1082 Ch. 26 • World War IIVichy enacted restrictions on Jews similar to those in force in Germany.
Beginning in October 1940, a series of laws forbade Jews from holding jobs
in public service, education, or cultural affairs, or in professions such as
medicine and law. A law in July 1941 sought “to eliminate all Jewish influ
ence in the national economy”; the state appointed a trustee who could
sell any property or liquidate any business owned by Jews.
These exclusions were only the beginning. French police cooperated with
German soldiers after Hitlers May 1941 order to round up 3,600 Polish
Jews in France. In December, the Vichy government proclaimed that it would
collaborate with the Nazis with “acts, not words,” and did just that. In July
1942, the French police seized 13,000 Jews, most of them foreign-born, in
Paris, sending them to death camps in the east. Premier Pierre Laval (1883—
1945) insisted that children be sent along with their parents. A Parisian
woman later recalled, “I saw a train pass. In front, a car containing French
police and German soldiers. Then came cattle cars, sealed. The thin arms of
children clasped the grating. A hand waved outside like a leaf in a storm.
When the train slowed down, voices cried, ‘Mama!’ And nothing answered
except the squeaking of the springs of the train.” Vichy France was the only
territory in Europe in which local authorities deported Jews without the
presence of German occupying forces, at least in the so-called free zone
until November 1942. A militia of determined collaborators created in Janu
ary 1943 continued to round up Jews, seeking to crush all resistance.
ResistanceEveryone in German-occupied territories knew the potential cost of resis
tance. In Czechoslovakia, the assassination in May 1942 of Reinhard Hey
drich brought the destruction of the entire village of Lidice and most of
its inhabitants. When partisans killed ten Germans in a Yugoslav town in
October 1941, the Nazis retaliated by massacring 7,000 men, women, and
children.
Yet people did resist. On April 19, 1943, the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw,
from which already about 300,000 Jews had been sent to the death camps
after German troops had concentrated Jews there from other places, rose
up against the Nazis. They were crushed almost a month later with the loss
of at least 12,000 lives. Thousands of those who had survived perished in
the camps. Poland had what amounted to a secret underground state linked
to the government in exile, many clandestine publications, and a “Home
Army” about 300,000 strong, whose members fought with Allied troops in
Europe and Africa, On August 1, 1944, the Warsaw Uprising began. After
two months of intense fighting, German military strength again won out,
with 200,000 Poles perishing in the fighting or executed afterwards.
Resistance movements were most effective where hills and mountains
offered protection from German troops, as in central and southern France,
Greece, and Yugoslavia. Active and effective resistance was least possible in