It could still occur well a few centuries before our people are penetrated of enough spirit and culture so that one can say them that for a long time they were Barbarians.
(Goethe - city by E Ludwig in History of Germany, p.283)
The defeat opens the doors of the German night. One night which falls as of May 20, 1940, is ten days only after the entry in France of Wehrmacht. With this date, a signed ordinance Der Oberbefelshaber of Heeres (the Commander as a head of the Army) place companies given up by their persons in charge under the direction for provisional administrators appointed by the Commanders for group for armies. This measurement, which considers liquidation or alienation of the aforesaid companies, touches full whip the Jewish goods whose owners legitimately fled in front of the threat Nazi. This one specifies on July 16, 1940, when the application of the plan of germanisation of Alsace and Lorraine involves the expulsion of the Jewish residents and the seizure of their goods.
Thus starts a process which, after the German ordinance of September 27, 1940 relating to measurements against the Jews, will lead, in 1942, with the decision Nazi to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. Wounded France and the soldier who, vis-a-vis the enemy, agreed to remain with his bedside are not responsible for the design and the execution of such a crime. Silence on this subject, observed, during three weeks of the lawsuit of Pétain, by its more savage adversaries, proves it éloquemment[1 ]. And, two years later, in the prison of the island of Yeu during a tight interrogation of almost two hours, the parliamentary Commitee, charged to inquire into the events which have occurred in France of 1933 to 1945, the least question about the tragedy lived by the people juif.[2 will not pose to him ]
However, the time which master key erases testimonys of the actors responsible for the time. And "under the influence of an inversion historiographic, relayed by the médias"[3 ], a new history takes form, according to which "the vichysme and the Nazism, it was the similar one with same, even that the first, at the bottom, was much guiltier than the second"[4 ].
It is an operation of subversion aiming at diaboliser the Marshal and to disqualify it without call by the Pétain-Auschwitz amalgam. It is thus necessary to answer it.
*
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The wave of anti-semitism which touches Germany in 1933, as of the accession with the capacity of the author of Mein Kampf, leaves the indifferent world. The phenomenon is not new, and no one imagines, even within the Jewish populations of Europe, only persecutions and expatriations whose German Jews are victims can be the precursory signs of the unnamable one. The great allied, inert powers in front of the ideology and the rearmament of IIIè Reich, are worried especially problems raised by the reception of immigrants of a nationality enemy and pertaining to proud people of an identity preserved during centuries, by refusing any religious integration, with the risk to be too often victim of multiple forms of ségrégation.[5 ]
With its birth, the party national-Socialist had affirmed his policy anti-semite. Items 4 and 6 of its program in 25 points, February 20, 1920, specify the line of it:
- only, a brother of race can be citizen. Only, of race that which is of German blood, without consideration of confession is brother. No Jew can be a brother of race (point 4)
- the right to decide direction and laws of the State can belong only to citizens (not 6)[6 ]
Five years later, in 1925, Mein Kampf denounces judéo-capitalism and the judéo-Communism to which it allots the responsibility for the Large War and the German defeat: "All that, in the whole world, is printed against Germany is written by Jews, just as, in times of peace and during the war, the press of the Jewish stock-brokers and the Marxists systematically poked hatred against Germany until the States have, the ones after the others, given up neutrality and, sacrificing the interests of the people, entered the world coalition which made us the guerre"[7 ].
The author, Adolf Hitler, did not forget his years of war and in particular the night from the 13 to October 14, 1918, when, close to Ypres, its regiment was subjected during long hours to foul air of the shells of British artillery. It writes: "If one had, at the beginning and the war, held only once twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrews, corrupters of the people, under poisoned gases that hundreds of thousands of our best German workers of any origine and all professions had to endure on the face, the sacrifice of thousands of men had not been useless. On the contrary, if one had gotten rid in time of these some twelve thousand rascals, one would have perhaps saved the existence of a million goods and German brave men full with avenir"[8 ].
The disciples of Freud will find in this text the origin of the "final solution". The historians will observe that the poison gases were employed, for the first time, in April 1915, by the German army, precisely in Ypres where the Hitler corporal will be itself victim, three years later. Simple and just reward of the things.
With his savage anti-semitism, the Nazi head associates his hatred for victorious France which imposed a peace treaty whose rigour is the principal leaven of national-socialisme: "the role that France, urged on by the thirst for revenge and systematically guided by the Jews, plays today in Europe, is a sin against the existence of white humanity and will unchain one day against these people all the avengers spirits of a generation which will have recognized in the pollution of the races the hereditary sin of the humanité".[9 ]
As of the accession of Hitler to the capacity, the decree of April 7, 1933 lays off the civils servant "of nonAryan ascent", and a text of April 11, 1933 defines this one starting from the criterion of the judaïc religion. Raul Hilberg written on this subject: "the Nazis worried very little about the" Jewish nose "; what worried them, be "the juive"[10 influence ]. These provisions are confirmed by the law on the citizenship of September 15, 1935 and its implementing regulation of November 14 1935.[11 ]
Parallel to discriminatory measurements, Reich Nazi gets busy to drive out the 520 000 Jews living, in 1933, inside his borders. At the beginning of 1938, following the emigration, this population was reduced. It increases notably, with the annexation of Austria, in March 1938. But the Western countries are from now on reticent and refuse to receive new refugees. The Swiss federal government makes known, August 10, 1938, that Switzerland is resolutely opposed to the judaïsation of the country;as from October 5, 1938, the passports of the Jews are plugged of a large J to red ink in order to identify them without ambiguïté[12 ]. In December 1938, George Bonnet, Foreign Minister, inform Ribbentrop that France does not wish any more to accomodate Jews coming from Germany; it even thinks of sending 10 000 Jews to Madagascar[13 ]. According to Raymond Aron, the French Jews themselves had reacted highly on arrival in France, after 1933, of the German Jews; "they were boches"[14 ]. Speaking about the foreign Jews, Marc Bloch will not hesitate to write, in 1941: "Their cause is not exactly ours. We have the right to say it since it is vrai"[15 ].
Less than 10 days after the invasion of France, Germany enacts its first measurement aiming at the Jews. The ordinance of 20 May 1940, applicable in the occupied territories of France, of Belgium, of Luxembourg and the Netherlands, prescribed designation by "the groups of armies or the authorities indicated by them" provisional administrators with the head of the companies given up by their responsible heads.
Vis-a-vis the threat which this provision of a general nature constitutes which more particularly touches the Jewish companies given up by their leaders, the French government creates, by the law of August 16, 1940, the Steering Committees for the industry and the trade which, with the great fury of the Germans, interpose the State between the occupant and the companies. Then, by the law of September 10, 1940, the French State affirms its right to indicate itself the provisional administrators of the private companies their leaders.
Applicable in free zone as in occupied zone, these measurements relate to a majority of companies whose Jewish owners left the occupied zone or who, later, will cease their activities in free zone, either voluntarily or pursuant to the professional exclusions decided by the law of June 2 1941[16 ].
The mode of the provisional administration extended to the buildings, except for the buildings being used for the owner-occupied housing of the Jews. In the event of sale of a good, the law stipulated that the product of liquidation was versed with the account of the Jewish owner, with the Case of the deposits and consignments, where it would bear interest. A tenth of the sum was versed with the same case to constitute mutual aid funds intended to come to assistance of the Jews needy. There was thus, in the event of sale, a transmutation where movable and real goods were converted in cash whose State guaranteed the property in Juifs[17 ].
In fact, no company was sold in free zone where 825 provisional administrators had been named. In the Northern zone, on 29.831 listed companies (more 12.396 buildings), 7.340 were liquidated. Were sold to not-Jews - i.e. "aryanized" within the meaning of the terminology Nazi - 7.972 companies and 1.708 buildings. Thus remained in function, when the occupation ended, 14.519 provisional administrators for the companies (and 10.688 for the buildings). The former owners took again possession of their goods then, at the end one period during which the French services in charge of the control of the provisional administration had been opposed, as much as they could it, with the German influence on the economy française[18 ].
*
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The absolute anteriority of the German legislation on the provisions of safeguard taken by the French government is, in this case, indisputable. It is brutally confirmed on July 16, 1940.As from this date, and in violation of the convention of armistice which treated only territorial occupation and not of annexation, the germanisation of Alsace-Lorraine is affirmed. The organizations Nazis make hand-low on the goods belonging to the Jews. Those are driven out with other guilty French of an intransigent patriotism. The North-African ones are victims of the same measurement.
Expulsions concern, initially, more than 20 000 people. They will continue, in particular in November 1940, by that of 70 000 Mosellans[19 ]. They will exceed, on the whole, 100 000 Alsatian and Lorraine, of which numbers peasants whose grounds will be taken by colonists come from beyond the rhine. They express brutality and cynicism let us teutons. But, paradoxically, it prove that the anti-semitism of the occupant does not comprise a criminal intention yet. The apparatus Nazi applies in Alsace-Lorraine the racial legislation of Reich hitlérien whose objective was then not to exterminate, but to drive out the Jews of Germany. Thus in October 1940 Gestapo off-sets in nonoccupied France 7 500 Jews, as a majority of the Germans and Autrichiens.[20 ]
Such is not, in 1940, the reception that France reserves for Alsatian-Lorraine of any confession. It is about French to which the Marshal is particularly attached. Its reaction is expressed, September 3, 1940, in a protest transmitted to the German authorities by the Huntziger General, Minister for the War and head of the French delegation at the armistice Council:
Staff
N° 3335/EM
Wiesbaden, September 3, 1940
SUBJECT: A.S. of measurements
catches by the Government
of Reich in the départe-
ments of the Low-Rhine, Top
The Rhine and of the Moselle
Note
for Mr. President of the Commission
allemande of Armistice, General of the Infantry
von Stülpnagel
My General,
Of order of my Government, I have the honor to transmit the following declaration to you:
"Since the entry of the German forces in the departments of Haut-Rhin, the Low-Rhine and the Moselle, the German authorities of occupation took a great number of measurements which cause to deprive France of its rights of sovereignty on these territories.
Among these measurements, the French Government wants to quote only the following ones:
1° the Prefects, Sub-prefects and Mayors, like numbers civils servant of nonlocal origin or whose tendencies passed for suspect, their respective seats were évincés.
2° Mgr Heintz, Bishop certificated of Metz, was driven out of its diocese. Several members of the clergy, as well secular as regular, were also expelled under the pretext which they were of language or French mentality.
3° Mgr Ruch, Bishop certificated of Strasbourg, was seen prohibiting the access of its diocese and, consequently, the resumption of its ministry.
4° Mr. Joseph Bürckel was named, August 7, gauleiter of Lorraine, and Mr. Robert Wagner, gauleiter of Alsace. The first of the provinces was attached to the gau of the Saar-Palatinat, and the second with that of Bade.
5° Alsace and Lorraine were integrated in the civil administration of Germany. The border and the customs police force were carried in extreme cases Western of these territories.
6° the railroads were built-in in the German network.
7° the administration of the Stations, Telegraphs and Telephones was taken in hand by the German Post offices which gradually substitute for the personnel in place their own personnel.
8° the French language is eliminated as well from the administrative life as of the public use.
9° the names of the localities are germanisés.
