Collaboration in France (1940-1944)

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The collaboration in France (1940–1944) describes the voluntary cooperation and joint action of the French with the German occupying power on French territory between 1940 and 1944. It does not only include the state collaboration with the German Reich , as presented by Marshal Pétain on the occasion of his on 30 October 1940 on the French radio broadcast, but also any other cooperation with German agencies or persons outside the French state apparatus .

There are three types of collaboration:

French historians also speak of an everyday collaboration ( collaboration au quotidien ) in order to describe certain behavior relevant to everyday life that should not be seen as an active political statement. B. good personal relationships with Germans; sending denunciation letters to the police or the Gestapo (three to five million anonymous letters in France, i.e. an average of 2,700 letters a day); Entrepreneurs who applied for orders from German agencies on their own initiative; Love relationships between French women and German soldiers or members of the Gestapo (" horizontal collaboration ").

Overlaps between state collaboration and political collaboration were possible: numerous collaborators who were convinced of the final German victory and of National Socialism received offices in the Vichy regime .

The state collaboration

All support measures of the Vichy regime and the French administration for the Third Reich are referred to as state collaboration . The support extended above all to the economic area (occupation costs), to police measures (fight against the Resistance , special tribunals , extradition to France of German opponents of the Nazis who had fled to France, etc.), to participation in National Socialist racial policy (registration, arrest and deportation of Jews ) and military cooperation ( Darlan-Abetz Agreement of May 28, 1941, Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme (LVF) , French Waffen-SS , Milice française ).

Political collaboration

The term collaborator ("collaborationniste") was first used by Marcel Déat in the daily newspaper L'Œuvre on November 4, 1940. Political collaboration was shaped by political parties and the collaborative press , which described themselves as “national”, but nevertheless publicly advocated cooperation with National Socialist Germany and also actively participated in it. The German occupying power, which did not take it very seriously, used it primarily to put pressure on the Vichy regime . Since the "collabos" were a largely isolated minority in the population (an estimated 2% of the total population) and also in order not to endanger the supremacy of the German occupying power, Adolf Hitler was careful not to give them too much responsibility. The high- profile agitation of political collaboration of the most varied of orientations, which took place above all in occupied Paris, pushed the simultaneous less spectacular, but determined and more effective collaboration of the Vichy regime into the background.

The parties of the collaboration

As early as July 1940, individual politicians tried to found political parties that were compliant with the occupying power. Fascist politicians joined them from autumn 1940 onwards, who were disappointed by the backward-looking and Catholic-moralizing policies of the Vichy regime. Were characteristic of the beginning, the inability of the collaborationist politicians to agree on a common approach, as well as numerous intrigues between the leaders of various groups (eg. As the rival Jacques Doriot with Marcel Déat , but also Marcel Déat with Eugène Deloncle etc.) . Marcel Déat tried for the first time in 1941 from the RNP and MSR and then again in 1943 as part of a short-lived Front révolutionnaire national to form a unity party of collaboration.

Although all parties and groups officially invoked Marshal Pétain , the collaborationist milieus gathered in Paris were primarily anxious to change the Vichy regime politically: in direct contact with the German occupying power, they strove to establish a "revolutionary" fascist or fascist for France National Socialist regime, which in a Europe dominated by Germany would work together unconditionally with the Third Reich . The Paris collaborators gradually took over positions within the Vichy regime, which they had previously criticized so much, and tried to radicalize its policies according to their ideas. Marcel Déat was appointed Minister for Labor and National Solidarity in March 1944.

From October 1944 to April 1945 Sigmaringen was the seat of the fled Vichy government. Marshal Pétain and his last loyal followers from Vichy found themselves in German exile. Some former members of the Légion des volontaires français (LVF) , which was dissolved in September 1944, fought on the German side in the Battle of Berlin in 1945.

