Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis

4. Up in Arms: Jewish Resistance against Nazi Germany in France - Nathan Bracher

73 Nathan Bracher 4 Up in Arms Jewish Resistance against Nazi Germany in France The story of Jewish resistance against the Nazis in France is in fact composed of an entire set of interrelated, multifaceted narratives. First, this resistance evolved over time. Jews adapted their opposition to the Third Reich in response to the changing realities of the war and the German occupation of France, as they successively faced the outbreak of hostilities; the defeat and the armistice; Vichy’s collaboration in excluding, pillaging, arresting, and detaining the Jews in internment camps; and finally, a long list of ever-increasing persecutions and deportations that we now recognize as part of the Nazis’ enterprise of total annihilation. Second, different components of the Jewish population in France opposed Nazi Germany and its collaborators in numerous ways, which varied according to the perceptions, cultural habits, and historical experiences specific to each group. Both armed and unarmed Jewish resistance thus varied according to contexts that evolved significantly from one stage of the war and Occupation to another. We must moreover be mindful of the geopolitical dimensions of the Occupation , particularly in the first phase from June 1940 until November 1942, when France was divided into a number of areas, each subjected to a different set of dangers and restrictions: in addition to the major split between the Northern or Occupied Zone, which found itself directly facing the German military command , and the Southern or Unoccupied Zone relegated to Vichy, three départements of the Alsace-Lorraine region, le Bas Rhin, le Haut Rhin, and la Moselle, 74 Nathan Bracher had been annexed by the Third Reich, while the northernmost tip of France, the départements of le Nord and le Pas de Calais were declared a forbidden zone. The widely revered World War I “Victor of Verdun,” Marshal Philippe Pétain , took over as the overtly paternalistic head of the “French State” at Vichy. Pétain quickly scuttled democratic institutions and immediately set out to stigmatize egalitarian ideals and so-called “non-French” elements of the population . Jews were conveniently blamed for the disastrous defeat accompanied by an equally calamitous collapse of civil society known as the “exodus,” when millions had chaotically sought to flee the rapidly advancing Wehrmacht in France. First in line for such scapegoating were prominent Jewish politicians such as Léon Blum, Pierre Mendès France, and Jean Zay, who had championed labor reform and social justice in the late 1930s. Even under the terms of the humiliating, burdensome, and dishonorable armistice agreement that required French authorities to surrender refugees from Nazi Germany, Vichy peremptorily claimed to embody French sovereignty. From the very outset in late June 1940, however, a previously little known army officer who had gone to London as a liaison to Churchill, General Charles de Gaulle, vigorously denied the legitimacy of both the armistice and the Vichy regime, which in turn lost little time in condemning him to death in absentia. That the very foundations of legal authority were sharply contested created a significant degree of ambivalence and confusion, particularly in the earliest phases of the Occupation, as resistance in the Northern and Southern Zones developed according to contrasting perceptions of events. Resisters in the Northern Occupied Zone tended to see the ubiquitous Germans as their unique enemy and set about organizing acts of sabotage and networks that could gather intelligence and provide escape routes for Allied aviators. Resisters in the Southern Unoccupied Zone tended to have a more political focus that insisted on keeping France in the war on the Allied side in spite of the Armistice and Pétain’s demand that France must seek to renovate itself while collaborating with the Germans.1 Geographical realities added another set of critical factors conditioning Jewish resistance to Nazi Germany: the large expanse of territory, with its sparsely populated rural areas, numerous forests, and major mountain chains offered space for the maquis and armed resistance movements and shelter for refugees within France’s mainland borders, while the contiguous 1. Dominique Veillon and Olivier Wieviorka, “La Résistance,” in La France des années noires, vol. 2, De l’Occupation à la Libération, ed. Jean-Pierre Azéma and François Bédarida, 65–73 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993). 75 Jewish Resistance in France presence of two nonbelligerent countries, Switzerland and Spain, on France’s eastern and western borders, offered the possibility of getting the...