10° the racial legislation of Germany is introduced into the country; with the favour of this measurement, Israélites are expelled as those of the nationals which the German authority holds for intruders.
11° Seuls, the Alsatian ones and the Lorraine ones which agree to be recognized as being of German stock are allowed to reinstate their hearth.
12° the inheritance of Associations of political nature and the Jews is struck of confiscation, just as the goods acquired subsequently to November 11, 1918 by the French.
Nothing illustrates better the spirit which animates these measurements, in themselves arbitrary, which publicly pronounced words on July 16, in Strasbourg, by Mr. Robert Wagner. Making state of elimination in the course of all the elements of stock or foreign nationality, this senior official affirmed that the intention of Germany was to regulate once and for all the question of Alsace.
A similar policy, which could not be the fact of subordinated bodies of occupation, is equivalent to a disguised annexation and is formally contrary upon the engagements subscribed by Germany to Rethondes.
Indeed:
It is with whole France, in its borders of the State of 1939, that Germany signed the Convention of June 22.
It is the integrity of whole France which Germany included/understood in the Convention of Armistice by specifying that the French Government had the right to manage the occupied and nonoccupied territories, without territorial limitation any.
Extremely of its right, the French Government raises a solemn protest against measurements taken, in violation of the Convention of Armistice, with regard to the Alsatian and Lorraine departments and of their population and which constitute an annexation in fact of these territories ".
Please accept, my General, the insurance of my high consideration.
Signed: Huntziger[21 ]
A new protest of the Marshal against massive expulsions of November 1940 is given on November 18, 1940 to the General von Stülpnagel by the Doyen General - successor of the Huntziger General at the armistice Council: "Of order of my government, I am charged to raise a solemn protest against these expulsions… France is placed in the presence of an act of force… of an unjust act… France did not subscribe to this transfer of population. She cannot accept it. She will not cease disputing the cogency of them ".
These interventions answer the falsified history which teaches that Pétain ignored the fate of theLorraine ones. The désinformé reader will be thus surprised to learn that the signed protest Huntziger is one of the 112 protests of order général[22 ] - without counting the interventions concerning the concrete cases - which spread out of July 6, 1940 to August 20, 1944, day of the removal of the Marshal by Gestapo.
Recurring protests, bus for the head of those which had given their life or the years of their youth in order to reconquer the steps of the East, the drama lived by the Alsatian ones and the Lorraine ones, of any confession, remains the object, as well as the fate of the its constant concern, prisoners of war. It testifies some, November 30, 1940, in a vibrating broadcast short speech: "French, since November 11, 70 000 Lorraine arrived in free zone, having had all to give up: their house, their goods, their village, their church, the cemetery where their ancestors sleep… They very lost, they come to ask asylum to their brothers of France… It is of the French of great race, with the energetic heart, the valiant heart… One needs that the reception which is to them fact is the reception of the heart, that which one holds to brothers and to loved parents ".
In these words, nothing against the German. Its despisers will benefit from it to overpower it, while concealing its 112 written protests. He, Pétain, will explain its public silence: "the Germans are sadists; if I them dissatisfied, they will crush the Alsatian ones. You do not know them!"[23 ].
Sadism! The word is weak to qualify the machiavelic procedure selected by the promoters of the Ordinance of September 27, 1940 relating to measurements against the Jews. Applicable in occupied zone, it forces the French administrative authorities indeed to open "a special register" to register the obligatory declarations of those and those which belong to the Jewish religion or which have more than two grandparents of the same confession. It simultaneously forces to the leaders communities israélites to provide "the justifications and documentations necessary for the application of this ordinance".
That which, today, knows how the lists thus drawn up will be used, two years later, discovers with stupor the fatal and satanic process which, engages the Jews themselves, as well as the French administration, in the preparation of a génocide that nobody in the world can then imagine. The more so as prohibited article 2 of the ordinance accused "with the Jews which fled the zone occupied to go back there". Nothing thus makes it possible to think that the mode which expels the Jews of Germany, of Alsace, of Lorraine and of occupied zone, in their refusing any hope of return, will require one day, under the fallacious pretext of creating a Jewish State in Poland, their delivery and that their co-religionists.
In any assumption, the French government had tried to be opposed to the promulgation of the German ordinance of September 27, 1940 of which it had been informed beforehand of the letter and the spirit. Its protest, September 25, 1940, near the authorities of occupation testifies some:
"the General of Laurencie indicates that it was advised by the liaison officer of the head of the German military Administration that certain measurements would be taken very soon against the israélites. According to a declaration of the colonel… these measurements will relate to the four following points:
1° No israélite will be authorized by the German authorities to go free zone in occupied zone;
2° the israélites currently residing in occupied zone will be able to remain there. They however will be compelled to present itself at the police force under definitely definite conditions.
3° the commercial firms and stores belonging to israélites will receive a special inscription, definitely apparent, indicating the non-aryanisation of their owners.
4° Any commercial firm pertaining to a israélite not having joined the occupied territories yet will be put in exploitation under the direction of a manager.
"Without approaching the bottom of the problem which is thus raised by the authorities of occupation, I announce you that the decision taken by the General seems me to call of our share the following observations:
"measurements which the German Administration plans to apply exceed the exercise of the rights recognized to the occupying Power as a whole; they tend to create in part of the French territory a mode of exception and, by a unilateral act of the German Authorities in a field which concerns the only French Authorities, they break the administrative unit of France, unit however recognized by the Convention of armistice.
"It is another point which must also hold our attention. In do the application of measurements in question, on which basis the German Authorities propose to establish the discrimination which they consider? The racial characteristics, the terminology of the names are often dubious criteria. As for the denominational base, it is difficult to call upon it in France where the individuals are not held to officially declare the religion to which they belong, where the marital status does not mention the confession to which the ascending ones belonged. This uncertainty is likely to give place to incidents regrettables"[24 ].
Useless protest. The German ordinance relating to measurements against the Jews appears on September 27, 1940. Its promulgation is against the Convention of the Hague which prohibits with the occupying power to legislate. The French government does not intend to let Reich interfere into the legislative and lawful field for which it is only responsible. Such will be its constant attitude. It expressed it for the provisional administrator nomination, while interposing between Germans and companies. It decides to act in the same way between Germans and Jews. Thus is explained, without justifying it, the signature by the Marshal, October 3, 1940, of the first bearing act statute of the Jews. Decision which contradicts the protests of September 3, 1940 and September 25, 1940, which protested against the racial measurements taken by the occupant. Who more is, with the reason not to break "the administrative unit" of France, the law of October 3, 1940 goes beyond of the aforesaid measurements, and, in particular, extends them to the free zone.
*
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Under the terms of the law of October 3, 1940, revised by the law of June 2, 1941, which is Jewish that results from at least three grandparents of Jewish religion, or of two grandparents of Jewish religion, if it is itself of Jewish religion or if its spouse is Jewish. From now on, the Jews are excluded - except exemption granted in Council of State - from a certain number of public administrations and Parlement[25 ]. The other public office remains open to the Jews ex-serviceman of 14-18 or listed in 39-40, like to ascending, women and descendants of the soldiers died for France. But no access is authorized to the professions being attached to the press, the radio, the cinema and, generally, the spectacles.[26 ]
For the liberal professions, a numerus clausus is fixed. It would have been 0,8 %, and even 0,4 % for the professions requiring French nationality, if one had retained a percentage proportional to the Jewish population living in France, is approximately 330.000 hearts of which 50 % had French nationality. It is fixed at 2 % and concerns in particular the bar, medicine, the offices public and ministerial, the architects, the dentists, the midwives and the pharmacists. This rate, five times superior with the percentage of the French Jews within the French population, shows that the legislator held account owing to the fact that the Jews are, as a whole, more carried towards the liberal professions than towards manual work.
For the access to the higher education, the percentage of Jewish students allowed to be registered each year is carried to 3 % of the manpower of the students not-Jews, with priority with ex-serviceman and with their children. Percentage which it is advisable to bring closer to the rates of population (0,8 and 0,4 %) pointed out above. In North Africa, this rate is carried to 14 %, but the Crémieux decree is reported, which, October 24, 1870, had granted the French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria; measure which was discriminatory to the Moslems, and whose maintenance, after the defeat, was likely to start unverifiable movements on the territories of the Maghreb whose strategic importance was capital. Eisenhower, itself, will opinera in this direction, after the unloading of 1942[27 November ].
*
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Thus, the defeat for which the whole responsibility falls on those, French and Combined, which wasted the heritage of the victory of 1918, is the catalyst of a reaction which results in iniquitous provisions. Iniquitous by their discriminatory character whose tragic incidences remain unforeseeable in 1940. These provisions fall under a general context of anti-semitism whose resurgence is reinforced by the responsibility charged to the rhéteurs for left, and singularly with Leon Blum, in the unpreparedness of the country for the tests which owed the abattre[28 ]. A Leon Blum who, according to François Mauriac, "had leaning for the siens"[29 ], which honoured its convictions, but made it vulnerable to criticisms which denounced the inassimilable character of the people juif[30 ]. In this respect, one of its co-religionists, Maxime Blocq-Mascart, written, in June 1942: "He was the first president of the socialist and Jewish Council. Moreover, him which could pass for equivalent, surrounded itself by many Jews. It appears that this Jew has only Jewish friends, that it relies only on Jews. The experiment was harmful and proves that the assimilation was still incomplète"[31 ].
Fernand Braudel evokes the major reasons of them: "the only sure thing, it is that the destiny of Israel, its force, its perenniality, its torment hold so that there remained a hard core obstinately refusing to be diluted…"[32 ]. What a religious authority israélite expresses in a more picturesque way: "Put oil glass in a water barrel; oil will remain separately. Double the quantity of water, triple it, multiply by ten it, centuplicate it, oil glass will never mix with cheap liquid. It is thus of our race"[33 ]. And the spirits, attaches with the French tradition of the assimilation, worried about a militant faith which proclaimed: "We are the holy people (…) We thank Jéhovah for not having made us similar to the other people (…) We are the people élu"[34 ].
However, the responsibility for the disaster was largely shared by politicians for all the confessions, as well as by the apparatuses of the parties of which the plays, sacrificing to the personal ambitions or utopian ideologies, with the detriment of the national interest, had caused the instability and the impotence of the mode. The decision to draw aside these persons in charge for the alleys of the capacity and the public office could be implemented, in accordance with the institutions, by the replacement with the key positions of the men whose one wanted to limit or neutralize the influence. It did not justify to legislate and, following the example law on the congregations or of the sanguinary ostracism of the revolutionists of Year I with regard to the Church, of its faithful and above, to deprive a whole Nation as a community, with the reason which it was of israélite confession, of the integrity of its civic rights; while forbidding even its members to achieve their French duties, duties which a number of them had filled with honor in peace as in the war. In this respect, how not to quote Marc Bloch: "Attached to my fatherland by an already long family tradition, nourished of his spiritual heritage and his history, incompetent in truth to conceive some another where I can breathe at ease, I liked it much and served as all my forces. I never tested that my quality of Jew put at these feelings least the obstacle"[35 ].
