Jews ‘sacrificed by French to get in Nazi good books’
FRANCE tried to “get into the Germans’ good books” by collaborating in the Nazi Holocaust, a historian claims.
Rather than resisting, the policy of collaboration was a “deliberate choice” by some French wartime politicians.
Laurent Joly, of Sorbonne University in Paris, said the French in the Free Zone – administered from the city of Vichy – helped send many of the 75,000 Jews deported between 1940 and 1944 to death camps. Launching his book The State Against the Jews, Mr Joly added that “Vichy was always trying to demonstrate its goodwill towards the Germans” and Interior Minister Adrien Marquet wanted to “get into their good books”. Pierre Laval, Vichy head from 1942 to 1944, later claimed he was “convinced that the Jews were being deported to Poland to create a Jewish state”.