The 2 main parties in the collaboration
Jacques Doriot (1898–1945) as communist member of the Seine département (1929)
Marcel Déat (1894–1955) as a socialist MP from Paris (1932)
Smaller collaboration parties

(more than 1000 members):

Organizations of notables and elected officials
  • Groupe Collaboration: a group of conservative officials and dignitaries led by the writer Alphonse de Châteaubriant , which held congresses on topics related to collaboration; 33 local committees in the South Zone and an unknown number in the Occupied North Zone
  • Comité d'action antibolchévique (CAA): Support group of the Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme (LVF) under the leadership of Paul Chack , a naval officer, right-wing writer and member of Action française until 1939. Estimated membership: around 1,000, but they too belonged to other collaboration organizations
  • Parti ouvrier et paysan français (POPF): collaborating wing of the communist party, initially under the leadership of Marcel Gitton , the former number 3 in the hierarchy of the Parti communiste français (PCF) , then under the leadership of Marcel Capron , MP and Mayor of the PCF for Alfortville . Estimated membership: 300 in the north zone
  • Comité ouvrier de secours immédiat (COSI): “Charity organization” for bombed-out workers, briefly under the leadership of Georges Yvetot , a former leader of the anarcho-syndicalist labor movement in France, then René Mesnard , a former socialist who had switched to the RNP , and Jules Teulade , a former communist who has switched to the PPF
  • Les Énergies françaises: launched at the end of 1942 by Pierre Laval as the nucleus of a future unity party; remained under the leadership of Léon Cayla , the former governor general of Madagascar , but ultimately an insignificant group of conservative dignitaries
Factions

(less than 1000 members)

Regional collaboration groups

The collaboration press or »collaboration of the spring«

The Daladier government had set up a "Commissariat Général à l'Information" (General Commissioner for Information) by law of July 26, 1936 (the so-called Décret Daladier ), which was directly subordinate to the head of government. Under the direction of the diplomat and writer Jean Giraudoux , it was intended to mobilize the media and public opinion against National Socialist Germany . During the Drôle de guerre ("Seated War ") , the General Commissariat was converted by decree of April 1, 1940 into a "Secrétariat d'État de l'Information et de la Propagande" (State Secretariat for Information and Propaganda) of the Ministry of Information. This institution was used after the French defeat to bring the idea of ​​collaboration closer to the French people. The main media used were: the cinema newsreel (which was produced under the monopoly of the Franco-German production company France-Actualité ), the state radio ( Radiodiffusion nationale or RN ) and the printed press.

The important press organs had a choice between three options: either they stopped their publication (such as Le Canard enchaîné , l'Intransigeant , le Populaire or L'Humanité ), and after June 10, 1940 they withdrew to the zone libre , especially after Lyon , where there were numerous printing works (e.g. Le Journal , Paris-Soir or Le Figaro ) or they continued to publish in the occupied zone ( zone Nord ) (such as Je suis partout or Le Matin ).

The Parisian press of the collaboration time was dominated by the press magnate Jean Luchaire . Most of the papers in the collaboration press in the occupied northern zone were subsidized or secretly supported by the German ambassador Otto Abetz , who had founded the publishing company Éditions Le Pont especially for this purpose . The German embassy in Paris concentrated on propaganda in favor of the Third Reich and the propaganda squadron (among them the Sonderführer Gerhard Heller ) took on the task of literary and press censorship in branches spread across occupied France . Apart from the committed collaborators, most of the journalists acted opportunistically, lured by material incentives (while the other salaries were frozen in France, their salaries were doubled at the instigation of the propaganda squadron) or out of cowardice rather than ideological reasons. The zone libre press predominantly supported the collaboration policy and its anti-Semitic stance of Marshal Pétain and exercised self-censorship under the control of the “Secrétariat d'État de l'Information et de la Propagande” in the Ministère de l'Information (initially under directed by former communist journalist Paul Marion , then by Philippe Henriot ).