One finds in these words the spirit of Andre Maurois to which Henry Bernstein - the known dramatic author - reproached for having given up his patronym of Herzog, at the same time as it reproached him its kindness with regard to the Marshal, head of the French State. "You disavow your Jewish origins, had written Bernstein, if the circumstances give you on my way, do not tighten me the hand, because I will refuse to tighten it". And Maurois had answered: "I am Jewish and I never disavowed it, but I am French initially. As for your refusal to tighten me the hand, it is the first good news which I record since the beginning of the guerre"[36 ].
In its Memories, André Maurois will report that its candidature for the French Academy had been fought by an academician who estimated that the Company already counted, among his members, a Jew: Bergson, and that that was enough. The Pétain marshal had then intervened for tancer the opponent: "Sir, the question is not there, the only question is to know if Mr. Maurois is a good French writer, and that yourself do not think of the nier"[37 ]. Observation all the more right and sincere that, in its letter of candidature, Maurois specified that it had written it "on the council of Mr. Pétain"[38 Marshal ].
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After the invasion of Poland, in September 1939, it are more than two million Polish Jews which fall under the yoke Nazi. But the doors of the emigration are closed. Those of the evacuation seem to open with the "Madagascar plan": the Large Island would become, by, the possession peace treaty of victorious Reich; a zone would be defined there in order to create a Jewish reserve whose expenses of installation would be covered by the goods that the deportees would on leave behind eux.[39 ] June 17, 1940, in Munich, Hitler answers in Mussolini which required of him what it considered about the emire colonial French: "One could create a Jewish State in Madagascar!"[40 ]
Heydrich[41 ] "had been filled with enthusiasm" by this idea. It enabled him to carry out the mission that Göring had entrusted to him, by decree of January 24, 1939, and who was initially limited to the organization of the emigration of all the Jews of Reich. Mission extended by the directive which it receives, July 31, 1941, of same Göring: "Supplementing the provisions of the decree of 24 January 1939 charging you with bringing to the Jewish question the most favorable solution according to circumstances', by the emigration or the evacuation, I give you mission of taking all preparatory measurements necessary, which it is about the organization, of the implementation, of the average materials, to obtain a total solution of the Jewish question in the zone of German influence in Europe… I instruct you, moreover, to address an overall plan soon… to carry out the desired final solution of the juive"[42 question ].
The objective to be reached is specified towards the end of the summer 1941, when Heydrich informs Eichmann that Führer ordered the physical extermination of Juifs[43 ].
Because, in fact of victorious peace, it is the all-out war which settles. At this point in time, in front of the closing of the last way which was offered to them "to solve the Jewish problem" by the emigration, or the evacuation, the Nazis decide coolness, in the first days of 1942, for the génocide. The "ghettoïsation", the deportations, the camps of work and those of death will be from now on the stages imposed to the Jews of Europe. On the way of their martyrdom, they will know the hunger, the cold, the disease, the anguish, the tearing loss of the beings which are most expensive to them, then finally the torment, between the hands of torturers who do not attack only the life, but still with the heart of their victims.
Leon Poliakov evokes this "ultimate insult", at the end of a tragedy sequence which constrained members of the Jewish Councils of the ghettos to becoming "wheels of the machinery which led Jews to Auschwitz or Belzec"[44 ]. Because the Jewish persons in charge are compelled by the Nazis to direct themselves the movement of tender of their co-religionists, and the heads of the ghettos become the instruments of their rendering.
Written Hilberg on this subject: "Unceasingly, they delivered Jews to save the other Jews (…) first the deportation day before, Merin[45 ] made its first decision: "I will not fear, declared it, to sacrifice 50.000 members of our community to save the 50.000 others". During the summer 1942, these "others" were aligned for a massive passage in review and the half sent to Auschwitz. After this deportation, Merin declared: "I have the impression to be the captain of a boat ready to sink and which succeeded in leading it to good port by throwing over edge most of its invaluable cargo". In 1943, there remained only one handle of survivors. Merin was addressed to them in these terms: "I am in a cage, in front of a famished and furious tiger. I stuff his mouth of food, the flesh of my brothers and of my sisters, to maintain it in this cage, for fear it does not escape and does not put to us in pièces"[46 ].
Internees of the camp of Drancy will be placed in front of the same dramatic alternative, by establishing themselves the lists for the déportation[47 ], but by being unaware of the destiny of their co-religionists.
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Why quote these facts, taken among others, if not to point out the démoniaque dimension of a company which was fixed for objective to destroy all the Jewish population of Europe. They reveal the context in which, to protect the Jewish French, the French authorities - which following the example rest of the world, are unaware of the génocide - go, under the relentless pressure Nazi, being forced to deliver to the deportation the German Jews and their foreign co-religionists or stateless people.
The tactics of the apparatus Nazi, with the service of his strategy of extermination of the Jewish people, reveal his diabolic simplicity thus: where no local authority exists and where reign a gauleiter, the Jews are held to provide themselves the information which delivers them without defense to their bourreaux[48 ]. Such is the case in Poland. Such is the situation in the Netherlands given up with the hands of the occupant[49 ] and where, January 10, 1941, a decree of the gauleiter Seyss-Inquart forces the Jews to be made count, and subjects even to this obligation any person having only one Jewish grandparent; tragically effective constraint which allows the machinery of the SS and the police force hitlérienne to stop and to off-set 110 000 of the 140 000 Jews living in Holland. Such was also, and inter alia, the case of Tunisia where during the few months of its invasion - November 1942 at May 1943 - the leaders of the Jewish community were charged, under penalty of death, with carrying out the orders nazis[50 ].
It thus should be recognized, with Annie Kriegel, that the census of the Jews "took place in all occupied Europe, with or without marshal". And the historienne adds: "It is in France still that the operation gave worse résultats"[51].Résultats which can be appreciated only compared to the madness Nazi, and with the indifference of the allies.
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The madness Nazi! While the "Einsatzgruppen"[52 ] intervening, as of the semione, on the backs of Wehrmacht, began their work of died by shooting thousands of Pole and Jews, they is January the 20 which 1942 the first conference takes place of the final solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question in Europe. Under cover of a "reinstalment" in the occupied territories of the East, the decision is made to off-set million Jews towards camps whose only exit is death. The figures as well as testimonys and documents of files are there, which reveal the width of the génocide and its inexpressible horreur[53 ].
It is established that, as of the semione, the first echoes of the massive executions whose Jewish population is victim, cross the borders of Poland martyre[54 ]. But it is established not less than no diffusion is given to these rumours by the allied authorities which had connaissance[55 of it ]. Who more is, March 27, 1943, Americans (Cordell Hull, Sumner Welles) and British (Eden, Halifax and Strang), study, according to Harry Hopkins, adviser of president Roosevelt, the question of the 60 or 70.000 Jews which are in Bulgaria. Eden stresses that "all the question of the Jews of Europe was very difficult and that the proposal to make leave all the Jews Bulgaria must be considered with the greatest prudence. If we do it, the Jews of the whole world will ask us to quote similar for Poland and Germany. Hitler could take to us very well with the word and there are not quite simply enough boats and means of transport in the world to move them… "[56 ].
Then, Eden adds, to the attention of the American representatives, whom it hopes for that they will not make "too extravagant promises which could not be held, for lack of bateaux"[57 ].
At the same time, the British reject quoted by Eichman to exchange a million Jews against 10.000 trucks. An emissary of the Jewish Agency - body Zionist -, Lord Moyne, British High commissioner in Egypt, answers: "This million Jews, that we will make?"[58 of it ] In front of the attitude of the British authorities indifferent to the distress of the Jewish people, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury of the United States, Morgenthau, does not hesitate to speak about a "satanic mixture of ambiguity and icy coldness (…) being equivalent to a sentence of mort"[59 ].
The United States themselves is not foreign with a recurring anti-semitism which appeared during their history and reached a peak of 1939 to 1945. The fact is highlighted for the example of Charles A. Lindbergh, hero of the first overhead crossing of the Atlantic, which, in September 1941, reproach with the Jews to push the United States to enter the war against Allemagne[60 ]. The famous aviator denounces the danger which they make run to the country, because of their position and of their influence in the cinema, the press, the radio and the gouvernement[61 ].
It is not a question there of an isolated opinion. A survey shows it, which asked whether the Jews had too much to be able.With this question, 36% of the answers were, in 1938, affirmatives. This rate makes a jump with 58%, in 1945.
Significant increase which one finds in an investigation into nationalities and groups religious or ethniques which could constitute a threat for the Americans. In February 1942, 24% designate the Japanese, 18% the Germans, and 15% the Jews. In June 1944, 24% designate the Jews, 9% the Japanese, and 6% the Germans.
One could multiply the examples and point out extreme forms of segregation of which one causes the right astonishment of the Henry-Hague, ambassador from France in Washington, 1940 to 1942: "… at the time of a passage to Atlantic-City, I was amazed to notice that the great beach was reserved for the White, the following one with the Jews, and the third in Africains"[62 ]. During the Twenties, many residential districts had been prohibited to the Jews. And in many colleges and private universities, they were refused or admitted according to a percentage very limited by a rule not écrite[63 ]. It is the time when a many residences of holidays post "their preference for the customers chrétienne"[64 ].
The behavior of the government undergoes the pressure of the public opinion. Thus, in front of a strong opposition of this one, President Roosevelt and the Congress disallow a proposal aiming, in 1939, to accomodate 20 000 European Jewish children. In 1940, Breckinridge Long, under-secretary of State in charge of immigration, explain why it is necessary to drive back the Jewish immigrants "while advising with our consulates to multiply the obstacles on their road, in order to indefinitely push back the attribution of a visa"[65 ]. It is in the same spirit that the American diplomacy intervenes with the president of the Republic of Haiti which wishes to accomodate a hundred Jewish refugees coming from France. The chargé d' affaires American in Haiti written: "the German Jews are probably agents of Abwehr Nazi. They could constitute a serious danger to the Republic of Haiti. The American government would not be very at ease if president Vincent took action on this plan. The president finally gave me reason. But it hopes for a financial compensation, because the taken refuge Jews would have brought with them of the capital importants"[66 ].
At the beginning of the year 1943, whereas the world is informed of the massive deportations operated by the apparatus Nazi, the Room of the Representatives, whose majority is preserving, refuses to amend the laws on immigration which "oppose to the Jews an almost insurmountable barrier" writes Nerin Gun[67 ]. And when the Henry-Hague, ambassador from France in Washington, proposes in Cordell Hull the maritime transport of thousands of Jewish refugees, the American Secretary of State considers "the idea excellent but inapplicable, because of impossibility for the United States of admitting on their territory such a significant quota from abroad without a special quota being granted by way législative"[68 ]. According to Nerin Gun, the State Department would have restricted itself to answer: "That the French manage with their Juifs"[69 ]. The door of the United States thus remains closed with the European populations victims of persecutions. The idea of an admission which would not be that temporary neither the Room nor the Senate interests. In addition to the insufficiency of the diffusion of information relating to the fate of the Jews of Europe, David S. Wyman allots the passive attitude of the American company at the height "running anti-semitism" [ 70 ]
It is only at the beginning of year 1944 that Henry Morgenthau, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, manages to convince Roosevelt to act to save the Jews. This one then creates the Council of the refugees of war (War refugee board), without specifying - and this, in order to avoid the controversies - that it was a question of saving the maximum of Jewish refugees. Then it accepts the creation of a temporary reception centre of the Jewish refugees, provided those are installed with the variation in the State of New York from where they would be returned to Europe, at the end of the war.
