Occupied France

Not a state so much as a country divided into zones under different kinds of control, with the argument about who could speak for it still running. After the armistice of June 1940 Germany occupied the north and the Atlantic coast directly, roughly three-fifths of the country, while the Vichy government under Petain administered the south from a spa town and retained the fleet and the empire. Alsace and Lorraine were annexed outright and their young men conscripted into the Wehrmacht. France paid enormous occupation costs, and a demarcation line cut the country in two with permits required to cross it. Vichy was not a passive administration: it passed its own antisemitic statutes in October 1940 without being asked, and French police carried out the Vel d'Hiv round-up of July 1942, arresting over thirteen thousand Jews in Paris, most of whom died at Auschwitz. Around seventy-five thousand Jews were deported from France and fewer than three thousand returned. Germany occupied the southern zone as well in November 1942, and the fleet scuttled itself at Toulon. Resistance networks were unified under Jean Moulin in 1943, and he was captured and tortured to death that year. Liberation came in 1944. France did not officially acknowledge the state's responsibility for the deportations until Chirac did so in 1995. Vichy in the Auvergne was chosen for its hotels rather than its importance. The Free French under de Gaulle broadcast from London from June 1940. Around two million French soldiers were held as prisoners in Germany throughout. Oradour-sur-Glane, where an SS unit killed six hundred and forty-two people in 1944, has been left in ruins as a memorial.

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