Word: petain
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German troops swept into France in 1940, occupying Paris and three-fifths of the country. A "free" zone was governed from Vichy, a health spa in south central France, under Marshal Philippe Petain...
Volume II has no such liability. Few Americans were on the scene as the Third Reich took form. Shirer was in Berlin, and accompanied Hitler and his entourage to Paris when the Petain government surrendered in 1940. At the start he was a newspaperman; Edward R. Murrow hired him away in 1937 to be the other half of CBS Radio's staff in Europe. Shirer's journalistic credentials eventually brought him invitations to the bizarre Nazi Bierabends (get-togethers over beer) organized for the press by Alfred Rosenberg, the official Nazi philosopher. Hermann Göring would circulate...
Pryce-Jones spends pages describing the structure and leading personalities of the Nazis' puppet government in Vichy. Although Henri Philippe Petain and the other chief collaborators spent much of their time outside of Paris, their influence and the attractiveness of their arguments were felt throughout the crippled capital. "It is with honor and in order to maintain French unity, a unity that has lasted ten centuries, and in the framework of the constructive activity of the new European order, that today I am embarking on the path of collaboration," Marshal Petain told Hitler in October 1940. Not only...
With plodding thoroughness, the author reveals the hypocrisy of submission and the personal deceit practiced by Petain and his ilk. Once the Jewish extermination program was in place in 1942, the Vichy leaders had increasing difficulty explaining that concern for France justified an alliance with Hitler. Picking through conversations between Pierre Laval and Wehrmacht representatives, Pryce-Jones proves that Vichy cooperation went beyond facilitating the deportation of Jews. Laval knew that there were no "labor" camps at the end of the German train lines, but that did not concern him. His only thought was to use the twisted German racial...
...government reacted by launching what must have been the most intensive corpse hunt in history. Nearly half of France's 94,000-man police force was combing the country minutes after the disappearance of Petain's body was discovered. Roadblocks were set up on every highway leading from the Atlantic coast toward Verdun, where the culprits-who were presumed to be ultra-rightists-might be planning to bury the corpse. All trucks capable of hauling the 450-lb., zinc-lined oak coffin were stopped and systematically searched. Police also circled the sprawling cemetery at Douaumont, where workers...