In spite of their limited range, these provisions are highly attacked, like incompatible with the existing legislation. The opinions of the American Jewish community themselves are divided. In particular those which made a success of their integration fear that the surge of Jewish immigrants does not accentuate the reactions of rejection of which they undergo the effects. Attitude similar to that of the French israélites who, in France, before 1939, made a point of being different from the Jewish Germans and feared that Jewish immigration does not cause resurgences of antisémitisme.[71 ]
One then includes/understands the corrosive remark of Pierre Laval in Pinckney Tuck[72 ], when this one announces its deep concern to him on the fate of the Jewish children. In a message of 11 September 1942, addressed in Washington, the chargé d' affaires American returns account: "In the conversation, it (Laval), by twice, was ironical about the" tone of high morality "adopted by certain governments about the treatment in France of the foreign Jews, by stressing that the aforementioned governments refused at the same time to admit Jewish refugees inside their own borders. It mentions on this subject which the only concrete offers that it had received to date came from the Dominican Republic which had given its assent to the admission of 3 000 children juifs"[73 ].
The short glance thus related to the United States reveals that the feeling of anti-semitism, which remains long-lived of 1939 to 1945 in the American people, is accompanied by the ignorance of the fate of the Jewish populations of Europe. This ignorance, inseparable from the indifference, is shared by Britanniques[74 ] and the civilized world. It must be pointed out and underlined, at the moment when the glance turns to France that the disaster of spring 40 plunged in the German night.
Is the attitude of the large allies with respect to the tragedy lived by the Jewish people the expression of national selfishness? or the manifestation of the ignorance of the "final solution", i.e. of the inescapable destruction of all the Jews of Europe? One can answer in the affirmative these two questions, if one judges of it by the declaration of Moscow, signed in October 1943, by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. This declaration warns the persons in charge for Reich: "the Germans who take part in the systematic shootings Italian officers or the execution of hostages French, Dutch, Belgian or Norwegian, or peasants crétois, or who took part in the massacres inflicted to the Polish people or in the territories of the Soviet Union, whose enemy is now swept, will know that they will be brought back on the scene of all their crimes and will on the spot be judged by the people to which they have attenté"[75 ].
Why, if they had been informed of the génocide, three the "Large ones" would have omitted to condemn it in this anathema from where the "Jewish" word misses?
Switzerland itself, in addition to discriminatory measurements that it already took, in 1938, with regard to the juifs[76 ], proclamation its ignorance of the génocide, when it is opposed formally, in September 1942, with the surge on its territory from abroad coming from France[77 ]. The head of federal justice and the services of police force declares: "We cannot transform our country into sponge of Europe and accept for example 80 to 90% of the réfugiés"[78 ]. Already, in 1938, the head of the police force from abroad, H. Rothmund, had declared: "the Jews as well as the other foreigners are regarded as a danger, as for foreign overpopulation. By systematic and circumspect measurements, we succeeded in avoiding enjuivement of Switzerland ". This mentality will become finally the guiding principle of the restrictive policy and lasts adopted with respect to the refugees during the Second War mondiale[79 ]. Thus "the Jews which are not regarded as political refugees are not allowed in theory. In 1942, the federal Council even orders to drive back refugees whose life was obviously in danger (…) the federal adviser, Edouard von Steiger, to excuse this policy, will find an image not very glorious: "the life raft is pleine"[80 ].
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In fact, the génocide was revealed in the free world only in April 1945, when the allied forces released the survivors of the death camps, and discovered the mass graves of the unnamable one. A Nobel Prize of peace, Sean MacBride, attests it: "What remained for me fundamental, it is that the most monstrous génocide of the history of humanity could develop during five years, in ignorance more totale"[81 ].
No political leader, no intellectual authority - such Einstein, inter alia - had denounced it beforehand, in order to alert the international opinion. The famous Jewish journalist, Walter Lippmann, "who treated practically all principal topical questions, did not write anything on the Holocaust" observes David S. Wyman.[82 ] But, only ignorance can explain such a silence which, in the contrary case, had been a crime of complicity with the torturers. How less severely to qualify the gesture of those which would have deliberately hidden with the victims the torment which awaited them?[83 ]
Dwight Eisenhower, itself, although Ordering as a head of the allied forces and informed for this reason of all that the services of information know of significant on the enemy, discover the horror, April 12, 1945, in Ohrdruf, Kommando dependent on Buchenwald. And thinking of those of the G.I. which doubted their crusade in Europe, it declares: "It is said to us that the American soldier does not know for what it fights. Now, at least, it will know against which it bat"[84 ]. It itself has just included/understood the human direction of its mission.[85 ]
In short, and in spite of the known rumours of certain combined services, the free world was unaware of the existence of the camps of extermination[86 ]. "That known were then intentions of Hitler, as of the fate which awaited the deportees? writing Rene Rémond. The response of A. Cohen is formal: the Jews did not know, and this, because one could not know. In this respect, the chronology solves the question in a decisive way: the "final solution" was stopped only in 1942; it could not thus be known as soon as possible before the middle of this year (…) It was one of the secrecies best kept guerre"[87 ].
Admittedly, the world knew, by the reading of "Mein Kampf", hatred that Adolf Hitler carried to the Jewish people and the Communists, as well as with the French. It knew that, since 1933, of the concentration camps, in which the death rate was high, their doors with those had opened which rejected or who rejected the mode Nazi. It observed the flood of the Jewish emigrants fleeing Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. It had followed the events of the night from the 8 to November 9, 1938, called "night of crystal", when following the assassination in Paris of a member of the embassy of Germany by a young Polish Jewish refugee, the German synagogues had been set fire to, the windows of the Jewish stores broken, and 30.000 Jews interned in concentration camps. But it underestimated the extent and the violence of the tragedy which brooded. In this respect, the step of Claude Lévi-Strauss is significant who, the shortly after the armistice, requests from Vichy papers to return to occupied Paris and to take his station with Henri IV[88 ].
Because no observer had imagined that one day of 1942 would be applied the "final solution", conceived and prepared since 1941 by a learned assembly of demented person. Raymond Aron testifies some, who, in London of 1940 to 1944, was informed, in quality to journalist and writer as a head to the review "Free France", of all that the free world knew: "the génocide that did we know some in London? Did the English newspapers evoke it? If they did it, was this assumption or assertion? On the level of the clear conscience, my perception was about the following one: the concentration camps cruel, were directed by slave-drivers recruited not among the policies but among the criminals of common right; mortality was strong there, but the gas chambers, the industrial assassination of human beings, not, I acknowledge it, I did not imagine them and, because I could not imagine them, I do not have them sus"[89 ]. Ernst Jünger evokes this subject and quotes in its Second Parisian newspaper a comment published in 1772 on the lawsuit of Brinvilliers: "the great crimes, far from suspecting itself, do not even think"
Commenting on the event, Leon Poliakov, who lived these times of distress in occupied zone then in free zone, written: "For my part, I always thought, contrary to the common opinion, that Laval, which was by no means anti-semite, does not deserve its bad reputation. My conviction of historian is that at the time, in summer 1942, it was unaware of, like everyone in France, the existence of the gas chambers. It was thought that it would be a hard life, painful, but one did not think of murders of enfants"[90 ]. And at the time of a "radioscopy", questioned by Jacques Chancel who is astonished by this judgement and asks whether the Marshal were, him, anti-semite, Poliakov answers: "Not plus"[91 ].
André Frossard is not less clearly when it evokes the "Hut with the Jews" of Strong Montluc, in Lyon, where no, among "the hundreds of hundreds" of his companions in misfortune "did not have the least idea of the fate which awaited it in Germany, and yet there were… curious spirits". Because these prisoners "thought that they would be sent in a camp of work and that they would undoubtedly be unhappy there, but less than in prison…" Also, during their loading for the beyond unknown one, had they "a last glance almost sympathizing for those which did not leave… Myself, when I learned on August 12 which 1944 I would be off-set the 16, I accomodated the news with a kind of relief. Ni in prison, nor with-outside, I did not hear somebody speak about the "final solution" before the return about rescapés and the revealing of the horreur"[92 ].
Jean Borotra, with which the name and the prestigious sporting career are synonymous with honesty, lived what reports André Frossard. He writes: "During the summer 1942, at the time of the raid in Paris of the foreign Jews and stateless people, nobody, in France, was informed of the" final solution ", of the holocaust of the Jewish people. It was believed that the stopped Jews were going to be sent in camps of forced work where they would work with the profit of the machine of German war, as well as many Jews and not-Jews had already done it for a few years. I thought that it would be my own fate, when I was off-set in Sachsenhausen, November 30, 1942, and that I live on the gate of the camp "Arbeit macht frei"[93 ].
Elie Wiesel did not know any more. In its book the Night, it testifies that in spring 1944 no member of the Hungarian Jewish community, whose his/her father was the rabbi, believed in the reality of the extermination of the Jews. It was known that deportees but "a few days ago after their departure, one said that they were in Galicie where they worked, whom they were even satisfied with their fate!". And in an introduction to the work The holocaust in Hungary, 40 years later, the Nobel Prize of Peace written: "on March 19, 1944, Germany occupies Hungary. I remember, it was spring (…) Whereas we were studying, somebody came and says that the Germans had just arrived. We left and saw the tanks. The first Germans were polished and we thought: Well, this also passera"[94 ]. In fact, two months later, it is found with his in Birkenau where the Jewish compatriots who preceded them astonish that they did not know the fate which awaited them. Elie Wiesel acknowledges, in the Night: "Yes, we were unaware of it. Nobody had said it to us ".
Then, why the mediatized history let does hear - when it does not affirm it - what at the time of the raids of 1942, the authorities and the police force Frenchwomen knew what still did not know, in 1944, a Jewish community of Hungary and its rabbi? And why does it never speak about the railwaymen who transported the deportees towards a destiny of which they could not imagine the inexpressible horror?
This ignorance, of the million combatants of the allied armies or the organizations of Resistance divided it with Dwight Eisenhower. Albert Chambon, former Ambassador of France, which was off-set in Buchenwald for facts of Resistance, testifies some in his work When France was occupied: "Even the Resistant ones, decrees after three or four years of activity in Resistance, were unaware of the exact fate their comrades off-set before them. In the same way the Jewish communities best informed were unaware of the horror of the final solution (…) After having remained three months with the secrecy with Fresnes (…) the departure for the deportation was, for me, a kind of relief. Of course (…) each one was well convinced that "over there" the life would be hard, difficult. But there was the safe life, one was not more alone and one was with the free air (…) the reactions of the world public opinion at the time of the revelations made by the Allies penetrating the first in these camps, attest at which point it acted, indeed, of revelation, i.e. of what, hitherto, had remained unknown, secret"[95 ].
Referring to André Kaspi and Asher Cohen, Jean-Marc Varaut written in his turn "that the Jews did not know the fate which awaited the deportees, since one could not know. What, comments on it, invites us to avoid retrospective peremptory judgements, fifty years after (…) What applies to the French Jews, short-sighted in front of the European dimension of the antijuive policy Nazi, is worth obviously for the French civils servant engaged with the daily newspaper in the dialectical one of the ends and the means and which had in load the life and the survival of their citoyens"[96 ].
