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After decades of educational programs and visits to museums and memorial sites, Jews around the world have become well acquainted with the fate of European Jewry under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Those non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews have been honored as “righteous gentiles,” and some have even been the subject of books and films. Among European nations, it is the Danes, Bulgarians, and Dutch who are most remembered for their compassion toward the Jews during the Holocaust; in recent years, in light of the Balkan wars, a point has been made of the fact that the Serbs, too, came to the aid of their Jewish countrymen, in marked contrast to the Croats and Bosnians.
The story of how the majority of France’s Jews were saved is not as well-known, however. Conventional wisdom sees the behavior of the French during the war as anything but praiseworthy. The actions of French citizens in general, and especially of the collaborationist regime in Vichy, are usually cast in unequivocal terms, as those of a people with little interest in either saving or murdering Jews, dedicated instead to protecting their own skins at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives. Even those French historians who note that the Germans did not succeed in murdering all of their country’s Jews tend to overestimate the death toll, putting it at between 40 and 50 percent of the total Jewish population.
Renee Poznanski’s To Be a Jew in France During the Second World War, 1939-1945, a detailed study first published in French in 1994 and now appearing in Hebrew, sheds new light on the period. As her research demonstrates, fully 75 percent of France’s Jews survived, a stunning anomaly among those countries that suffered German conquest—where, in most cases, occupation by the Nazis meant death for the great majority of a country’s Jews. According to Poznanski, a professor of political science at Ben-Gurion University, the main reason for Germany’s failure to destroy French Jewry was logistical, having to do with the unusual slowness with which the Germans established their rule and built the machinery of destruction. Yet the story told by Poznanski, depicting Jewish life in France at the time, the rescue efforts, and the high survival rate, points to other causes which may have contributed, even decisively, to the survival of France’s Jews—causes which, if fully understood, may fundamentally alter the way we look at French behavior during the Holocaust.
The story of French Jewry during World War II begins with France’s sudden transformation, in the summer of 1940, from an independent, democratic state to a country occupied by the totalitarian Nazi regime. The collapse of France’s military over a six-week period, from May 10 to June 17, shocked the nation. The French army, which until recently had been considered by many to be the strongest in Europe, collapsed so rapidly that it caused the great majority of the ruling elite, as well as the French public, to lose their will to fight. As a result, they were only too happy to pin their hopes, almost mystically, on a father figure: The World War I legend, Marshal Philippe Petain, the hero of Verdun.
Since joining Paul Reynaud’s government as vice-premier, Petain had campaigned for an end to French resistance against the Germans. With the resignation on June 16, 1940 of Reynaud, who had been among the few who wanted to continue the war, Petain—now prime minister—sued for an armistice, and brought an end to France’s participation in the war even before official talks with Germany had begun. The great majority of the French people and its elected representatives supported this decision.
On July 10, the French National Assembly handed over to Petain full legislative and executive power, and he set about refashioning France in the spirit of the times, purging it of Enlightenment and Revolutionary sentiment, and particularly of what was left of its liberal, socialist, democratic, or universalist past. Only eighty out of nearly seven hundred members of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate—which together constitute the National Assembly—dared vote against this constitutional revolution; among them were 36 Socialists, as well as some radicals, centrists, and members of the moderate Right. (The Communist Party had already been outlawed and its members ousted from the National Assembly at the end of September 1939, due to its opposition to the war and its support for the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact.)
The armistice dictated by the Germans was relatively tolerable, under the circumstances. It forbade France from maintaining a substantial military force (over one hundred thousand soldiers), placed the northern and western parts of the country under German military administration, and compelled the French to pay an exorbitant tribute. At the same time, however, it permitted the French government to continue ruling in the remainder of the country, recognized French sovereignty over the entire national territory, and even refrained from making any determination concerning the future of Alsace-Lorraine, an area that had been disputed by the two countries for some seventy years.
This is a rare case in the annals of Adolf Hitler’s actions in which we have explicit testimony by the Nazi dictator himself concerning his motives, thanks to conversations he conducted with Italian ruler Benito Mussolini while the armistice talks with France were going on; transcripts of these conversations were preserved in the Italian state archives and later published. Hitler explained to his fellow dictator how important it was to him that France, with its substantial navy and vast territorial possessions, lay down its arms. The French themselves, if given limited self-governing authority, would do the dirty work of controlling their public, while the highly efficient French administration would implement Germany’s policy of wringing France’s economy dry to support the Nazi war effort. Germany’s position, based on these calculations, accorded the French government, now seated in Vichy, considerable freedom of action.
Petain and his government were, apparently, unaware of Hitler’s motives. They acted on the assumption that the war would end within a few weeks, with a German victory over Great Britain. Their interests, therefore, seemed to lie with a policy of close economic and political collaboration with a victorious Germany, through which they might attain favorable terms in any peace treaty that would, in due course, be signed.
In order to curry favor with the Germans, the Vichy government adopted a policy of persecution towards the Jews. The base of Vichy’s support consisted of old-fashioned anti-Semites, members of the various movements of the radical Right, Catholic conservatives, and other opponents of Enlightenment traditions; a large segment of the bourgeois Right recalled with bitterness the Popular Front government of 1936-1938, headed by Leon Blum, a Jewish socialist who even became a Zionist, and they saw Vichy as an effective rejoinder to the policies and legislation of the Left.
While neither Petain nor his vice-premier, Pierre Laval—an outspoken advocate of collaboration with Germany—possessed an anti-Semitic past, they still had no qualms about enacting anti-Jewish legislation, backed by the support of this coalition. The new laws were first passed in the summer of 1940 and quickly led to the expulsion of Jews from the political, cultural, scientific, and legal centers of the country. Jews were ordered to register with the Interior Ministry, and their property was confiscated. The Vichy government made a point of keeping the spoils for themselves, arguing that it would be better for this property to be administered by Frenchmen, so that it would remain as part of the nation’s assets. In establishing a racial definition of the Jews, the Vichy government acted independently of the Germans, but in the end differed little from them, crafting their own theory of Jewish identity based on blood. If there was a time when French apologists were able to lay the blame for these policies on German pressure, the publication of research by Eberhard Jaeckel in 1966 and by Robert Paxton and Michael Marrus in the early 1980s long ago laid such claims to rest.
As the Nazis’ policies towards the Jews of France harshened, and their intentions became increasingly clear, a tangible rift emerged between the Germans and the French. When, in June 1942, the Germans dictated that all Jews must don a yellow star, the measure was opposed by the Vichy government, which acted with the widespread support of the French public, and the French authorities succeeded in preventing its implementation throughout unoccupied France. Henri Michel, the leading historian of wartime France, writes in his book Resistant Paris of Frenchmen in Paris who ridiculed the Nazi policies by hanging yellow badges around their dogs’ necks, emblazoned with the word “goy.”
