Vichy, France · September 22, 1940 As early as June 1940, after French resistance to the German conquest of France crumbled, Japan made overtures to French authorities for permission to station troops in French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) and for their warships to take up naval stations off northern Indochinese ports. On this…
Paris, Occupied France · August 21, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Paris, a 22-year-old member of the French Resistance named Georges Pierre, who took the nom de guerre of Fabien or Fredo, fired two bullets into the back of Alfons Moser, a young German naval officer, at the Barbes Rochechouart metro station. These…
Paris, France · July 23, 1945 Following the military defeat of France by Nazi Germany in June 1940, World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain proclaimed a new French government on July 10, 1940. Pétain held the title of “President of the Council” instead of President of France. His government, which accorded him extraordinary powers, was officially…
Paris, Occupied France · July 16, 1942 On June 22, 1940, representatives of Marshal Philippe Pétain, premier of the French Third Republic, signed a ceasefire with Germany, 44 days after the Wehrmacht had invaded France. Early that October Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy government—named after the resort community in which his administration had settled—approved the first French anti-Semitic…
Mont Mouchet, South-Central France · June 20, 1944 During the Allied invasion of France (Operation Overlord), the Maquis and other French resistance groups played a role in delaying the arrival of German reinforcements to the Normandy beachhead as well as in the eventual Allied victory in France. The FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Interieur for “French…
London, England · June 18, 1940 Four days after the fall of Paris to German invaders, Charles de Gaulle, a tall (6 ft, 4 in), young (49), relatively unknown French general who had escaped to England on June 17, 1940, addressed the French people in a radio broadcast from London on this date in 1940. In a celebrated…
Munich, Germany · June 17, 1940 On this date in 1940 Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, drawing on provisions of the secret protocol in the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact with his Nazi ally, ordered an attack on the Baltic state of Latvia. (The 1939 protocol had already returned dividends to the two conspirator…
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…
Paris, Occupied France · May 27, 1942 On May 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler, having ended Poland’s existence in September 1939, turned his wrath on the democracies in the West. The Netherlands and Belgium capitulated to his war machine in May. Representatives of Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had recently been named premier of the French Third…
CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE 2009
“…an essential book. It provides precise facts and figures for many issues that have heretofore been presented in impressionistic terms.” · The International History Review
Basing his extensive research into hitherto unexploited archival documentation on both sides of the Rhine, Allan Mitchell has uncovered the inner workings of the German military regime from the Wehrmacht’s triumphal entry into Paris in June 1940 to its ignominious withdrawal in August 1944. Although mindful of the French experience and the fundamental issue of collaboration, the author concentrates on the complex problems of occupying a foreign territory after a surprisingly swift conquest. By exploring in detail such topics as the regulation of public comportment, economic policy, forced labor, culture and propaganda, police activity, persecution and deportation of Jews, assassinations, executions, and torture, this study supersedes earlier attempts to investigate the German domination and exploitation of wartime France. In doing so, these findings provide an invaluable complement to the work of scholars who have viewed those dark years exclusively or mainly from the French perspective.