Being given the absence of very written official made public during the period 40-44, and which would be contrary for them, preceding testimonys cover a historical value that the quality of their auteurs[97 confers to them ]. Historical testimonys, bus will come time when the actors and witnesses of the second world war will have ceased living. Then, the Masters of the misinformation will have the free field to transmit to rising generation a pseudo-history which, among its untruths, teaches already or implies that the existence of the death camps was known of all, therefore of the Marshal and the French government. Thus works itself insidiously, between the génocide perpetrated by the ideology Nazi and the provisions taken in France, in 1940, against the Jews, an amalgam whose binder is the handshake of Montoire.
Infamy! Because if the Jewish génocide is an inexpressible crime that humanity should not forget - as that which, here two centuries, cost the life to 400 000 French, culprits with the eyes of their torturers to remain faithful to their God and their King - it is proven not less than the marshal Pétain and its governments cannot be shown to have applied a policy of ideological hegemony, initiating of crimes against humanity. Such is the verdict of the Court of criminal appeal of the Court of Appeal of Paris, which in the nonsuit returned on April 13, 1992, judge that "the State vichyssois (…) cannot (…) be described as State practising an ideological policy of hegemony".
The facts confirm this judgement.
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At the beginning of the summer 1942, Knochen[98 ], ordering police force of safety and services of safety (BdS), informs Laval that Führer decided to off-set all the Jews, men, women and children, residing in France. No distinction will be made between the Jews of French nationality and the foreigners or stateless people. This decision was already notified to the Prefect of police force of Paris[99 ].
Such is the situation in front of which the head of the government is brutally placed. It reacts immediately near the head of the SS and the police force in France, Oberg[100 ]. This last proposes a compromise under the terms to him of which the French Jews would be saved, for the moment, if the French police force took part in the operation: "the trains are ready, explains Oberg. They must be filled costs which costs. The Jewish problem does not have borders for us. The police force must help us, if not we will carry out the arrests without making distinction between the French Jews and the autres"[101 ]. And it certifies that the Jews must be sent in Poland where one would create for them a "Jewish State".
Odious blackmail in front of which the head of government and the Marshal, after having tried to exclude the French police force from a dishonouring operation, can only incline themselves. Not, as their despisers protest it, by giving their downstream to the arrest of the foreign Jews and stateless people, but, Laval affirms, to protect the Jewish French: "I could not act differently than I did it, without sacrificing our nationals of which I had initially the guard. The right of asylum was not respected. How could it be it in a country occupied by the German army, and how the Jews could they to be protected in a country where Gestapo?"[102 prevailed ]
Hilberg recognizes that in "renonçant to save a fraction, one saved most of the totalité"[103 ].
July 16, 1942, in Paris, the municipal police force takes part in a raid ordered by the apparatus SS which, to require its intervention, refers to the rights of the occupying power and article III of the convention of armistice. It becomes thus the blind instrument of the company Nazi of which it is unaware of the finality.To criticisms on his action, the Attorney General Mornet will oppose itself, at the time of the lawsuit of the Marshal, a judgement which points out to it tragic complexity of the events of the time, and the absurdity of the behavior of a number of their actors: "One should not forget, will declare it, with regard to the Parisian police force, the admirable suspension of service of all the policemen which were constituted in army to defend their prefecture against the attacks of the enemy and to fight on the barricades for the release of Paris"[104 ]. Who can doubt that these same men had refused to take place on July 16, 1942, if they had known that they were made accessory to a génocide? And quid of the railwaymen who will ensure the transport of the Jews, in particular starting from the free zone towards the occupied zone? How would they have known, police officers and railwaymen, in 1942, which the whole world was unaware of still in 1944, and discovered only in 1945?
Their intervention results in the arrest of 12.884 Jews including 3.031 men, 5.802 women and 4.051 enfants[105 ]. The objective of the SS is not achieved. It was of 22.000 arrests. At the time of the lawsuit of Xavier Vallat who was, in Vichy, Commissaire with the Jewish businesses, Doctor Nora, israélite, will testify: "… Xavier Vallat was certainly considered obliged to defend the French israélites and, in particular, ex-serviceman who, for him, was not to be dissociated from the French community. By him, I could know the date of certain great raids and, in particular, that of July 16, 1942, indiscretion wanted by him and which enabled us to save approximately 10.000 israélites. The German order was the arrest of 25.000 Jews. Twelve to thirteen thousand only were arrêtés"[106 ].
Behind these figures the inexpressible tragedy lived by the separate children hides their parents and who, the ones like the others, will be gathered in camps, then piled up, such of the cattle, in coaches before being forwarded to the East, for their destin[107 ].
The reaction of the French people is unanimous in his spontaneousness, as well in occupied zone as in free zone from where 10 410 German or foreign Jews had to be given with the occupant[108 ].The men of the church are the speaking pipes of a revolted opinion. A letter of the Suhard cardinal, archbishop of Paris, speaking to the cardinals and to bishops about France, followed that of Pasteur Boegner and an official statement of the national Committee of the reformed Church, alert the Marshal during the summer 1942. Their interventions accompany a letter by the central Consistory which evokes a degree of cruelty that the history seldom equalized; step which precedes a protest solennelle[109 ]. Finally and whereas the Prefects inform the government, the pastorales letters of Monseigneur Saliège in Toulouse, of Monseigneur Delay in Marseilles, the Gerlier Cardinal in Lyon, Monseigneur Théas in Montauban denounce the cruelty of the event and call some with the requirements of justice and the rights of freedom.
"France, chevaleresque and generous, I do not doubt it, you are not responsible for these errors", writing Monseigneur Saliège. And while the Gerlier Cardinal measures "the difficulties to which the government must face", an official statement of the national Council of the reformed Church of France states not to be unaware of "nor to ignore the extreme complexity of the situations in front of which the authorities of the country are seen placed".
"this dishonour should be stopped". Such is the cry of the Marshal addressing himself in Laval on July 24, 1942. But what can make the head of the government? The German is all-powerful and nothing can dissuade it to continue its company of deportation which relates to million Jews of Europe. Is it necessary to discuss, to moderate its fury, or to refuse any dialogue and, therefore, to let the SS operate with their own way, by extending to France the expeditious methods applied in Poland? In a word, does one have to allow to the occupant poloniser France, therefore to off-set all the Jews, foreigners or French, and, among those, the Alsatian ones to which the deep attachment of the Marshal is known?
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August 18, 1942, Pinckney Tuck, chargé d' affaires American in Vichy, is received by Pierre Laval. It gives an account of its visit per addressed message, August 26, in Washington[110 ]. It stresses that it drew the attention of Laval to the revolting character of the separation of the children whose documents of identification were destroyed intentionally, so that they will be able to never join their parents in exile. It adds: Laval questioned at once this relation of the facts, and known as which he did not want to admit that children had been separated from their parents. It asked me of him to provide the proof of it. And Tuck concludes: "I am brought to the conclusion that the arrest and the deportation of these Jews (…) can constitute an attempt partial of Laval to satisfy the request by the German government of workers. According to information's worthy of faith, the off-set Jews were sent in Lorraine, Poland and Ukraine… "
It is a testimony historique[111 ] which proves, without the least ambiguity, which Tuck and Laval, in mid-August 1942, were unaware of the génocide, thought that the deportees were going to populate a Jewish State in the European East, and thus judged that he was revolting to separate the children from the parents.
Pierre Laval had asked itself - and it had given an account in the Council of Ministers of it, July 16, 1942, that "in an intention of humanity, the children including those of less than 16 years, are authorized to accompany their parents".
What will be worth to him, like with the Marshal, the perfidious charge of the mediatized history which, in direct or allusive form, will see in this epic a demonstration of complicity with the torturers Nazis. Commenting on this question, Rene Rémond quotes Asher Cohen, which suggests that the proposal of Pierre Laval was inspired "by a thought of humanity, the concern of not separating the families, in ignorance where the president of the Council was final destination: the idea would not have come to him that it sent these unhappy children to the mort"[112 ].
"In fact, writing Leon Poliakov, all turns around a sentence of Dannecker, the head of the Jewish Service to France, which wrote that for the moment one had to off-set the Jews only starting from age the sixteen years, it with what Laval added that their children had to be associated to them, for the family regrouping. In short, I think that it was unaware of that these children were going to be killed on the spot - a small point of histoire"[113 ].
This opinion will surprise those which establish a bond of cause for purpose between the measurements taken by the French government against the Jews of France and the génocide perpetrated by the Nazis. Bergson, in a test on the possible one and reality, proposes elements of reflexion to them: "How to see only if the event is always explained, afterwards, by such or such of the previous events, a very different event would as well have been explained, in the same circumstances, by differently selected antecedents - what I say? by the same differently cut out antecedents, otherwise distributed, otherwise finally seen by the retrospective attention? Of before behind a constant replanning of last by the present continues, of the cause by the effet"[114 ].
In more concrete terms, how not to see that the deportations of the Jews in France had been carried out also "effectively" without the antecedent of the statute of the Jews of 1940, and that this one did not interfere of anything on the decision génocide taken in Wansee in January 1942?
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In November 1942, in echo with the unloading combined in North Africa, itself followed by the invasion of the free zone by Wehrmacht, fear is spread, in the Jewish community, to see Pétain leaving France to rejoin Algiers, and Laval to give up the government.The Hirschler chief rabbi, who was to perish in the storm, returns visit to the secretariat-general of the government, in Vichy, and worries about know if this one "continued in spite of the events of Africa". On the affirmative answer which is made to him, it declares: "I am reassured. For me, all the Jews are my children. But, I know well Mr. Laval and I know his difficulties. The French Jews will never forget what it did for eux"[115 ].
One among them, Emmanuel Berl, will testify with glare to its attachment with Pierre Laval, when he writes, March 10, 1954: "At this ignored and complex man who could be so skilful, and to which it felt reluctant so much to be skilful, main quality was, it seems to to me, the bonté"[116 ]. In February 1943, the Marshal himself receives, in a very open way, the Chief rabbi who declares himself magic of sound audience[117 ].
The shortly after the armistice, Leon Blum had asked the Marshal to take care that the prisoner of war salary of israélite confession is that of all the captive French, without reference of race or religion. The insurances which it had then received will be respected, in spite of the German pressures. The chief rabbi of Paris, Julien Weill, will testify, at the time of the lawsuit of George Scapini, ambassador of the prisoners, that, thanks to the Mission which the defendant directed, "we could avoid the worst with regard to those among us who were in captivité"[118 ].
This protection of the prisoners is extended to that of the Jews of North Africa. Because, if those are victims of the abolition of the Crémieux decree, they profit on the other hand from an armistice which, in their particular case, never deserved the qualifier of saver as much. Indeed, the 400.000 Jews of the Maghreb - 120.000 in Algeria, 80.000 in Tunisia and 200.000 in Morocco - will not know the pangs of the intention which the Nazis continue with an obstinacy which appears at the time of the occupation of Tunisia, by Wehrmacht, from November 1942 to May 1943.
