted by this branch of Vichy enforcement played in German success. While France appears to be laudable in obstruction of justice, as Touvier argues in his specific case, the reality is that a rigorous contextualization of the domestic military conflict between the Gestapo, the Jews, and the Resistance shows a higher level of cooperation than in other nations. The question of justice further complicates this relationship, as an inferred interpretation from inconclusive statements leaves the danger of deeming the actions of the Gestapo in prosecution of the Resistance as illegal, some of which were not, and the actions of the Milice enacting brutality in its own name a legal act.

Golsan flanks this argument with two supplementary points. Firstly, in Holland, one of the highest rates of Jewish extermination in Europe was perpetrated by the Nazism (82). The nation was heavily occupied, and included some of the only public demonstrations against Germann treatment of Jews, as late as 1941, though. Secondly, in Hungary the Admiral Horthy refused to deport any Jews out of the nation for two years during the extermination. The Germans subsequently carried out among their most brutal operations in Hungary.

It can be seen to be apparent that results do not always imply effort. In the case of Touvier, one main argument for his release is that many of the times he killed Jews, he had saved others. There is a young jeweler who worked for the underground. Without other trouble, Touvier returns him safely home and does not raid the shop despite his economic incentive to do so (131). These are stories that obfuscate the full severity of his actions as an interrogatory function of German repression.

Golson does not attempt to tackle the question of the German occupation simply as a single historian, but draws on the work of others in order to create a tangible web at through which a single thesis is explored and reinforced. More importantly, analysis of the court documents releasing one guilty party and convicting another provide contrasting perspectives contemporary to the progression of the understanding of the war. In the trial of Bousquet, in addition to the plea of ignorance and perhaps contradictorily, the high survival rates of Jews in France is portrayed as a solvent to the edge of accusatory agents (81).

Finally, as with the larger movement in France regarding the French role in the Holocaust, Touvier relies in his argument on plain and simple denial. When faced with the accusations of a survivor, Louis Goudard, he simply claims they did not occur (139). As a prisoner with seven Jews, Goudard survived because he was not one and because they were. He also witnessed the torture of prisoners with cattle prods. Here the denial is not complete. “At first I was interrogated without the ‘machine’. Just blows everywhere. After that, there was the tub of water, the electric prods, then more blows, the needles under the fingernails.” Faced with this, Touvier replies in a quavering voice that there were no electric prods. There can be little doubt that had he been tried during the war a guilty verdict would have been reached.

Three Distinct Antisemitic Trends in Vichy France

Paul Fischer

9/20/2017

Professor Zdatny

Marrus, Michael R. Paxton, Robert O. Vichy France and the Jews. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1981.

Word Count: 752

Three distinct antisemitic trends in Vichy France

Vichy France and the Jews is research that has been done rereading evidence, correspondence, and documents from the persecution of the Jews in France during World War II. It is worthwhile to highlight some of the critical trends of antisemitism at the time, as well as that which separates French racism from other national discriminatory natures.

Some background is provided into the history of anti-racist measures, helping to establish the surprise with which the French encountered the success of racist movements (25-71). Foremost, loi Marchandeau prohibited antisemitism in the press and had been passed shortly before the invasion. It would be replaced with the Statut des juifs, legislation updated during the war (3). In the first statute effects were primarily felt by civil servants, but as the war drew on, its goals would be expanded in revisions to include mandatory identification, property sequestration, and ultimately death for all Jews in Occupied France. Other empirical restrictions on the activities of Jewish communities included race-exclusive leagues such as l’Ordre des Médecins established August 10, 1940 that effectively excluded Jews from medical practice (160). A similar measure was taken shortly afterwards for lawyers.

Reconciliation of trending French sympathies for the Allies that grew through the war and simultaneously increasing sanctioned persecution of the Jews can be difficult (201, 210). Three examples are useful in addressing this: that of Theodore Dannecker, SS judenreferat, of Xavier Vallat, Commissioner-General of the Jewish Question (CGJQ), and of Ambassador Otto Abetz.

Upon arrival August 12, 1940, Theodore Dannecker, a young officer of the SS, was tasked with bringing the “‘gut antisemitism’ - a visceral hatred undisciplined by reason, patriotism, or a sense of public order” of Germany to France (89). At the time, this proved complicated; even the Marshall Pétain had friends in his inner circle that he wished to ensure were exempted from early legislation (207). Dozens of property crimes and other violence had been directed against Jews in the countryside of France before German invasion, to be sure, but officially these had been hitherto rightly viewed as illegal acts (34, 182). The nature of these crimes were personal rather than organized, and did not near the level of the atrocities experienced during the war. Marrus and Paxton even point to the irony that legislation preventing refugees from getting jobs or obtaining worthwhile occupations created the very conditions of criminality that they were explicitly charged with preventing.

