The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (79 page)

role in turning public opinion against the Vichy regime and inspiring

France under the Nazis 405

more Frenchmen to resist the occupation actively. No longer able

to sit on the fence with the Vichy labor dragnet hanging over their

heads, many young men escaped to the mountainous regions of

southern France. Although these bands of labor deserters, who came

to be known as the
maquis
after the scrublands where they sheltered,

initially had no direct tie to de Gaulle or the resistance, they challenged Vichy authority by raiding STO offi ces for money and supplies. In this sense they resembled the Italian bandits who bedeviled

Napoleonic offi cials.

This shift in popular sentiment led resistance groups that had

been fragmented and largely inconsequential in the early years of

the occupation to become more active. They distributed propaganda,

intimidated collaborators, cut phone lines, burned crops, planted

bombs, and derailed trains. Most signifi cant, some groups executed

Vichyite offi cials and policemen after convicting them of treason in

absentia at secret trials. The communists remained the boldest faction, but they were joined by a variety of new organizations drawn

primarily from the moderate and left wings of the French political

spectrum. Reviving the Popular Front squabbles of the 1930s, these

various resistance bands barely trusted each other. It therefore took

considerable effort for de Gaulle’s representative Jean Moulin to

organize them into the Conseil National de la Résistance (National

Council of the Resistance). The National Council gave the appearance

of unity, but it actually refl ected the resistance leaders’ decision to

defer debates over the nature and character of the new France until

the postwar era.

Despite this growing opposition, there were still many Frenchmen who remained committed to Pétain because they considered the

resistance and
maquis
fi ghters criminals and terrorists. For those with

conservative sympathies, a communist postwar France would have

meant exchanging the German occupation for an even more hateful

form of tyranny. The Vichy regime also had the support of bureaucrats and functionaries who preferred order and stability to the chaos

of the resistance, and many offi cials gambled that the Allies could not

mount an invasion on a suffi cient scale to liberate France. Lastly, the

resistance executions of convicted traitors demonstrated that those

who rallied to Pétain would have a hard time switching sides.

This meant that the Nazis still had the necessary local allies to

maintain imperial control over France even as their rule became

406 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

progressively more brutal. Having lost faith in Pétain and the French

police after the 1941 communist assassination campaign, Hitler gave

the SS and Gestapo greater freedom to operate. This provoked General von Stülpnagel into resigning as head of the MFB in early 1942,

and his replacement and cousin, Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, had

authority only over explicitly military matters. This gave Higher SS

and Police Commander Carl-Albrecht Oberg a free hand to deal with

the resistance. Dispensing with wholesale hostage executions, his

men attacked the families of resistance members and spirited off to

concentration camps suspects not immediately worthy of being shot.

Oberg also raised a French arm of the Gestapo, comprised largely

of criminals, that further terrorized the imperial regime’s enemies

through extortion, torture, and outright murder. When these more

targeted tactics failed to suppress French opposition suffi ciently, German soldiers and SS men fell back on the time-honored methods of

imperial intimidation by wiping out communities they suspected of

aiding resistance groups.

Even the slaughter of French civilians did not dissuade Vichy

bureaucrats and policemen from cooperating with the Nazis. René

Bousquet, Laval’s youthful secretary general of police, convinced

himself that he was helping the Germans arrest anarchists, terrorists,

communists, and other mutual enemies of the two regimes. Seeking

to salvage as much French sovereignty as possible by demonstrating

to their imperial masters that the Vichy courts and security forces

could maintain order, Laval and Bousquet directed French policemen to help the Nazis round up victims when Himmler demanded at

least one hundred thousand French Jews for the concentration camps.

Although some offi cers tipped off people marked for arrest, the Paris

police seized more than twelve thousand Jews in July 1942. Most

were foreign-born because Laval refused to turn over French citizens

on the grounds of national sovereignty. All told, Vichy offi cials sent

between forty thousand and sixty thousand Jews from France to their

deaths in Nazi concentration camps.

The Vichyites had little to show for this complicity in genocide.

Deeming Bousquet too timid, the Nazis took direct control of the

French police and forced Laval to make Joseph Darnand police secretary general in December 1943. Darnand had proved his worth

to both Laval and the Germans by transforming the paramilitary

SOL into the Milice Française (French Militia). Composed largely of

France under the Nazis 407

fanatics, opportunists, and blatant criminals, the Milice grew steadily

from Laval’s praetorian guard into a uniformed forty-thousand-man

army that was Vichy’s main weapon against the resistance. Darnand

was also doubly trustworthy in German eyes because as an honorary

colonel in the French SS volunteer grenadier regiment, he was the

fi rst high-ranking Vichy offi cial to swear loyalty to Hitler.

Darnand’s total embrace of the Nazi cause was symptomatic of

the Vichy regime’s political and moral bankruptcy in the fi nal years

of the war. As mounting Allied victories and the stench of Laval’s collaborationist policies alienated French moderates, the leaders of the

Paris-based extremist groups joined him in taking over what was left

of the Vichy state. Pétain was still popular, but his authority waned

even further when Laval returned the main French ministries to Paris

and Darnand’s men arrested any offi cial they suspected of cooperating with the resistance.

This bitter civil war raging just below the surface of occupied

France made switching sides extremely complicated and dangerous.