As of the arrival of the German forces in Tunis, Einsatzcommando[119 ] stops the leaders of the Jewish community, then releases them against the payment of a fine of 20 million francs, and, under death threat, the constrained one to create the service of the labour forced their co-religionists. Those are then assigned to the construction of works of fortification on the first line of face.It is only the first step of a walk which one knows the route without return. Go stopped by the capitulation of the forces of von Arnim, in May 1943 at the end of a battle during which the units resulting from the army known as of Vichy, and ordered per June, covered glory. Evoking these months of oppression, written Hilberg: "the 80.000 Jews did not move, not petrified by the violence of the tornado which had fallen down on eux"[120 ].
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"Mister the of torture one, I intend too much much to speak about vous"[121 ]. Such is the apostrophe addressed by Pétain to Darquier de Pellepoix which, since May 1942, replaced Xavier Vallat with the head of the Police station to the Jewish businesses. The Marshal had declared itself with the chief rabbi Isaïe Schwartz: "As long as I will be alive, I will never accept but this ignominie that is the yellow star is applied in Sud"[122 zone ]. It thus expresses the feelings of the Church and of the French people in front of a company which, if it cannot be stopped by words, must be slowed down by all the possible means.
This braking, operated as of October 1942, is concretized by figures: in five months, of June 5, 1942 to November 11, 1942, 40.839 Jews were off-set, including 33.000 in eleven weeks, of July 17 at September 30; it will be necessary for the occupant more than nineteen months to off-set 34.000 autres[123 of them ]. He is denounced, in a report/ratio of February 12, 1943, is established by the assistant of Oberg, Knochen. This one shows the Marshal and the secretary-general of the police force "to do all that they can to prevent the deportation of the French Jews". This report/ratio of February 12 1943 refers to a conversation with Eichmann[124 ]. It stresses that "the Marshal declares himself with greatest energy against the fact that Jews of French nationality are put in concentration camps or evacuated. Pétain even threatens to be withdrawn ". It recalls that this one was formally opposed to the port of yellow star "in zone lately occupée"[125 ]. It adds: "By now undertaking the final solution of the Jewish question, it should be held account that Pétain will be opposed to it". And, in a report/ratio of March 6, 1943, Röthke returns account that, considering the attitude of the Marshal, only the constraint can allow him to have the police force. As for Knochen, it will declare on April 24, 1950: "the Pétain marshal was well quickly regarded as having actually remained a dangerous enemy for Germany. All the reports/ratios of our services (…) reflected the same opinion ".
*
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The threat Nazi takes an acuter character with the reiterated requests aiming at dénaturaliser the Jews having acquired French nationality after 1927. The report/ratio of Röthke, of March 6, 1943, exposes the Nazi plan: "To ask for the French government (…) the promulgation of a law withdrawing French nationality with the Jews naturalized subsequently to 1927 when at 1933. Handing-over of the Jews become thus stateless people, for their deportation ". Terms which underline protection that them nationality can bring to the French Jews. But how the government will act, vis-a-vis the new German requirements?
With the instar of the organization which had functioned during the First World War, a Commission had been created in 1940, within the framework of the law of July 22, 1940 relating to the revision of naturalizations and the acquisitions of nationality which have occurred since 1927. This law related to all the justiciable ones, without reference of race and religion.
Divided into 3 sub-commissions which sit as from January 1, 1941, the Commission, - to which Mornet belongs, soon Attorney General with the lawsuit of the Marshal - studies 250.000 files concerning 900.000 people. Its work is carried out in all independence with respect to the occupant. Any proposal for a withdrawal must be examined, before decision, by a special sub-commission made up of the three presidents of sub-commission. The justiciable ones profit from an equitable relief.
March 24, 1942, the president of the Commission, Mr. Roussel, adviser of State, is received by the Marshal. It exposes the benevolent, human jurisprudence and without any racial concern or policy to him which guides work. Only one goal: higher interest of the country. The assessment, on this date, is eloquent: "We do not reach, declares Roussel, three percent of the number of naturalized". The Marshal congratulates and thanks the Members of the Commission for human quality for their travaux[126 ].
This work is always in progress when, with semi-43, the occupant expresses in Laval the desire which a law is promulgated, bearing denaturalisation of the Jews naturalized after 1927. In front of the categorical refusal of the Marshal and Laval, the Nazis make known with this one that there is no possible discussion: their desires are orders. At this point in time Laval, in full agreement with the Marshal, draws the attention of the Germans to the fact that a legislation already exists and that its application falls within the competence of the Roussel Commission. August 28, 1943, this one is again received by the Marshal who announces his "anguish" to him about naturalized Jewish. Roussel, while expressing his regrets that work of its Commission can take a new orientation, assures the Marshal whom it will take all measurements to prevent that the naturalized Jews do not have to undergo the consequences of them. Pétain expresses its relief then. "Ah! … but then it is very well as that (…) I am very happy of knowing that the Commission will take these mesures"[127 ].
President Roussel, in his deposition at the time of the lawsuit of the Marshal, will specify that these measurements consisted with never dénaturaliser a Jew whose address was known and who, consequently, could be seized by the occupant. He thus respects the spirit of resistance that Pétain had expressed on July 19, 1943, in a letter signed by his Secretary-general, Jean Jardel: "the Marshal asks that Mr. Pierre Laval immediately intervene with the authorities of occupation in order to put an end to a mode of exception applied in particular to French of which some made of another offence to only be juifs"[128 ].
Although a problem as painful as that of the fate of the Jews of France cannot be dealt with in statistical terms, it is important to quote figures. According to statistics' given by Raul Hilberg, the Jewish communities of Austria, of Belgium, of Czechoslovakia, of Germany, of Greece, of the Netherlands, of Luxembourg, of Poland and Yugoslavia, underwent, during the war, a total rate of losses rising with 93.8%[129 ].
Being France, the numerical state of the deportees, established on March 6, 1943, by the services Nazis, figure with 49.000 the number of foreign Jews and with 3.000 that of the Jews français[130 ]. It is starting from the latter figure that evaluations had been advanced, during the Fifties and Sixties, which estimated that approximately 5% of the French Jews had disappeared in the storm. This rate was confirmed the shortly after the war by the Commission Report of Anglo-American investigation into the Palestinian question. The percentage of the off-set of France and missing foreign Jews was established then to approximately 40%.
These percentages were re-examined with the rise for the French Jews and the fall for the foreign Jews. A étude[131 ], published by the Institute of history of time present, resumes the work carried out starting from lists of names, and provides the following data:
- Jewish Population in France in 1940: 330.000 the half was of foreign nationality.
- Jewish Population off-set between spring 1942 and the summer 1944: 76.000 including 24.000 of French nationality.
- 3% of the deportees survived.
Calculation makes it possible starting from these data to establish the following assessment:
- 23.300 Jewish French, are 14% of the French Jewish community, died in deportation.
- 50.500 foreign Jews or stateless people, is 30.6% of their population, died under the same conditions.
I.e. 86% of the Jewish French and nearly 70% of the foreign Jews of France survived the storm, whereas less than 7% their co-religionists of Europe escaped the génocide.
These rates do not take account of protection assured with the 400.000 Jews North Africa, including 120.000 in the French departments of Algeria. Who can to doubt - in particular after short incursion of Einsatzkommando in Tunisia - that a number of them had to survive only the armistice of June 40 and the strategy which then prohibits in Wehrmacht and the apparatus Nazi to take foot in the Maghreb, and to put at execution the promise which Führer had made the Large Mufti of Jerusalem destroy all the Jews living in Arab territory?[132 ]
Thus, 730 000 Jews (400 000 in North Africa and 330 000 in Metropolis) lived, in 1940, in French mobility. 76 000 were off-set 3% only survived. It is thus 90% of the Jews residing in 10% and France and North Africa which escaped the final solution which were victims. This rate of 90% is to be compared with that of 6% which applies to the survivors of the whole of the Jewish communities of Germany, of Austria, of Belgium, of Greece, of Luxembourg, of the Netherlands, of Poland and Yougoslavie.[133 ]
*
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The figures which precede are sometimes brought back to those of Denmark and Italy where the rates of deportation were lower than in France. A short analysis shows légéreté of the conclusions which one can draw from a surface comparison between political and social situations essentiellements different.
Indeed, in Denmark, nonbelligerent country of 5 million inhabitants, the Jewish population rose with 6 500 hearts is 0,13 % of the total population - against 0,8 % in France. And, according to Raul Hilberg, the Jewish community "hardly exerted influence in the country". One found 31 of his members in the public office, 35 lawyers, 21 artists, 14 journalists and any writer as a head.
It is only in September 1943, the shortly after the dissolution of the Danish army, that an operation of deportation is considered by the occupant. Carried out on October 1, it is limited to 477 juifs[134 ]. As for the remainder of the community, it profits from the reception that Sweden proposed in Reich. Shuttles of fishing vessels evacuate, in October 1943, towards Sweden, 5 919 Jews, 1 301 half or quarter-Jews and 686 not-Jews married to Jews. Result remarkable, but which cannot be compared with the case of France, belligerent and overcome, whose neighbors, Switzerland included/understood, refuse to receive Jewish refugees.
Pushing their whimsical comparison further, the despisers of the Marshal set up the king of Denmark in model of resistant to the racist persecutions directed by the apparatus Nazi. They invent the legend of Christian X who, according to them, had protested against the occupant while carrying yellow star imposed on his subjects of Jewish confession. Caption matched, of course, fable according to which Pétain, had not known to him to imitate such a noble example.
Its Majesty the queen Margrethe II, grand-daughter of Christian X, made justice of these balivernes. In its work, the trade of Queen, it writes: "One of the stories which one generally hears, in connection with the period of the occupation and that I contradict obstinately each time I hear it, it is the fable according to which Christian X would have expressed his opinions while carrying yellow star. The history is beautiful symbolically, but without relationship with reality (…) I cannot prolong a myth when I know that it is not founded; it would actually be dishonest person (…), the Germans never dared to insist that the Danish Jews carry the star jaune"[135 ].
It is known that they did not dare more with Pétain, in Southern zone and Africa of Nord.[136 ]
As for Italy, allied of Germany, it was subjected to no obligation to off-set its own Jewish citizens. Enacted in 1938, its severe legislation anti-semite, not more than the French law carrying statute of the Jews, did not comprise measurements of this kind. But, the fall of Mussolini, July 25, 1943, followed armistice required by the Badoglio government, places the Italian territory under the yoke Nazi. The deportations start in October 1943. They will end in August 1944. They will thus have lasted three times less longer than in France. What explains an apparently lower rate of 17%, but which, paid to the duration, is supérieur[137 ].
These short compared analyses answer the history manichéenne by showing that this one does not hesitate to handle the facts with an only aim of diaboliser Pétain. It is certain that null can affirm only the Marshal today, the government, the French, the police officers, the railwaymen… could not be opposed more effectively to brutality Nazi. But it is not less certain than without Pétain, i.e. without the armistice, without the relative protection of the free zone, without the survival of a civil administration and a company, the Jews of France - French, foreigners, stateless people - would have known all the martyrdom of their European co-religionists including one negligible minority survived the storm.