In view of the obvious propaganda, the French newspaper readers gradually turned away from the collaboration press, which announced fantastic circulation figures until the end, while in fact it had to accept 30 to 50% loss of circulation. They preferred themed magazines (sport, women's magazines) and the underground press of the Resistance (such as Franc-Tireur , Combat or Liberation ).

A number of well-known journalists and publicists in France became collaborators who campaigned in public for the German occupation power or the "Révolution nationale" of the Vichy regime:

Voluntary military engagement on the part of Germany

  • The French Volunteer Legion against Bolshevism (LVF) :

The LVF went back to an initiative of the leaders of collaborationist parties in July 1941. Marshal Pétain initially encouraged the formation of the troops (for example in November 1941) before he increasingly kept a cautious distance. The LVF was recognized as a non-profit organization and Pétain declared that its fighters were "une part de notre honneur militaire" (part of our military honor). The volunteers took an oath of leadership on Adolf Hitler .

  • The French Waffen-SS :

The formation of a French Waffen SS was approved in July 1943.

  • The phalange africaine

After the British-American invasion of French North Africa in November 1942, the admirals Derrien and Esteva saw each other under the command of Marshal Pétain , who demanded that French troops be deployed in the region on the side of the Germans. Since the French colonial troops in North Africa were judged to be unreliable, a volunteer force called La Phalange Africaine was supposed to fight the Allied troops in French North Africa on the side of the German troops. However, it was only possible to recruit around 200 volunteers who were briefly deployed in the fighting of the Tunisian campaign.

The private collaboration

Private collaboration is primarily used to describe professional activities, for example by entrepreneurs (due to the social impact of their economic decisions) or artists and "stars" (due to the publicity of their behavior).

Collaboration between private companies

  • Louis Renault was accused of collaborating with the Wehrmacht during the Liberation . The Renault factories were therefore confiscated and nationalized.
  • Gnôme et Rhône supplied aircraft engines to Germany. During the Liberation, the company was nationalized due to collaboration and became the Société Nationale d'Etudes et de Constructions de Moteurs d'Aviation (Snecma, National Society for the Research and Construction of Aircraft Engines ; now Safran SA ).
  • In 1946, a court in Lyon sentenced Marius Berliet to two years in prison and confiscated his property for collaborating with the occupying power. He was accused of producing trucks for the Wehrmacht to keep the company going, of suppressing the Resistance by prohibiting sabotage and thus using Germany. It was also proven that he had extradited a worker from the Berliet works to the Gestapo through the placement of a security employee from the Milice française .
  • After the first arrests of Jews in May 1941, the Photomaton company offered its services to the occupying power.
  • Construction companies such as Sainrapt et Brice (now part of the Vinci SA group ) and cement manufacturers such as B. Vicat were involved in the construction of the Atlantic Wall .
  • Executives of the former Jewish owners Banque Worms had close ties to the Vichy regime : Jacques Barnaud was an advisor for Franco-German economic relations and Pierre Pucheu was first State Secretary for Industrial Production and then from 1941 to 1942 State Secretary for the Interior.
  • Entrepreneurs belonged to organizations of the Vichy regime . Joseph Merceron-Vicat was appointed a member of the Conseil national (National Council; substitute parliament without legislative function). He proposed a Schéma d'organization corporative based on the social ideas of the National Revolution .

Artistic collaboration

Some men and women in French show business (e.g. Sacha Guitry or Arletty ) were accused of collaborating in the post-war period because between 1940 and 1944 they had more or less close relationships with representatives of the occupying power. They had - as Guitry put it - " continued their profession " while other artists (such as Ray Ventura ) had emigrated. Hardly any personality from the field of visual or performing arts was permanently committed to the benefit of the German occupying power, but many had social contacts in the context of the turbulent Parisian social life (le Tout-Paris ). The actress Arletty is credited with the saying: " Mon cœur est à la France, mais mon c ... est international (My heart belongs to France, my A ... is international.)".

