World War II Day by Day

Paris, Occupied France · June 14, 1940

On this date in 1940 German troops marched into Paris, forcing the French govern­ment to move to Tours, then to Bor­deaux, where it set up an im­promptu head­quarters. In a futile plea to U.S. Presi­dent Franklin D. Roose­velt, the French govern­ment under Prime Min­is­ter Paul Rey­naud im­plored the United States for a decla­ra­tion of support or a decla­ra­tion of war against Germany. It didn’t happen. When the majority of French min­is­ters finally con­cluded that it was impos­sible to con­tinue fighting against both Ger­many and now Italy (Italian dic­ta­tor Benito Mus­so­lini had declared war on France on June 10), the prime minis­ter resigned. It was a stun­ning emotional and political collapse.

Rey­naud was succeeded by 84-year-old World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856–1951), who cobbled together a new Council of Minis­ters on June 16. Then, using the offices of neu­tral Spain, Pétain rushed to learn what Adolf Hitler required to halt mili­tary opera­tions against his country and sign an armis­tice. Hitler punished Ger­many’s cen­tury-old enemy by waiting until June 21 to reply. After the Franco-Ger­man armis­tice was signed on June 22, 1940, Pétain estab­lished a new French state (L’État fran­çais) centered in Vichy, Cen­tral France. Paris remained the official French capi­tal, to which Pétain always in­tended to return the govern­ment when this became pos­sible. Civil juris­dic­tion of the Vichy govern­ment extended over the whole of metro­poli­tan France except for Alsace-Lor­raine, a disputed territory in Eastern France under German administration.

While offi­cially neu­tral during the war, Vichy actively col­lab­o­rated with the Nazis. In his capa­city as head of state (Chef de l’État fran­çais, 1940–1944) and prime minis­ter (1940–1942), Pétain sup­pressed Vichy’s par­lia­ment and turned his regime into a non­democratic, repres­sive govern­ment aligned with, among other things, Ger­man anti-Semi­tic laws. French police organ­ized raids to arrest Jews and other “unde­sir­ables” in both the northern zone, occupied by the Wehr­macht (German armed forces), and the south­ern, or “free,” zone (Vichy France). One of the most noto­rious raids occurred in Mar­seille in late January 1943. After the war Pétain was con­victed of trea­son and sen­tenced to death, a sen­tence com­muted to life imprison­ment by his wartime enemy, Gen. Charles de Gaulle.

French Jews and the Marseille Roundup, January 22–24, 1943

Left: Pithiviers internment camp was a transit camp in Pithiviers, a town in the Loire Valley, south of Paris. One-fourth of the Jews living in France were rounded up by French and some­times German Gestapo police and deported to the death camps of East­ern Europe during the Vichy years. Few Jews in France, especially for­eigners, escaped depor­ta­tion and sur­vived the war without help from cou­ra­geous French men and women who willingly risked their liberty and often their lives by breaking French law.

Right: The Marseille Roundup of Jews took place in the Old Port (“Raeu­mung des Hafen­viertels”), which the Nazis con­sidered a “ter­rorist nest” because of its small, winding, and curvy streets. French police checked the iden­tity documents of 40,000 peo­ple, nabbing 2,000 Mar­seillese who were passed through a series of French tran­sit camps, even­tually ending up at the Drancy intern­ment camp out­side Paris, the last stop before the death camps in the East. The Mar­seille Round­up also en­com­passed the ex­pul­sion of an entire neighbor­hood of 30,000 per­sons after a house-by-house search by Ger­man police, assisted by their French counter­parts. Then the buildings were dynamited.

Left: Because of the importance the Nazis attached to the round­up of Mar­seille’s Jews, SS (Schutz­staffel) leader Carl Oberg, in charge of Ger­man police in France, in­cluding the Gestapo and the intel­ligence agency of the SS known as the Sicher­heits­dienst (SD), made the trip from Paris and trans­mitted to René Bousquet, Vichy Secre­tary Gene­ral of the French Police (in fur-trimmed coat with Ger­man officers, Janu­ary 23, 1943), orders directly received from Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler in Berlin.

Right: Gen. Hans-Gustav Felber (left); SS‑Sturmbannfuehrer Bernhard Griese, Commander Police Regiment Griese; and Carl Oberg at Mar­seille’s Gare d’Arenc freight train depot during the depor­ta­tion of Jews, Janu­ary 24, 1943. Oberg was the supreme autho­rity in France for managing anti-Jewish policy and the battle against the French Resis­tance. He deported well over 40,000 Jews from France.

Left: Deportation in Marseille at the freight train depot Gare d’Arenc under guard of the SS Police Regi­ment Griese and French police, Janu­ary 24, 1943. French police loaded women, children, the elderly, and the infirm into freight cars and split up families before the trains departed for transit camps.

Right: The Marseille Roundup was assisted by thugs, thieves, and mur­derers from the city’s under­world, who received 1,000 francs for every Jew caught, plus what­ever they could steal or extort from their victims. The Nazis could also depend on French in­formers to main­tain a steady stream of Jews to fill the deportation convoys.

Remembering the French Holocaust Through Memorials in the French Capital