The savage despisers of the Marshal endeavour to allot the results of this relative protection, not with the Marshal and his government, but at the "civil company" and religious institutions. How to explain whereas, in the European countries without Marshal, the aforementioned company and the aforementioned institutions remained also not very effective? How to imagine that it is the civil company which protected all the Jewish French prisoner of war? who ensured the physical protection of the 400 000 Jews of North Africa? who prohibited the port of yellow star in free zone, even after the occupation of this one by Wehrmacht?
The history knows that these facts are to be carried to the only credit of the French government. They constitute the irrefutable proof that, if the statute of the Jews were an iniquitous administrative measurement, and if the deportations towards an unknown destiny were irrevocable acts imposed by the occupant, there was not, in the spirit of the soldier who took care of the bedside of France, the least will to practise an ideological policy of hegemony whose physical disappearance of human beings would have been the expression.
*
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Simone Weil, left France, in 1942, with the regret to lose "the comfort (…) to have share with the suffering of the country" and with to have made feeling the "an act of désertion"[138 ], written of New York, in November 1942, a few days before its departure for London where she will die in August 1943: "… I do not like much to hear people, perfectly comfortable here, to treat cowards and traitors those which, in France, manage as they can in a terrible situation (…) I believe that Pétain did about all that the general situation and its own physical and mental state enabled him to do to limit the dégâts"[139 ].
Annie Kriegel opine in the same direction: "There is a young historical school which wants to carry out a kind of private and qualified war the heroic one against the Vichy government. It appears absurd to to me to reverse the things at the point of saying that not only the government was accessory but that it took the initiative of a company of repression of the Jews. I wonder sometimes if, contrary to the common idea, the share of sacrifice in the policy and the control of the Pétain marshal effects more some did not have and positive on the safety of the Jews only on the destiny of France"[140 ].
Justice is thus returned to that which, taking the French people for judge, will declare with the first audience of its lawsuit:"the history will say all that I avoided you, when my adversaries only think of reproaching me the inévitable"[141 ].
The inevitable one, it was, during four long years, the occupation of France by démiurges of the German night, with the orders of the exaggerated one which, in its den of the Chancellery, will dictate, April 30, 1945, before committing suicide, its "political Legacy" and its hatred of the people juif[142 ]. A hatred whose inexpressible criminal demonstrations give measurement of what was avoided. It is up to the History to point out it, as Annie Kriegel did it. Thus, and as it should be, the duty of truth will be used the duty as memory.
[ 1 ] Pierre Ordioni points out that, at the time of the lawsuit Pucheu (March 1944), the decrees of 1940 and 1941 bearing statutes of the Jews were evoked "at no time, by anyone, even by the Weiss General, government commissioner of Gaulle". (Fracture - of London 1941 in Sétif 1945. New Latin Editions p.324)
[ 2 ] Events which have occurred in France of 1933 to 1945 (PUF), volume 1st, pp.167 with 186.
[ 3 ] J.M. Varaut - The Lawsuit Pétain, 1945-1995.
[ 4 ] A. Griotteray - media justice - the Barber, 16-4-95.
Article in which the author protests against such a comparison.
[ 5 ] In the French history, the segregation is of a religious and nonracial nature. Thus Louis VII taking again the expensive principle with the Athenian democracy, which prohibited in Athens the practice foreign worships in the City, legislates in 1144 "on the question of the Jews relaps. The king notes that, at the instigation of the devil, a certain number of Jews converted with Catholicism had returned to their old faith. A decision royal, firm, was essential to punish similar insolence. From now on, any Jew relaps will have to leave the kingdom. If it contravenes this regulation, it will be punished loss of the head or a member "(Public records - K23, n°11).
Edict of another age, which evokes the policy of Kings de France, which launch the Cross ones against Islam, and defend, inside the Kingdom, the Christian order, cement of the nation born into 496 with the baptistry of Rheims.
Rome de Tibère expressed the same will of defense against the Jews, either by driving out them, or by eliminating them physically. Tacit written: "One also occupies oneself to purge Italy of the Egyptian and judaïc superstitions. Under the terms of a decree of the senate, four thousand freed, soiled these impiétés and in age to carry the weapons, were sent in Sardinia to repress the armed robberies there; and if they succumbed to the insalubrity of the climate, their loss was little of thing. One ordered with the others to leave Italy if, in a fixed time, they had not abjured their impious culture "(Tacit - Annals, Livre II, LXXXV).
[ 6 ] Raul Hilberg - destruction of the Jews of Europe, p.35.
[ 7 ] Hitler - Mein Kampf, New Latin Editions, p.619.
[ 8 ] ibid, pp.677-678.
[ 9 ] ibid, p.621.
[ 10 ] Hilberg - op.city, p.63.
[ 11 ] ibid, pp.65-67.
[ 12 ] ibid, p.153.
[ 13 ] ibid, p.340.
[ 14 ] Raymond Aron - Memories, p.18. One of the many German spies stopped by the French special Services, between 1940 and 1942, one was named Silberstein, German Jew refugee in France since 1935. (Colonel Paillole - Special Services, p.241)
[ 15 ] Marc Bloch - The Strange Defeat. Letter of the 02/04/41. Folio History, p.309.
[ 16 ] Law of June 2, 1941, replacing the law of October 3, 1940 bearing statute of the Jews. (OJ of June 14, 1941).
[ 17 ] Hoover institute - life of France under the occupation, p.665.
[ 18 ] These data are extracted from the testimony published in the Marshal n°152, under the signature of Rene Fredet who was responsible for the financial Service of the ministry for the industrial Production, in Vichy, from May 1941 to March 1943.
In a long report/ratio, July 1, 1941, on the Jewish question in France and its treatment, written Dannecker: "That one knows, to remain the Paris following the example of about it, that, on 21 000 Jewish companies declared in all, 600 companies only had, at the end of June 1941, disappeared by liquidation and that it well is said, 200 only were torn off Jewish hands by aryanisation. For including/understanding well, it should be known how the French supervising authority generally finds a French for a provisional post of administrator. It frequently happens that this one is related in one way or another to the Jewish owner, which, remainder, does not have anything astonishing in France ".
[ 19 ] Jean Marsal, the Marshal, n°151, 3è quarter 1988.
[ 20 ] Germans and Austrians are directed on the camp of Gurs, and other nationalities on the camp of Agde.
[ 21 ] This vigorous note of protest of the French government, about the introduction of the racial legislation Nazi and the expulsion of Israélites, is underlined by E Jäckel in France in Europe of Hitler, p.119.
[ 22 ] to see the work of Louis Cernay (alias André Lavagne): The Pétain marshal, Alsace-Lorraine, Facts and documents (1940-1944).
[ 23 ] Robert Aron - History of Vichy, p.277.
[ 24 ] Note signed Baudouin, Foreign Minister, quoted in the History of Vichy of Robert Aron (p.229) and in that of F.G. Dreyfus (p.290).
[ 25 ] During the Council of Ministers of October 1, the Marshal insisted that Justice and Teaching do not include/understand any Jew.
[ 26 ] They are the professions which exert truth capacity: that of the media. Rene Rémond observes on this subject that the policy of the government tends to lock up the Jews "in a discriminatory statute which draws aside them from any station of responsibility or influence". He stresses that "the government of the Marshal does not aim at all to the disappearance of the Jews" (Rene Rémond - Foreword with the work of Asher Cohen: Persecutions and rescues).
[ 27 ] J Groignec - the Marshal and France, p.185, reference 21. The political statute however French citizens, the indigenous Jews of the departments of Algeria preserve which belonged to a combat unit during the war of 14-18 or 39-40, and obtained the Legion of honor on a purely military basis, the Military decoration or the Military Cross.
[ 28 ] Nearly one year after the arrival with the capacity of Hitler, Blum declared: "Since the army is demolished, I am". (Pedroncini - Pétain, volume II, p.203). Raymond Aron will judge it for the history: "Leon Blum it ever became aware of his aberrations, of the fault made by a statesman which sacrifices the interests and even the safety of the country to its illusions, which confuses an abdication with the sign of a new world" (Memories, p.138).
[ 29 ] F Mauriac quoted by Andre Blumel in Leon Blum, Jew and Zionist.
[ 30 ] The assembly of the cardinals and bishops, held on August 31, 1942, estimated that a Jewish problem existed, related to the existence of an international community "inassimilable by nature".
However, any problem of assimilation involves reactions of segregation and rejection. Endemic reactions which prevail in Germany since centuries, and also in Poland, in Russia, in Greece… In Italy, a legislation anti-semite with the severe provisions was promulgated in November 1938. The racial segregation does not save the United States (see will infra)
[ 31 ] Maxime Blocq-Mascart, quoted by François-George Dreyfus in History of Vichy, p.295.
[ 32 ] Fernand Braudel - the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world, volume II, Armand Colin, p.155.
[ 33 ] Memories of Joseph Barthélemy, p.319.
[ 34 ] Mercury of France, May 1, 1936, Apology for Israel by a Jew. Declaration of Mr. Kadmi-Kohen.
[ 35 ] Marc Bloch - the strange defeat - Will - Folio history - p.212. Historian, professor in the Sorbonne, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour on a purely military basis, four times listed in 14-18, once in 1940, Marc Bloch enters, in 1942, in clandestinity and Resistance. Stopped in 1944 by the Germans, it is tortured then shot.
[ 36 ] The Henry-Hague - op.city, p.276.
[ 37 ] Andre Maurois - Memories, p.309.
[ 38 ] See opposite the facsimile of the letter of candidature of Maurois.
[ 39 ] Hilberg, op.city, p.342.
[ 40 ] Paul Schmidt - My figuration at Hitler, p.248. Hilberg recalls (op.city, p.340) that George Bonnet, Foreign Minister, had, in December 1938, makes known in Ribbentrop that France did not wish any more to accomodate Jews coming from Germany and that it even thought of sending 10 000 Jews to Madagascar.
[ 41 ] Heydrich: head of the central Office of safety of Reich (RSHA). Carried out in Prague, in 1942, by the Czech patriots.
[ 42 ] Hilberg, op.city, p.345.
[ 43 ] ibid,
[ 44 ] Leon Poliakov - Jews and our history, p.185.
[ 45 ] Moses Merin, President of the central Council of "Old hand" for High-Silesia.
[ 46 ] Hilberg, op.city, pp.424-425.
[ 47 ] Maurice Rajfus - Drancy, a very ordinary concentration camp, p.158.
[ 48 ] "the leaders of the Jewish communities, organized as a council on the injunction of the Germans, communicated to the latter the list Jews living in their locality, with the inventory of their goods, thus facilitating the task of their torturers… The Jews were to thus take part in the destruction of their race ". (Robert Manvell and Heinrick Fraenkel, the absolute Crime, Stock).
[ 49 ] It seems that if the Wilhelmine queen had remained in her kingdom invaded in May 1940, - with the example of Pétain which refused to give up the French in June 1940 and November 1942 - the Netherlands would not have been placed under the yoke of a gauleiter, and the Jewish population would have, undoubtedly, less suffered.
[ 50 ] Hilberg, op.city, p.558.
[ 51 ] Annie Kriegel - what I believed to include/understand, p.173.
[ 52 ] Groups of intervention (SS).