According to National Socialist ideas, Paris should be a capital of easy life (thirteen brothels reserved for Germans) and mass leisure time entertainment. Contrary to the wishes of the occupying power, artistic circles in the French capital tried to maintain a certain artistic level (theater, opera).

Since the German policy has sought to take France its cultural importance for Europe and convert it to a predominantly agrarian region, they promoted under the Vichy regime emerging regionalist literature .

Liberation and Purges

In the course of liberation , there were unguided actions against former collaborators ("épurations sauvages"), in which the thirst for revenge and festival character were mixed and in which, among other things, numerous women were shaved and exposed who were accused of having relationships with Germans. Soon after the withdrawal of the German troops, members of the Resistance and a little later the Provisional Government of the French Republic began to take action against such spontaneous acts of violence and to initiate “legal purges” (“ épuration judiciaire ”). By decree of June 26, 1944 , special courts were commissioned with the legal processing of the collaboration time. At the local level, special courses of justice were set up at the département level, as well as chambres civiques with the right to impose the loss of civil rights for offenses against national honor ( indignité nationale ) that cannot be prosecuted under criminal law ( dégradation nationale with deprivation of active and passive suffrage, Expulsion from the army, restrictions on exercising the profession and the ban on carrying weapons). In addition, a Haute Cour de Justice was set up as a state court, before which high state dignitaries such as B. Philippe Pétain were accused of collaboration. The purges covered all areas of activity and all layers of society. Even after the establishment of special courts, resistance fighters and other sections of the population repeatedly took action against former collaborators on their own. This mainly affected members of the Milice française or members of collaborating parties.

The purges soon became the subject of polemical controversy in France. Since initially only the active participants in the purges or their victims expressed themselves and no serious investigations into every case by the police or gendarmerie were carried out, an objective assessment was hardly possible. Right-wing extremist newspapers and former members of the Vichy regime or their lawyers spread a “légende noire” (black legend) with reports of massacres and manipulated figures. Investigations by the Comité d'Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale (CHGM) and its successor organization, the Institut d'histoire du temps présent (IHTP) , determined for 84 departments (out of a total of 90 in 1945) the number of 8,775 civil killings in extrajudicial killings Purges, to which the executed death sentences of the Haute cour de justice and the Cours de justice (791 or 767 depending on the source) and of military courts of law (769 in the 77 departments examined by the IHTP) are added. Although more than 1,500 were executed for collaboration in post-war France, two-thirds of those sentenced to death were ultimately commuted. This corresponds to the highest percentage of commutations in Western Europe. Fewer than one French in a thousand have been interned or arrested, which is well below the comparative figures for Denmark , Norway , Belgium and the Netherlands. In absolute terms, fewer French people were interned for collaboration than in the Netherlands . In order to prevent an internal division of the country, the governments of the Fourth French Republic issued a total of three amnesties for the "purged": in 1947, 1951 and again in 1953.

In the mid-1990s, 50 years after the end of the Second World War , many French studies dealt with the time and circumstances of liberation . For uncontrolled cleansing actions ( épuration sauvage or épuration extrajudiciaire ) between 10,000 and 11,000 fatalities and around 20,000 women with shaved heads were determined . The legal purges covered more than 300,000 cases, resulting in 127,000 convictions with 97,000 convicts. The sentence ranged from 5 years of loss of civil rights ( dégradation nationale ) to the death penalty .

