Word: pryce
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...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...
...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 ideology as a bargaining chip...
...photographs compiled for Pryce-Jones by Michael Rand, art director of the London Sunday Times, include few dead bodies or bleeding babies. What you see are storm troopers touring the Eiffel Tower, young couples flirting in the streets of Mesnilmontant, and an old woman, who wears a yellow star, hurrying down the rue de Rivoli. People lived, some very normally, through all of those years. Most, like that old woman, probably never conceived of battles on the Eastern front, or Auschwitz. It is with Rand's pictures and a group of excerpted interviews that the author paints his truest protrait...
...contrast, there were those who chose to fight, knowing the danger of their actions, and others who really had no choice. Pryce-Jones buries his own description of the resistance movement and the Jewish community under a mountain of detail. He is unfortunately fascinated by the various underground groups and their foes in the German and Vichy hierarchy. But the heroes speak well enough for themselves...
...have $25 to throw around you could better spend it on this book than on pizza and beer. The stories Pryce-Jones and Rand reproduce are clearly valuable. Someone could learn something from them at a boring cocktail party. But the same has been told better by others, and ultimately, Paris in the Third Reich bears the flaw of its genre; it sacrifices unity for the specific...