When Pierre Pucheu, the Vichy minister of the interior from 1941

to 1942, fl ed to North Africa after the Operation Torch landings, de

Gaulle’s National Committee of Liberation tried and executed him

for treason. Declaring their intention to rid France of “all men who

played politics with the Vichy government, without any distinction

between the
bons
(good) and
mauvais
(bad),” the committee created a

Purge Commission to “mete out adequate punishment” to those who

“by their acts, their writings, or their personal attitude, either encouraged enemy undertakings, or prejudiced the action of the United

Nations and of Frenchmen who are resisting; or have interfered with

constitutional institutions or basic public liberties.”51 Pucheu more

than fi t this description given his role in selecting communist hostages for execution.

Pucheu’s failed gambit demonstrated how profoundly Nazi

imperial rule had blurred French conceptions of political and social

legitimacy. Far from resolving the divisions of the 1930s, the French

surrender and armistice threw wide open the struggle to defi ne the

boundaries and character of the French nation. In 1944, this competition took the form of bloody battles between the Milice and the

maquis
, as well as audacious resistance attacks on the collaborationists. All told, thousands of Frenchmen died in this fratricidal violence

during the course of the occupation. Popular French history recalls

408 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

this as a great national struggle, but the resistance’s appearance of

unity as the Nazi regime weakened obscured sharp divisions between

the communists, Gaullists, and even monarchists over who would take

control of France after the liberation. Additionally, as in Napoleonic

Italy, some of the people who styled themselves resistance members

were little more than criminals and thugs who preyed on local communities under the cover of attacking collaborators.

These tensions became more apparent after the Allied landing

in Normandy on June 6, 1944. In returning to France for the fi rst

time since 1940, de Gaulle’s goal was to preempt the communists

and head off British and American plans to create a transitional

military government by making it appear that his forces liberated

France. Betraying his own imperial biases, he “whitened” the Second French Armored Division, the sole Free French formation operating with the Allied forces, by replacing twenty thousand Arab and

African soldiers with resistance members. This unit was not part

of the initial D-Day invasion force, but de Gaulle convinced the

Allied generals to send it into Paris ahead of the British, Canadian,

and American troops who had done most of the fi ghting during the

breakout from Normandy. Radio broadcasts and newsreels showed

white Free French soldiers marching through the capital, but they

never would have been able to defeat the Nazi garrison, which had

swelled to one million men by 1944, with a single division. Indeed,

the French were fortunate that the German commander ignored

direct orders to destroy the city.

The Normandy landings and the subsequent fall of Paris on August

25, 1944, threw the Vichyites into shock. While they understood that

the Third Reich was losing the war, they appear to have convinced

themselves that the liberation would never actually come. The Paris

extremists wanted the Germans to bring the LVF and French SS grenadier regiment back from the eastern front to fi ght the invasion, but

Laval and Pétain simply asked French offi cials not to take sides and

remain at their posts on the delusional grounds that: “we are not in

the war.” Laval plotted to preempt de Gaulle by recalling the National

Assembly to lead a transitional government, while Pétain hoped to

negotiate a truce between the Americans and Nazis in preparation for

a Christian war with the Soviets. The French police, by comparison,

deftly switched sides by staging a timely uprising on the eve of the

liberation of Paris. As the last of the fence sitters fi nally chose sides,

France under the Nazis 409

Parisians derisively referred to army offi cers who suddenly turned up

in long-mothballed uniforms as “naphthalenes.”

While these small fi sh hoped to navigate the liberation’s shifting

tides, the Nazis had no intention of letting their Vichy clients come

to terms with the Allies. They forced Pétain and Laval to join the

German retreat back into the Reich and installed them in a castle at

Sirmaringen, a small Danube River town near the Swiss border, as a

French government in exile. Both leaders fi nally refused to play the

role of puppet any longer, and Jacques Doriot, the leader of the fascist

Parti Populaire Français, assumed the Vichy leadership. With France

overrun, he ruled a pathetic exile community of collaborationist and

milicien
diehards that numbered over forty thousand men, women,

and children. Conditions at Sirmaringen deteriorated markedly as the

Allied armies pressed in on Germany, and alcoholism and malnutrition led to a growing sense of hopelessness among the refugees.

Nevertheless, the most committed and desperate collaborators still

joined their Nazi masters in the suicidal defense of the Third Reich.

The German forces facing the Soviet Union’s January 1945 offensive

were outnumbered fi ve to one and largely stood alone as the Nazi

satellite states in Eastern Europe surrendered or were overrun. Lacking the manpower and material to fi ght a multifront war, Hitler was

caught in a vise as the allied armies closed in from Poland, Italy, and

France. Fearing retribution for their genocidal
Lebensraum
policies

in the east, Nazi leaders were most concerned with holding off the

vengeance-driven Soviets. Consequently, they desperately fi lled out

their eastern lines with old men, boys, and the most loyal subject

auxiliaries from the Reich’s lost territories.

This last group included thousands of Frenchmen. In the summer of 1944, the Nazis cobbled the LVF, the French SS, the French

Gestapo, and the remnants of the Milice into the Charlemagne SS

Division. Equipped with antiquated tanks and numbering only seven

thousand men, the unit stood little chance against the Red Army and

was destroyed defending Pomerania in February 1945. Two months

later, a German SS general organized the most diehard French survivors of the Pomeranian debacle into the Charlemagne Battalion for

a bloody last stand in the ruins of Berlin. There they joined the most

extreme anti-Bolshevik and reactionary fanatics that Europe had to

offer in defending the Reich’s capital. As the Soviets took the city in

savage block-by-block fi ghting, Hitler relied on these Norwegians,