In its First Parisian newspaper, to the date of March 30, 1942, Jünger brings back the crimes of a "Kommando of murder" which had killed an incalculable number people in Lithuania and other areas borders: "After having gathered the victims, one initially makes them dig the common graves, then one orders to them to extend to it, and one kills them with shots, in top, by successive layer".
[ 53 ] Cf in particular Raul Hilberg - destruction of the Jews of Europe, Beech edict and Gallimard (Folio/histoire).
[ 54 ] David S. Wyman - the Abandonment of the Jews, Americans and the final solution, pp.38 and ss.
[ 55 ] David S. Wyman stresses that in August 1944 some of the American journalists invited to inspect the camp of dead of Madjanek "noted that the Jews were the principal victims, but the majority did not mention them that within the framework of a list of all those which had been assassinated there" (op.city, p.414)
[ 56 ] Robert E Sherwood - Roosevelt and Hopkins, p.717.
[ 57 ] ibid. The British legislation is then very strict, in particular with regard to the German Jews. In 1942, the Mr. Morrison, Minister of Interior Department, recalls that those of them living in England, and become stateless people under the terms of a German decree, would continue to be treated like German nationals, because the government of Its Majesty did not recognize, in times of war, in an enemy State, competence to deprive a citizen of his nationality. (Hilberg, op.city, p.912).
On this subject, David S. written Wyman: "… until the end of 1944 (…) the State Department and Foreign Office feared (…) that Hitler did not put the Allies opposite a Jewish exodus, possibility that they assiduously sought to avoid. (D. S. Wyman, op.city, p.423).
[ 58 ] Saul Friedlander - Kurt Gerstein or the ambiguity of the good - p.138.
[ 59 ] ibid.
[ 60 ] On the other side of the Atlantic, France had, a few years earlier, lived the same pressures. "This role of the foreign Jews in France" worries "even the French Jews: Emmanuel Berl shows to him also these foreigners to push with the war… " (Mr. Ferro - Pétain, p.239).
[ 61 ] Léonard Dinnerstein - Antisemitism in America, p.129.
In this same work, the author notes the evolution of mentalities and stresses that in 1986, whereas the Jews made only 3% of the population, they counted 13% of "executives" of less than 40 years (ibid, p.256).
[ 62 ] The Henry-Hague - the great Franco-American eclipse.
[ 63 ] Y. H. Nouailhat - the United States 1898-1933 - the advent of a world power, p.338.
[ 64 ] Commercial Stéphane - the Barber, April 16-17, 1994.
[ 65 ] ibid.
"the Jewish population is not less significant: in 1939, out of 16 643 120 Jews in the world, the United States and Canada 4 965 620 counted some, that is to say nearly a third. In 1947, on a world Jewish population decreased of almost 30%, the same countries counted 5 176 500 of them, i.e. hardly more natural increase, but about half "(French documentation - Documents on the social life in the United States - n° 1404, November 17, 1950, p.81).
[ 66 ] N Gun - secrecies of the American files - Pétain, Laval and of Gaulle, p.77.
[ 67 ] ibid.
[ 68 ] G the Henry-Hague - the great Franco-American eclipse, p.274.
[ 69 ] N Gun - op.city and recalled by Henri de Foucaucourt in Birth of the myth gaullist, p.182.
[ 70 ] David S. WYMAN – op.city – Conclusion.
[ 71 ] Raymond Aron - Memories, p.18.
[ 72 ] Pinckney Tuck, chargé d' affaires American in Vichy.
[ 73 ] Foreign relations, 1942, volume II, p.712 - Message September 11, 1942, of Tuck to the American Secretary of State - Translation of the author.
[ 74 ] In a letter of December 16, 1941 addressed to Roosevelt, Churchill considers the invasion by the Germans of the totality of France which they "will control, as an occupied territory", and comments: "It does not seem that the living conditions of the occupied and nonoccupied zone are really different".Language which does not hold any account of the Jewish problem, and of the refuge which will be, for the Jewish French, the existence of the Southern zone.
[ 75 ] International conference one military trials, pp.11-12. This declaration is consolidated by the fact that with the conference of Teheran (November 28, 1943 - December 2, 1943), the three Large ones will evoke the sanctions to be applied to the German war criminals, but will remain dumb on the Jewish génocide. (Elliott Roosevelt - My father said to me, p.225). The conference of Bermuda, in spring 1943, had already been the sad example of the indifference of Anglo-American with regard to the problem of the refugees whom they think of solving by the victory. Argument which underlines the responsibility for Allied for France which did not know, after the First World War, to maintain a policy of peace whose their "alliance" and their armies would have been the guarantors.
[ 76 ] supra, reference 12.
[ 77 ] Note of September 30, 1942 of the Legation of Switzerland in France.
[ 78 ] Hilberg, op.city, p.555.
[ 79 ] New history of Switzerland and Swiss, Payot, p.695.
[ 80 ] ibid, p.759.
[ 81 ] Sean MacBride, President founder of international Amnesty.
[ 82 ] David S. WYMAN – op.city – Conclusion.
[ 83 ] However, among the religious authorities, the central Consistory of Israélites de France, addresses, August 25, 1942, a solemn protest against the deportation of the foreign Jews. He in particular affirms not to have "any doubt about the final fate which awaits the deportees, after they will have undergone a dreadful martyrdom". And he points out, on this subject, the message of Führer of February 24, 1942: "My prophecy according to which, during this war, it will not be the Aryan humanity which will be destroyed, but the Jews which will be exterminated, will achieve themselves. No matter what the battle brings to us and whatever is the duration, such will be the final result ". This message referred to its speech, January 30, 1939, with Reichstag: "If the financial international Jews were to still manage to plunge the nations in a world war, it would result the destruction from it from the Jewish race in all Europe". It was a prophecy, had it says, and it repeated it five times of sharp voice in public occasions. (William L Shirer - IIIè Reich, volume II, p.336).
[ 84 ] H. Amouroux - the page is not yet turned, p.98. Annette Wieworka, in his work Déportation and génocide, stresses that none the belligerent allies "envisaged or will not envisage special teams charged to release the camps, even after Struthof, Auschwitz, Ohrdruf, Buchenwald or Bergen-Belsen" (p..78) Deficiency which constitutes a tangible proof of the surprise that the discovery of the death camps causes. (NDLA)
[ 85 ] It should be noted that the gigantic logistic means of the armies of Dwight Eisenhower do not comprise medical departments likely to help without delay of the released deportees, but with the threshold of death. This deficiency is ascribable less with the indifference with regard to the fate of the deportees that with the ignorance in the way in which those, whatever was their race or their religion, were treated. How to explain the fact differently that the US Air Force - following the example Royal Air Force - did not undertake any operation aiming at destroying the railways leading to Auschwitz and the other camps of death? It was the same for the Resistance which never tackled the ways leading to Drancy or while leaving.
[ 86 ] Rumours circulated in certain German mediums. Ernst Jünger pays, in its First Parisian newspaper, a conversation held in Ukraine, at New Year's Eve 1942: "the Müller General made us the account of the many fixed prices to which the Services of safety were delivered, after the catch of Kiev. One also evokes, once more, the tunnels with gas where penetrated of the trains charged with Jews. These are there rumours, that I note as such; but of the murders on a great scale must be surely made ".
Albert Speer acknowledges a held conversation, at the summer 1944, with one of his friends, Karl Hanke, gauleiter of Low-Silesia, which had required of him "never not to accept an invitation to visit a concentration camp in Gau of High-Silesia (…) It had seen a spectacle over there that it did not have the right to describe and that it was not either able to describe" (Speer - In the heart of IIIè Reich, p.529).
[ 87 ] Rene Rémond - Foreword of the work of Asher Cohen: Persecutions and rescues.
[ 88 ] Interview Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Barber, 22-23.7.89.
[ 89 ] Raymond Aron - Memories - p.176.
[ 90 ] Poliakov - the back of the destiny, p.36.
[ 91 ] Jacques Chancel, declaration with Radio-Courtesy, 11.12.89. Free newspaper of Shoed Jean.
Weygand which, in the capacity as Delegated in North Africa, contributes to protect the 400 000 Jews which resided at it, was, him also, of as much less anti-semite that it had been raised by a Jew. At the time of a lunch where Jews were slandered, it had been drawn up: "I was raised by a Jew and I do not admit only one calumny of the Jews in front of me" (Bernard Destremau - Weygand, p.669).
[ 92 ] Andre Frossard, Excuse me to be French, pp.68.69.It should be noted that Pétain is off-set four days after Frossard.
[ 93 ] Jean Borotra, foreword of the work of J Groignec, Pétain, glory and sacrifice.
[ 94 ] Translation.
[ 95 ] Albert Chambon - When France was occupied, Editions France-Empire, pp.43.44.
[ 96 ] J.M. Varaut - The Pétain Lawsuit, p.465.
[ 97 ] There exists, on this question, other testimonys of indisputable value by the quality of their authors. Such that of Leon Poliakov who, speaking about the death camps and the gas chambers, declares: "I believed there only in spring 1945, with discovered camps of dead" (Interview - the Barber, May 17, 1990).
One remains however surprised silence of the politicians and "large signatures" which however "know that they did not know", but which do not dare the statement. As if they feared the terrorism of loan-with-thinking. Such a frileux behavior serves the cause of the malevolent history, by depriving the history very court of their testimonys.
[ 98 ] Helmut Knochen, condemned to died in 1954, gracié in 1958, released in 1962.
[ 99 ] Hilberg, op.city, p.549.
[ 100 ] General Karl Oberg, delivered to France in 1945, condemned to died in 1954, gracié in 1958 and released in 1963.
[ 101 ] Hilberg, op.city, p.549.
[ 102 ] The Lawsuit Laval, ED France-Empire, p.120.
In a report of July 1, 1942, Dannecker underlines "the hesitant and often hostile attitude of the representatives of the French government and the authorities with regard to the solution of the Jewish problems". The difficulties inherent in the respect of the right of asylum in a country under the boot are as obvious as the facility with which this right was refused by free and "democratic" countries to the Russians of the Vlassov army and faithful the harkis delivered to their torturers, whereas dedicated they were known to an unquestionable death.
[ 103 ] Hilberg, op.city, p.523.
[ 104 ] Lawsuit of the Marshal, OJ, p.300.
[ 105 ] Klarsfeld - Vichy-Auschwitz, p.121.
[ 106 ] Lawsuit of Xavier Vallat, goes down for hearing of December 5, 1947. In its report of 18 July 1942, relating to the raids of July the 16 and 17, Röthke is convinced that "of the police officers French would have, in several cases, informed about the projected raids the people whom they were to stop…".
[ 107 ] Nobody can to doubt that, if the railwaymen had been informed of the destiny of the convoys that their network carted, they had refused to lead them or had tried to stop them with the determination and the courage of which they made proof, in 1944, while attacking transport by rail of Wehrmacht.
[ 108 ] Robert Aron - History of Vichy, p.528.
[ 109 ] Quoted extract, supra, reference 83.
[ 110 ] Foreign relations, 1942, volume II, p.710.
[ 111 ] Testimony occulted by the hemiplegic history which takes care well not to announce the existence of it.
[ 112 ] Rene Rémond - quoted foreword.