Word: petain
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...over the Western Allies in the spring of 1940. The Dutch army was crushed within a week, and Queen Wilhelmina fled to London, leaving the immense wealth of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in the charge of a few colonial bureaucrats. France collapsed in a month, and Marshal Petain's feeble puppet regime, based in the French resort of Vichy, had other worries than French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). Britain, threatened by a Nazi invasion, could devote little more than some Churchillian rhetoric to the defense of Singapore, Malaya, Hong Kong and Burma...
...Germans marched into deserted Paris on June 14. Reynaud fled to England, leaving the government in the hands of Marshal Henri Petain, 84, who was still revered as the man who had defended Verdun during World War I under the watchword, "They shall not pass." But on June 17 he asked Hitler for an armistice. Hardly noticed in the debacle was an appeal from London one day later by an obscure French general named Charles de Gaulle, who, in a speech that was to become the rallying cry for the Resistance, asked all Frenchmen to fight on under his leadership...
Hitler's terms seemed mild: Germany would occupy and rule the northern half of France and its Atlantic coast; the southern half could remain an autonomous state under Petain, with its capital in the sleepy resort town of Vichy. But he insisted that the armistice be signed in Compiegne, just outside Paris, in the same railroad car where Marshal Foch had made the Germans sign the armistice in 1918, the site marked by a stone tablet placing blame for the war on "the criminal pride of the German empire." CBS correspondent William Shirer, who was standing nearby, reported that Hitler...
Elie Wiesel in his article on the Klaus Barbie trial ((ESSAY, May 11)) says, "France under Petain fully collaborated with Hitler's Germany." I must disagree with the word fully. If this were so, why were the French Jews in the Vichy-controlled territory not ordered to wear the Star of David as in other Nazi-controlled countries? And why was the percentage of deported French Jews so much lower than that of other occupied countries...
...even more to fear from the revelations or digressions of their special prisoner. Ever since Marcel Ophuls's documentary The Sorrow and the Pity unreeled in Europe and America, people have stopped believing in the myth that France united to resist the occupying forces. On the contrary, France under Petain fully collaborated with Hitler's Germany. It handed its Jews over to the Nazi executioners -- 76,000 were deported, few came back. French militia competed with the Gestapo for efficiency. French police organized the roundups. Will the nation be forced to remember its sins? Or will its citizens allow themselves...