Author: Léon Werth
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190499540
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
This diary is one of the most precious--and readable--pieces of testimony about life in Vichy France under Nazi occupation. Léon Werth was a Jewish writer who left Paris in June 1940 and hid out in a small village. We see how the Occupation affected life in the countryside and, after his return to Paris, the insurrection of August 1944.
Author: Robert Gildea
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312423599
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 548
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Book Description
In France, the German occupation is called simply the "dark years." There were only the "good French" who resisted and the "bad French" who collaborated. Marianne in Chains, a broad and provocative history drawing on previously unseen archives, firsthand interviews, diaries, and eyewitness accounts, uncovers the complex truth of the time. Robert Gildea's groundbreaking study reveals the everyday life in the heart of occupied France; the pressing imperatives of work, food, transportation, andfamily obligations that led to unavoidable compromise and negotiation with the army of occupation.
Author: Simon Kitson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226438953
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
From 1940 to 1942, French secret agents arrested more than two thousand spies working for the Germans and executed several dozen of them—all despite the Vichy government’s declared collaboration with the Third Reich. A previously untold chapter in the history of World War II, this duplicitous activity is the gripping subject of The Hunt for Nazi Spies, a tautly narrated chronicle of the Vichy regime’s attempts to maintain sovereignty while supporting its Nazi occupiers. Simon Kitson informs this remarkable story with findings from his investigation—the first by any historian—of thousands of Vichy documents seized in turn by the Nazis and the Soviets and returned to France only in the 1990s. His pioneering detective work uncovers a puzzling paradox: a French government that was hunting down left-wing activists and supporters of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces was also working to undermine the influence of German spies who were pursuing the same Gaullists and resisters. In light of this apparent contradiction, Kitson does not deny that Vichy France was committed to assisting the Nazi cause, but illuminates the complex agendas that characterized the collaboration and shows how it was possible to be both anti-German and anti-Gaullist. Combining nuanced conclusions with dramatic accounts of the lives of spies on both sides, The Hunt for Nazi Spies adds an important new dimension to our understanding of the French predicament under German occupation and the shadowy world of World War II espionage.
Author: Caroline Moorehead
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062202499
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
“Le Chambon has long been mythologized in France for the actions of its inhabitants. . . . But, as this riveting history shows, the story is more complex. . . . If the picture Moorhead paints is messier than the myth, this only serves to enhance the heroism of the main actors.”— The New Yorker From the author of the New York Times bestseller A Train in Winter comes the absorbing story of a French village that helped save thousands hunted by the Gestapo during World War II—told in full for the first time. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a small village of scattered houses high in the mountains of the Ardèche, one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of Eastern France. During the Second World War, the inhabitants of this tiny mountain village and its parishes saved thousands wanted by the Gestapo: resisters, freemasons, communists, OSS and SOE agents, and Jews. Many of those they protected were orphaned children and babies whose parents had been deported to concentration camps. With unprecedented access to newly opened archives in France, Britain, and Germany, and interviews with some of the villagers from the period who are still alive, Caroline Moorehead paints an inspiring portrait of courage and determination: of what was accomplished when a small group of people banded together to oppose their Nazi occupiers. A thrilling and atmospheric tale of silence and complicity, Village of Secrets reveals how every one of the inhabitants of Chambon remained silent in a country infamous for collaboration. Yet it is also a story about mythmaking, and the fallibility of memory. A major contribution to WWII history, illustrated with black-and-white photos, Village of Secrets sets the record straight about the events in Chambon, and pays tribute to a group of heroic individuals, most of them women, for whom saving others became more important than their own lives.
Author: Sarah Fishman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
This collection of essays uses as a starting point Robert O. Paxton's: Vichy France : old guard and new order, 1940-1944 (1972). Takes up where Paxton left off and shows how the last 25 years of scholarship have made problematic the tidy categories used to describe behaviour during the Vichy years. Examines ways in which scholars have analyzed their historical legacy.
Author: Meg Ostrum
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803203914
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
"In 1942, in coordination with the Belgian resistance, Schepens stage-managed a highly secret information and evacuation service through the counterfeit operation of a backcountry lumbering enterprise. This book traces Schepen's gradual transformation from an apolitical young ophthalmologist into double agent "Jacques Perot," and his emergence in the postwar period as a modern folk hero to the residents of Mendive. Woven into the account are the stories of a remarkable international cast of characters, most notably the Basque shepherd Jean Sarochar, regarded as a local misfit, with whom Schepens formed his most unlikely partnership and an enduring friendship.".
Author: Elizabeth Karlsgodt
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804777829
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
Defending National Treasures explores the fate of art and cultural heritage during the Nazi occupation of France. The French cultural patrimony was a crucial locus of power struggles between German and French leaders and among influential figures in each country. Karlsgodt examines the preservation policy that the Vichy regime enacted in an assertion of sovereignty over French art museums, historic monuments, and archeological sites. The limits to this sovereignty are apparent from German appropriations of public statues, Jewish-owned art collections, and key "Germanic" works of art from French museums. A final chapter traces the lasting impact of the French wartime reforms on preservation policy. In Defending National Treasures, Karlsgodt introduces the concept of patrimania to reveal examples of opportunism in art preservation. During the war, French officials sought to acquire coveted artwork from Jewish collections for the Louvre and other museums; in the early postwar years, they established a complicated guardianship over unclaimed art recovered from Germany. A cautionary tale for our own times, Defending National Treasures examines the ethical dimensions of museum acquisitions in the ongoing noble quest to preserve great works of art.
Author: Sarah Fishman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190248629
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
In the decades after World War II, French ideas about gender and family life underwent dramatic changes, laying the groundwork for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. This book offers a broad view of changing lives and ideas about love, courtship, marriage, giving birth, parenting, childhood, and adolescence in France from the Vichy regime to the sexual revolution of 1960s.
Author: Sarah Ann Frank
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496207777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
Hostages of Empire is a social, cultural, and political history of the colonial prisoners of war.
Author: John Sweets
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195037510
Category : Auvergne (France)
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Basing his work on French and German archives as well as on interviews and private correspondence, Sweets examines the French response to the Vichy government and Nazi occupation by studying Vichy's application of their experiment to the city of Clermont-Ferrand.
