Macron decries France's Nazi past during Netanyahu visit

PARIS (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron denounced France's collaboration in the Holocaust, lashing out Sunday at those who negate or minimize the country's role in sending tens of thousands of Jews to their deaths.

After he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended a Holocaust commemoration, Macron also appealed for renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Worried that Netanyahu is backing away from commitment to a two-state solution, Macron assailed Jewish settlement construction as a threat to international hopes for peace.

Commemorating 75 years since a mass roundup of Jews during the darkest chapter of modern French history, Macron insisted that "it was indeed France that organized this." "Not a single German" was directly involved, he said, but French police collaborating with the Nazis. More at link.

https://www.mail.com/int/news/europe/5362582-macron-decries-frances-nazi-netanyahu-visit.html#.1258-stage-hero1-2

That won't go down well - too many claimed they were in the Resistance, when a great many French people were grassing up their neighbours to the Gestapo, actively rounding up Jews, etc.

bb1 wrote:That won't go down well - too many claimed they were in the Resistance, when a great many French people were grassing up their neighbours to the Gestapo, actively rounding up Jews, etc.

There are photos of French police herding Jews into cattle trucks in Paris for onward transmission to Auschwitz. There are documents that show the police were 'forgiven' for what they did in Drancy and the Velodrome.   The biggest hypocracy was the treatment of French women who 'fraternized' wth the Germans - they were beaten and had their heads shaved and imprisoned; nothing was done about the French who went hand in glove with the Nazis.   LL

The fraternising women were easy targets, IMO, and if truth were known, the Frenchmen tormenting them probably did far worse.

I must say, Macron is going up in my estimation. He seems to have far more backbone than I gave him credit for - I suspect telling the truth about this dark episode isn't going to go down very well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vel%27_d%27Hiv_Roundup


On 2 July 1942, René Bousquet attended a planning meeting in which he raised no objection to the arrests and worried only about the "embarrassing [gênant]" fact that the French police would carry them out. Bousquet succeeded in a compromise that the police would round up only foreign Jews. Vichy ratified that agreement the following day.[7]

Although the police have been blamed for rounding up children of less than 16 – the age was set to preserve a fiction that workers were needed in the east – the order was given by Pétain's minister, Pierre Laval, supposedly as a "humanitarian" measure to keep families together. This too was a fiction, given that the parents of these children had already been deported, and documents of the period have revealed that the anti-semitic Laval's principal concern was what to do with Jewish children once their parents had been deported. The youngest child sent to Auschwitz under Laval's orders was 18 months old.

Three former SS officers testified in 1980 that Vichy officials had been enthusiastic about deportation of Jews from France. The investigator Serge Klarsfeld found minutes in German archives of meetings with senior Vichy officials and Bousquet's proposal that the roundup should cover non-French Jews throughout the country.[8]

July 17, 1995    http://articles.latimes.com/1995-07-17/news/mn-24867_1_world-war-ii
Chirac Admits France's Complicity With Nazis:  For the first time, a French president acknowledges the nation's role in the deportation of Jews during World War II.

PARIS — President Jacques Chirac acknowledged Sunday what a generation of political leaders did not--that the French state was an accomplice to the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews during World War II.

At a ceremony to commemorate the 53rd anniversary of the roundup of at least 13,000 Jews at a Paris stadium--the biggest during the war years--Chirac said that French complicity with the Nazis was a stain on the nation.

"These dark hours soil forever our history and are an injury to our past and our traditions," Chirac told the gathering at the former site of the Velodrome d'Hiver stadium in western Paris.

"The criminal folly of the [German] occupier was seconded by the French, by the French state," he said.

Chirac, a conservative who took office in May, is the first French president to publicly recognize France's role in the deportations of Jews under the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Petain, which collaborated with the Nazis.

n all, about 75,000 Jews were deported from France to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Only 2,500 survived.

Chirac's predecessor, Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, maintained that the Vichy regime did not represent the French republic and its actions were not those of the state.

That attitude pained France's large Jewish community, which has long pressed authorities to come to grips with the nation's collaborationist past.

At dawn on July 16, 1942, French police banged on doors throughout Paris, pulling men, women and children from their homes and rounding them up at the cycling stadium. The families were imprisoned for three days without food or water, then deported to Auschwitz. Only a handful returned.

The roundup was considered particularly heinous because of the French fervor in making arrests, a tactic aimed at appeasing the Nazis to gain more independence for Vichy.

"France, the nation of light and human rights, land of welcome and asylum, accomplished the irreparable," said Chirac. "Betraying its word, it delivered its dependents to their executioners."

In a clear warning against today's extreme-right National Front, Chirac also urged vigilance against attempts by some political parties to promote a racist, anti-Semitic ideology.

Noted Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld hailed Chirac for his "courage" and said that the president's words were "what we had hoped to hear one day."

"It is a turning point. . . . It is, finally, looking the truth in the face, lifting the veil," said Henri Hajdenberg, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France.

Chirac's statements culminated a process that gained pace in 1994 when a court for the first time convicted a French citizen, Paul Touvier, of crimes against humanity. The former pro-Nazi militia chief is serving a life term for ordering the executions of six Jews in June, 1944.

Mitterrand, a Vichy official before joining the anti-Nazi resistance, was the first president to lay a wreath at the memorial on the riverside site of the stadium, demolished after World War II.

In 1993, he declared July 16 a "national day of remembrance of the racist and anti-Semitic persecutions committed under the de facto authority of the so-called government of the French state in 1940-1944."

But Jews and many Resistance veterans were angered because Mitterrand sent a wreath each year to the grave of Petain, the Vichy head of state, in honor of his heroism during World War I.

Chirac, like Mitterrand, made a distinction between Vichy and the rest of the nation, which he called "upright, generous, faithful to its traditions, its genius."

"This France was never at Vichy," Chirac said, but was "everywhere that the Free French fought," a reference to the Resistance forces. France, he said, "is not an anti-Semitic nation."

Several deportation survivors attended Sunday's ceremony, along with representatives of the Jewish community and the archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, a Jew who converted to the Roman Catholic faith.

It took 50 years from the end of WW2 to make this acknowledgement. LL

See the police hats?   No comment.   LL

Yes, it's something that simply cannot be denied, IMO, LL. There is far too much photographic evidence, too many written records - and boy, did the nazis like keeping records of their atrocities.

This pretence that all French men and women supported the Resistance is like the post-war declarations from Germans that they were never nazis. So, who were all those people with their right arms in the air, before it all went wrong, then?

It's all shades of grey; I don't regard the poor German youth who were conscripted as 'nazis' - most of them just wanted to somehow survive, and stay sane. I've never forgotten a German family friend from my childhood - he'd been conscripted and ended up on a U-boat, of all things. He had the rare good fortune to have a captain who was a patriotic German, not a nazi, in common with many in the Kriegsmarine, who surrendered rather than get his crew killed doing something heroic for Hitler- hence the family friend's happy arrival in a PoW camp near here.

He detested the nazis, and what they had done to Germany and the wider world.

Likewise France- at one end, there was the Resistance, in the middle people who just wanted to survive, and at the other end, active collaborators. I am afraid rounding up Jews was active collaboration.

The claim made after the war that Vichy was the only part of France that collaborated was a crock of sh*t - Drancy and the Velodrome were in Paris, the former being located in Drancy, a northeastern suburb of Paris, the latter being close to the Tour Eiffel. Also France was very anti-semitic, think of Alfred Dreyfus and Emile Zola's J'Accuse letter to the President of France in 1898. LL

You don't have to look to the past, or France, to find anti-semitism, LL. Just look at Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party.