→ Main article: Commission d'Épuration

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Clio online. European history portal: Pétain, Philippe: Address on "Collaboration" (October 30, 1940) (last checked on October 16, 2011)
  2. ^ Robert Paxton : La Collaboration d'État , in Jean-Pierre Azema / François Bédarida (eds.): La France des années noires , Vol. I. Éditions Le seuil, Paris 2000. ISBN 978-2020183062
  3. ^ Philippe Burrin: La Collaboration d'État , in La France des années noires , vol. 1. Éditions du seuil, Paris 1993. ISBN 978-2020183062
  4. ^ Jean-Pierre Azéma / Olivier Wieviorka: Vichy 1940-44 . Editions Perrin, Paris 1997, chap. Le temps des profiteurs , p. 231f. ISBN 978-2262022297
  5. ↑ Claude d'Abzac-Epezy: Afterword to L'Armée de Vichy by Robert Paxton, Taillandier, coll. "Points Histoire", p. 547.
  6. ^ Philippe Burrin, La France à l'heure allemande , Éditions du Seuil, 1995.
  7. ↑ Christophe Cornevin: Les indics: Cette France de l'ombre qui informe l'Etat . Flammarion, Paris 2011. ISBN 978-2081241169
  8. ↑ This exile is described by Louis-Ferdinand Celine : D'un château l'autre, Gallimard, Paris 1957. German: From one castle to the other . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1982. ISBN 978-3499149641 .
  9. ↑ Number of members according to NSZ Rheinfront from September 22, 1940.
  10. ^ Gerhard Heller: In an occupied country. Nazi cultural policy in France. Memoirs 1940-1944 , pp. 45–47. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1982.
  11. ↑ Chapter "L'information sabordée" in the book by Fabrice d'Almeida and Christian Delporte: Histoire des médias de France, de la Grande Guerre à nos jours . Flammarion, Paris 2010. ISBN 978-2081237704
  12. ↑ " Nous pensons que le rassemblement de certaines catégories d'individus de race juive dans des camps de concentration aura pour conséquence administrative la constitution d'un dossier, d'une fiche ou carte, etc. Spécialistes des questions ayant trait à l '" identité », nous nous permettons d'attirer particulièrement your attention sur l'intérêt que présentent nos machines automatiques Photomaton susceptibles de photographier un millier de personnes en six poses et ce en une journée ordinaire de travail. ”(Basically: We assume that the administration of a gathering of people of Jewish race in concentration camps makes it necessary to create files, index cards, etc. As specialists in all questions of identification, we allow ourselves to draw your attention to our photomaton devices which allow thousands of people to be photographed in six positions in one working day. Quoted from Renaud de Rochebrune / Jean-Claude Hazera: Les Patrons sous l'occupation . Editions Odile Jacob, Paris 1995. ISBN 2-7381-0328-6
  13. ↑ Arnaud Berthonnet, Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) : L'histoire d'une épuration: l'industrie du bâtiment et des travaux publics en région parisienne (1944-1949) (last checked on October 16, 2011)
  14. ↑ Michèle Cointet: Le Conseil national de Vichy: vie politique et réforme de l'État en régime autoritaire. 1940-1944 . Éditions Aux amateurs de livres, Paris 1989, p. 85. ISBN 2-87841-000-9
  15. ^ Alan Riding: And the Show went on. Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2010. ISBN 978-0307268976
  16. ↑ Cécile Desprairies: Paris dans la collaboration . Éditions du Seuil, Paris 2009. ISBN 978-2020976466
  17. ↑ Julian T. Jackson: Dark Years. 1940-1944 . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001. ISBN 978-0198207061
  18. ^ Fabrice Virgili: La France virile - Des femmes tondues à la Liberation . Payot, Paris 2000. ISBN 978-2228898577
  19. ↑ Philippe Bourdrel: L'Epuration sauvage 1944-45 . Perrin, Paris 2002. ISBN 978-2262028343 .
  20. ^ Peter Novick: L'Épuration française . Éditions Seuil, 1986. ISBN 978-2715805163
  21. ↑ History of the Institut d'histoire du temps présent (IHTP) ( Memento of the original from December 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (in French; last checked on December 4, 2011) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ihtp.cnrs.fr
  22. ^ Henry Rousso : L'épuration en France une histoire inachevée . Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire , n ° 33, January-March 1992, pp. 78-105. ISSN  0294-1759

literature

Review articles:

  • Christophe Belser: La Collaboration en Loire-inférieure 1940-1944 (2 vols.). Geste éditions, 79260 La Crèche 2005. ISBN 2-84561-210-9 bw. ISBN 2-84561-211-7 .
  • Philippe Burrin : La dérive fasciste. Doriot, Déat, Bergery 1933-1944 . Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1986 (paperback edition with a new foreword 2003). ISBN 202009357X .
  • Philippe Burrin: La France à l'heure allemande 1940–1944 , Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1995. ISBN 2020183226 . (Paperback 1997 edition ISBN 2020314770 ).
  • Michèle Cotta: La collaboration 1940–1944 , Armand Colin (“Kiosque” collection), Paris 1964.
  • Simon Epstein: Les Dreyfusards sous l'occupation . Albin Michel (collection Bibliothèque Albin Michel de l'histoire), Paris 2001. ISBN 978-2226122254 .
  • Jean-Pierre Koscielniak: Collaboration et épuration en Lot-et-Garonne, 1940-1945 . Editions d'Albret, Narrosse (Landes) 2003.
  • Pascal Ory : Les Collaborateurs 1940-1945 . Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1976. ISBN 2-02005-427-2 .
  • Pascal Ory : La France allemande (1933-1945) , Gallimard, Paris 1995. ISBN 978-2070328932 .
  • Robert O. Paxton : La France de Vichy 1940-1944 . Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1999. ISBN 978-2020392105 .
  • Henry Rousso : Pétain et la fin de la collaboration. Sigmaringen 1944–1945 . Éditions Complexe, Brussels 1999. ISBN 978-2870271384 .
  • Eberhard Jäckel : France in Hitler's Europe - The German French policy in the Second World War . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1966 (with a foreword by Alfred Grosser )

Parties and political movements:

  • R. Handourtzel, C. Buffet: La collaboration… à gauche aussi , Editions Perrin, Paris, 1989. ISBN 978-2262006310 .
  • Pierre Philippe Lambert, Gérard Le Marec: Partis et mouvements de la Collaboration . Le Grand livre du mois, Paris 2002. ISBN 978-2702879290 .
  • Ahlrich Meyer : perpetrator under interrogation. The 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question' in France 1940-1944 . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt, 2005. ISBN 3534175646 .

Press and cultural life:

  • Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat: L'argent nazi à la conquête de la presse française (1940–1944) . Éditions Jean Picollec, Paris 1981.
  • Gerhard Heller : In an occupied country. Nazi cultural policy in France. Memories 1940–1944 . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1982. ISBN 3-462-01521-4 (from the later euphemistic point of view of one of the participants; in addition, Manfred Flügge : Paris is difficult. German résumés in France. , Chapter The censor as protector or the contradictions of the “Ltn . Heller " pp. 175–198. Das Arsenal, Berlin 1992. ISBN 3-921810-20-5 .)
  • Eckard Michels : The "German Institute" in Paris 1940–1944. A contribution to the German-French cultural relations and the foreign cultural policy of the Third Reich . Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 1993. ISBN 3-515-06381-1 .
  • Katrin Engel: German cultural policy in occupied Paris 1940–1944: film and theater . Oldenbourg, Munich 2003. ISBN 978-3921810200 .

French companies:

  • Annie Lacroix-Riz: Industriels et banquiers français sous l'Occupation: la collaboration économique avec le Reich et Vichy , Éditions Armand Colin, Paris 1999.
  • Annie Lacroix-Riz: " Les entreprises françaises et l'Allemagne de l'avant-guerre à l'occupation, Des capitaux aryens " in Le Manifeste , n ° 4, March 2004.
  • Renaud de Rochebrune, Jean-Claude Hazera: Les patrons sous l'occupation . Éditions Odile Jacob, Paris 1995. ISBN 978-2738103284 (supplemented 2-volume paperback edition 1997. ISBN 978-2738105059 and ISBN 978-2738105066 ).

Web links