Rosbottom - Sudden courage: youth in France confront the Germans, 1940-1945

MAY 1940JUNE 1941

1. Germany invades France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France in May; all nations have ceased combat by mid-June.
2. Paris, an open city, is taken peacefully by the Wehrmacht on June 14.
3. The relatively correct Occupation of France begins; Germans are not yet at war with the Soviet Union.
4. Although resistance activities are minor for the most part, there are German retaliations, including executions.
5. Philippe Ptains new government, Ltat Franais, is established in Vichy; its legislature passes unanimously and strict anti-Jewish ordinances are quickly imposed.
6. Hitler cancels Operation Sea Lion, his plan for invading the British Isles.
7. The Battle of Britain begins; Nazi air attacks against the United Kingdom (JulyOctober 1940) are followed by the Blitzthe carpet-bombing of British cities that lasts until May 1941.
8. It becomes obvious to all sides that the war and the Occupation of France will continue indefinitely.
9. Prime Minister Pierre Laval is fired by Ptain in December.

JUNENOVEMBER 1941

1. Germanys invasion of the Soviet Union offers a thin ray of hope that Hitler may have bitten off more than he can handle.
2. The French Communist Party, previously neutral after the signing of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939, becomes actively hostile to the German Occupation.
3. Twenty-seven French hostages are executed at Chteaubriant on October 22, including Guy Mquet; a total of forty-eight hostages will be shot at Chteaubriant, Nantes, and Paris.
4. The Reich is forced to demand increasing amounts of matriel and labor from occupied countries.

DECEMBER 1941APRIL 1942

1. Hitler declares war on the United States, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
2. The United States enters the war against the Axis powers.
3. The Reichs first Russian campaign concludes indecisively.
4. The first French Jews are deported from the Drancy camp outside of Paris on March 27, 1942, and sent to Auschwitz.
5. Pierre Laval returns to the premiership in April.

JUNEJULY 1942

1. The policing of anti-German activities in France is transferred from the Wehrmacht to the SS and its Gestapo police.
2. La Relve (roughly, the call-up): The Vichy government requests tens of thousands of volunteers for work in Germany in exchange for the better treatment and possible release of some French POWs.
3. All Jews over the age of six are required to wear the yellow star in the Occupied Zone.
4. The yellow star injunction is followed by a massive roundup of Jews, including French citizens, by French police, bringing more domestic opprobrium onto the Vichy government.

NOVEMBER 1942

1. The Allies invade North Africa, where Vichy forces are defeated.
2. The German Wehrmacht occupies the Zone free of France (previously administered solely by the Vichy government).
3. After recalling its ambassador in May 1942, the United States breaks diplomatic relations with Ltat Franais.

JANUARYJUNE 1943

1. The Milice franaise, the soon-to-be-despised Vichy antiresistance police and paramilitary unit, is instituted.
2. Because La Relve did not succeed, Laval institutes the STO (Service du travail obligatoire), a draft for required work in Germany.
3. To avoid the STO, many young men either hide or join the Maquis.
4. The Wehrmachts General Friedrich Paulus surrenders the encircled German forces at Stalingrad; many foresee a resolution of the war, whether Allied victory or armistice.
5. Alos Brunner, an SS officer, takes command of the Drancy camp from the French police.
6. Between March 1942 and August 1944, tens of thousands of Jews and other undesirables at Drancy, including thousands of children, are sent to death camps.

JUNEAUGUST 1944

1. The Allies invade France; the Battle of Normandy is launched on June 6.
2. Paris is liberated by Free French forces on August 25.

SEPTEMBER 1944MAY 1945

1. The liberation of France continues, but at the end of the war, the Germans still hold a few besieged enclaves on the Atlantic coast.

High school students are scary. We arent cynical yet.

JAY FAUK, 18, VIRGINIA HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR (2018)

In times of war, we are brought abruptly to consider youth. While researching and writing my previous book, When Paris Went Dark, on daily life in Paris during the German Occupation of France, I took this truism for granted. On reflection after finishing that work, I realized that adolescents and youngsters played a much more important role in resisting the Germans than I had given them credit for. As early as the German invasion in May 1940, a substantial percentage of those few French citizens who resisted in some way or another, as well as immigrants from other European nations, were adolescentsyoung men and women between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five. After more research, I discovered that even though French historians, essayists, filmmakers, and novelists had paid some attention to the role of youth during World War II, there were few such studies, stories, or films in English, and the debate was still heated among historians of Europe about how crucial this age group had indeed been in the struggle against German fascism.

In general, Americans know little about the French dilemma, namely, the fate of the only European nation to have signed a collaborative agreement with the Third Reich. That agreement allowed the Germans to maintain total control over a large section of France and permitted the establishment of a French government to administer the rest. In other nations, puppet governments were established by the Germans, led by domestic fascists and right-wingers, but not one had signed a treaty that divided the country geographically, and then whose elected legislature voted for the end of their previous government.

France was then, and is now, a highly patriotic country; it has always been proud of its history as the protector of the rights of man and of citizens. Yet, unlike Germanys political and cultural self-flagellation since 1945a courageous and generous response to those whom it terrorized for a decade and a halfmany in France have felt less urgency to apologize, for, they firmly observe, they too were victimized by the Third Reich and by its Vichy minions. Many argued then, and still do, that from the beginning of the defeat, London was the official site of Free Francewhich included many of Frances African coloniesand that it was led by the indomitable Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle.

But the confusion remains, for many Frenchmen, especially the French police, did assist the Germans in their repressions. For instance, more Jews were tracked and physically arrested by French police than by the Gestapo. (The Germans simply did not have enough available forces to occupy completely such a large country.) Furthermore, after the liberation of France in 1945, the politically astute de Gaulle led the world to believe that most of his fellow citizens had followed his admonitions to resist passively and that only a minority of ambitious and venal politicians, with orders from Vichy, had betrayed the values of