The invasion of France also saw antisemitism drift into the sphere of politics and diplomacy. For one powerful figure, the Ambassador Abetz, “antisemitism [was] one of the levers to replace the reactionary grip of the Church and Army in Vichy France by a popular, anticlerical, pro-European … mass-movement” (78). The use of antisemitism as a tangent factor in contingent political battles directed mass opinion in a manner uncharacteristic of the liberal or communist antisemitism extant in France before occupation.

Xavier Vallat was the Commissioner-General of Jewish Questions in France. Original enthusiasm led to his public admission that “aryanization had produced an unleashing of greed’” (156). He “proclaimed himself a champion of ‘state antisemitism,’ the regulation of Jewish existence by state agencies for the benefit of all Frenchmen” (89). The position was offensive to the Germans, though not entirely out of step with the general strategies that they employed, because the French created the position independently of Germany and without forewarning. While for some, it could be seen as a way of heading off some of the more strict German rules for Jews, it also behaved more harshly towards certain groups of Jews as well (83). Arguably, it is the deviation from German guidelines that may have led to his dismissal.

The successor of Vallat, Louis Darquier, would be a complete contradiction in terms to the first Commisioner-General. With three arrests, he took the level of antisemitism to another level (283). By the time he was appointed in 1942, Laval had taken office and persecution of the Jews already well outside the legal bounds of French sovereignty, began to escalate well out of all legal and moral bounds (251). While the Germans influenced Vichy France greatly, it is a tragedy that such a high level of complicity existed, and co-operation was present even outside of the specifically antisemitic departments, “it was not the PQJ who conducted the arrests and guarded the trains, but regular police” (294).

Technics of France in Crisis: Two Defeats in Strange Defeat

Paul Fischer

9/18/2017

Professor Zdatny

Bloch, Marc. Strange defeat: A statement of evidence written in 1940. No. 371. WW Norton & Company, New York, 1968.

France in Crisis: Two Defeats in Strange Defeat

At the time Marc Bloch wrote Strange Defeat, France had lost territory and its political status was reduced to that of a puppet empire. 1940 was a dark year, and the coming years would force the French to lose hope in the goodness of their national Marseilles, motto, or constituent ideals as a competent force for good. The technics of war, from the point of view of a supply line Intelligence officer creates a distinct prism of analysis for historians that appropriately conveys the logistical predecessors of contingent and subsequent complete defeat at the hands of the Germans. That is, the two intertwining communications stressed in this book are the military losses during the rapid advance of Nazi Germany through France and the cultural capitulation spreading throughout France and the Allies like a disease under the stress of starvation, hardship, and absence of adequate leadership.

The importance of the Maginot line cannot be stressed enough in French plans. Like the Titanic, a great ship so formidably designed no one thought to include life boats except for cosmetic purposes, the French investment in concrete believed to stop a German incursion substituted for proper evacuation and withdrawal plans (52). The French hoped to avoid a war with Germany first through diplomatic means and if all else failed to repulse her by utilization of near limitless resources invested soundly in the same mechanics of warfare found in the First World War.

Germany correctly anticipated the French attachment to a static defensive structure (73). Engines had grown in size, and motorized transports, armored divisions, and even motorcycles traversed the countryside, sowing uncontrollable panic without even confronting the fortifications of the military (51). Bloch hypothesizes that if such an outcome were possible there may have been a path to victory in this early war with full and vigorous retreats to bring the French military together and to make a unified assault on German targets (40). Improper planning led to isolated units, without water or other necessary supplies, that Bloch was personally acquainted with as an officer of the fuel depots (38).

Hitler met with psychologists in the development of the Blitzkrieg in order to ensure that the war would exert the maximum effect on civilian and military populations possible. Mechanical means were used to boost the screech of dive-bombers, for example (54).  The Battle of London showed the Luftwaffe capable of a good deal more than was deployed into France. The French likely would have required more than simple modifications to withdrawals to counter German invasion forces, should such an outcome be conceivable without dramatically changing the fundamental makeup of the French Army. Only half of the battle was lost on the field, however.

By the conclusion of military operations dramatic social class differences in France were extant, and the occupiers sought to exploit these as liberators or bringers of a new form of government: the tyrant or dictator. In the process of authoritarianism, the French would lose hope in their national Marseilles (138). For the first time, the Germans began to fail. Where the military had instilled fear in the mind of France, appropriately enough, intelligence operatives from Germany were thugs. Improper targets were chased, and fifth columnists inappropriately exploited, becoming one of the targets of blame (25). As a consequence, the Resistance lived on.

At the time Marc Bloch wrote, the France that De Gaulle described in London was a fairy tale. Even among the regular French population, “the Germany of Hitler aroused certain sympathies the Germany of Ebert could never have hoped to appeal” and the war seemed lost for the French people as well as the military (150). To Bloch, the political right had sold out to fascists and vassalized France while detracting their political opponents as warmongers. These were elements of a social class conflict with the bourgeoisie as their target. They had “refused to take the masses seriously, or they trembled before their implied threat. What they did not realize was that, by so doing, they were separating themselves effectively from France” (167).