Last Exit from Vichy France

Last Exit from Vichy France PDF Author: Eric Thomas Jennings
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description

Last Exit from Vichy France

Last Exit from Vichy France PDF Author: Eric Thomas Jennings
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description


Escape from Vichy

Escape from Vichy PDF Author: Eric T. Jennings
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674983386
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Early in World War II, thousands of refugees traveled from France to Vichy-controlled Martinique, en route to safer shores in North, Central, and South America. While awaiting transfer, the exiles formed influential ties--with one another and with local black dissidents. As Eric T. Jennings shows, what began as expulsion became a kind of rescue.

The Holocaust & the Jews of Marseille

The Holocaust & the Jews of Marseille PDF Author: Donna F. Ryan
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252065309
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
One-fourth of the Jews living in France - once considered an asylum for the politically dispossessed - were identified, rounded up, and deported to the death camps of eastern Europe during World War II. In this carefully documented, gripping account of the treatment and fate of French and foreign Jews in Marseille, Donna Ryan explores the extent to which the Vichy government participated in the German plans to exterminate them. Marseille was a major French city in the Vichy Zone that had a large Jewish population; the Italians, who sometimes thwarted French administrators, never occupied Marseille; and it was a regional office of the Commissariat General aux Questions Juives and the Union Generale des Israelites de France, which could provide documentation.

Choices in Vichy France

Choices in Vichy France PDF Author: John Sweets
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199910405
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Post-World War II scholarship and films like The Sorrow and the Pity have frequently replaced the old Gaullist notion of widespread resistance, and cultivated the impression that the French may well have been a "nation of collaborators," embracing the dream of a new authoritarian order in France as embodied by the puppet Vichy regime of Marshall Petain, and hindering the network of the French Underground. From evidence gathered in France, Germany, and England, John F. Sweets has produced an insightful reappraisal of French life during the war at Clermont-Ferrand, the largest town near the occupational capital of Vichy, and the very setting of The Sorrow and the Pity. Having thoroughly examined town archives, records, and manuscripts, the author reconstructs occupational commerce, education, media, and attitudes, maintaining that, contrary to popular opinion, the vast majority of French were far from collaborationist. Choices in Vichy France details the effects upon society of war, oppression, internment, rationing, aryanization, and propaganda, painting a portrait of the wartime French that lies somewhere between the extremes of outright resistance and enthusiastic collaborationism. With illustrative examples of what day-to-day life was like in the region for the German, the Jew, the Communist, and the fascist, as well as the French masses, this provocative book opens a remarkably clear window onto an era of history often fraught with misunderstanding and suspicion.

England's Last War Against France

England's Last War Against France PDF Author: Colin Smith
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0297857819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 607

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Book Description
Genuinely new story of the Second World War - the full account of England's last war against France in 1940-42. Most people think that England's last war with France involved point-blank broadsides from sailing ships and breastplated Napoleonic cavalry charging red-coated British infantry. But there was a much more recent conflict than this. Under the terms of its armistice with Nazi Germany, the unoccupied part of France and its substantial colonies were ruled from the spa town of Vichy by the government of Marshal Philip Petain. Between July 1940 and November 1942, while Britain was at war with Germany, Italy and ultimately Japan, it also fought land, sea and air battles with the considerable forces at the disposal of Petain's Vichy French. When the Royal Navy sank the French Fleet at Mers El-Kebir almost 1,300 French sailors died in what was the twentieth century's most one-sided sea battle. British casualties were nil. It is a wound that has still not healed, for undoubtedly these events are better remembered in France than in Britain. An embarrassment at the time, France's maritime massacre and the bitter, hard-fought campaigns that followed rarely make more than footnotes in accounts of Allied operations against Axis forces. Until now.

Surrender on Demand

Surrender on Demand PDF Author: Varian Fry
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Varian Fry, a young editor from New York, traveled to Marseilles after Germany defeated France in the summer of 1940. As the representative of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization, he offered aid and advice to refugees who found themselves threatened with extradition to Nazi Germany under Article 19 of the Franco-German armistice — the “Surrender on Demand” clause. Fry risked his life to rescue those targeted by the Gestapo in “the most gigantic man-trap in history.” Working day and night with a few associates in opposition to France’s Vichy government and to American authorities, his elaborate rescue network managed to spirit more than 1,500 people — including prominent European politicians, artists, writers and scientists — to safety by the time Fry was expelled from France after 13 months. “Surrender on Demand is by turns wildly exciting, horrifying and exalting. Certainly, there has never been another book like it... Varian Fry is a good man. Through the people he has helped rescue — the doctors, the painters, the writers, the sculptors, the teachers — he has added to the sum total of the world’s happiness... an astonishingly good book.” — Russell Maloney, The New York Times “Surrender on Demand contains enough intrigue and conspiracy, enough narrow escapes and shady and flamboyant characters for three or four spy stories. But Mr. Fry has not written it for excitement... He has put down some plain and eloquent facts.” — Orville Prescott, The New York Times “I have read and heard many accounts of escapes from Europe... but none surpasses this restrained and factual narrative in suspense and excitement... It tells of many triumphs and some defeats: it depicts with vividness and often with humor a large number of interesting and frequently distinguished persons; it describes the endless obstacles encountered and the ingenious and constantly changing shifts and devices contrived to overcome them; and throughout it makes one feel the undercurrent of potential tragedy which too often became actual.” — New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review “A novelist would hardly dare pack a novel with so many hair-breath escapes.” — Lewis Gannett, New York Herald Tribune “... a brilliant exposé of the work accomplished by [Fry] in Marseille during the tragic days that followed the French defeat... Surrender on Demand is a unique contribution to the underground history of the war.” — Josef Forman, Free World “There are a larger number of highly exciting and almost unbelievable stories in this deeply moving but often also highly amusing book. Friends of light adventure novels will undoubtedly like it. And friends of humanity will see much more in it than an adventure story although it deals with forging passports, with hiding and escaping from detectives, with secret messages hidden in a toothpaste tube, and with an underground railroad over a well protected border. They will see in it a memorial to the man who made what he modestly calls ‘an experiment in democratic solidarity’ and also to the women and men who sent him on his dangerous mission.” — Henry B. Kranz, Saturday Review

Vichy

Vichy PDF Author: Eric Conan
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9780874517958
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
A plea for a more moderate, balanced, and accurate view of the Vichy regime.

Vichy France and the Jews

Vichy France and the Jews PDF Author: Michael Robert Marrus
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804724999
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Provides the definitive account of Vichy's own antisemitic policies and practices. It is a major contribution to the history of the Jewish tragedy in wartime Europe answering the haunting question, "What part did Vichy France really play in the Nazi effort to murder Jews living in France?"

The Unwanted

The Unwanted PDF Author: Michael Dobbs
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525434836
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a riveting story of Jewish families seeking to escape Nazi Germany. In 1938, on the eve of World War II, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote that "a piece of paper with a stamp on it" was "the difference between life and death." The Unwanted is the intimate account of a small village on the edge of the Black Forest whose Jewish families desperately pursued American visas to flee the Nazis. Battling formidable bureaucratic obstacles, some make it to the United States while others are unable to obtain the necessary documents. Some are murdered in Auschwitz, their applications for American visas still "pending." Drawing on previously unpublished letters, diaries, interviews, and visa records, Michael Dobbs provides an illuminating account of America's response to the refugee crisis of the 1930s and 1940s. He describes the deportation of German Jews to France in October 1940, along with their continuing quest for American visas. And he re-creates the heated debates among U.S. officials over whether or not to admit refugees amid growing concerns about "fifth columnists," at a time when the American public was deeply isolationist, xenophobic, and antisemitic. A Holocaust story that is both German and American, The Unwanted vividly captures the experiences of a small community struggling to survive amid tumultuous world events.

The Vichy Past in France Today

The Vichy Past in France Today PDF Author: Richard J. Golsan
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498550339
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
The Vichy Past in France Today: Corruptions of Memory is an interdisciplinary study examining the continuing impact of the memory of Vichy and World War II in French politics, literature, intellectual discourse and debates, and the law. It argues that despite multiple efforts in all of these areas to come to terms with France’s World War II past and to fulfill a “duty to memory” to Vichy’s Jewish victims, the nation is still not reconciled to the so-called “Dark Years,” even seventy years after the Liberation. Indeed the Vichy past “occupies” important recent works of literature, inflects much political discussion and debate, often serving as a metaphor for political (and moral) evil. Its legacies include the passage of problematic laws that dangerously distort and simplify complex historical realities. Chapter I examines the historical and legal legacies of the 1990s trials for crimes against humanity and traces their impact on the so-called “memorial laws” of the new century. Chapter II revisits the 2002 presidential elections in France and the impact of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s first round victory on intellectual and cultural debate. Chapter III explores Alain Badiou’s controversial characterization of Sarkozy’s presidential victory as a return of “Petainism” in The Meaning of Sarkozy. The discussion is cast against the backdrop of Badiou’s “radical” political thought and Sarkozy’s political uses and misuses of the World War II past. Chapter IV examines the controversy surrounding the publication of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2006) and its morally and historically problematic portrayal of an unrepentant Nazi and SS officer. Chapter V discusses Yannick Haenel’s fictional recreation of the Polish resistance hero Jan Karski (The Messenger, 2009) in his novel by that name, and the polemics between the novel’s author and the maker of the classic Holocaust documentary film, Shoah, Claude Lanzmann. The Conclusion first explores the ways in which the memory of Vichy inflects literary and political reflections on the recent terrorist attacks in France. It also examines strategies proposed by French philosophers for moving beyond the “impasse” of Vichy’s memory in France before concluding with a different strategy proposed by the author for the French nation to move beyond the memory of the Dark Years.