The only European country whose government didn't go into exile during WWII, but preferred to collaborate with the Germans was..

Didn't France collapse relatively quickly? What good would an exiled government do when your army has been defeated and the German's held key cities? After France fell, the rest of the European governments were like "oh shit" and high tailed it out of town. It only took 6 weeks for the Germans to conquering France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. More than likely the French just accepted their fait and made the best of a bad situation.

On the bright side, they had a lot of hot German cock to service and the boys had money to spend. Then the American's came horny and ready to spend their G.I. money (which went a long way). Id you set morals aside and focus on the sex, a woman or gay man could have cleaned up in Paris with all those sexy things running around. Just don't talk politics during pillow talk with a Nazi or racist American.

The Prime Minister of France when the Germans invaded in May 1940 was Paul Reynaud; he was opposed to an armistice with Germany, but when he was overruled by Pétain and others, he resigned on June 16; he attempted to flee the country, but was captured and imprisoned in Austria until the end of the war. Charles de Gualle, who led a government in exile opposed to Pétain's Vichy government, said that Reynaud was "a man of great worth unjustly crushed by events beyond measure."

[quote]Most Frenchmen didn't really find the Nazis to be that problematic (at least not in the beginning); after all, the Krauts were mostly after the Jews and the Commies, and the majority of Frenchies wasn't all that crazy about those two groups too.

All true.

And France has far and away had the largest far-right movements and sentiment of any European country in the post-war period.

Apologies for my ignorance, but was Charles de Gualle a good leader? Not sure if anyone has an option on him in here.

Well, r4, a 2005 survey of French citizens declared de Gualle to be the greatest French person ever.

This is exactly how fascism work--rail against a suspicious minority group so the majority feel it doesn't affect them.

Like Trump with immigrants, muslims, and gays

There’s a historical fiction book called The Flight Portfolio that takes place in occupied France. It focuses on an American who travels to France in order to help artistic refugees escape Europe and has a predominantly gay story line. It might interest some of you!

About 75,000 Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps and death camps and 72,500 of them died, but 75% of the approximately 330,000 Jews in metropolitan France in 1939 escaped deportation and survived the Holocaust, which is one of the highest survival rates in Europe. France has the third highest number of citizens who were awarded the Righteous Among the Nations, an award given to "non-Jews who acted according to the most noble principles of humanity by risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust".

Cheese-eating surrender monkeys!

"Then the American's came"

Oh, dear, R1.

Denmark’s government also stayed operational and collaborated with the Nazis.

The Germans left them alone for the first few years of the war, but then cracked down later.

R8 That's true. But it was still the French police that helped to roundup those deported Jews and it took the French government decades to apologize for that.

And most of the French Jews didn't even know about the extermination camps. The Eastern European Jews knew very well what was going on in those places, because they had to live in those dreadful ghettos for years before being sent there and there were already rumors in the streets about places like Auschwitz and Treblinka. Plus they were sent there in the freight cars, like cattle, so most of them knew very well that they were on their way to get killed (and many of them arrived there half-dead already, because of the horrible living conditions in the ghetto).

But Jews from places like France, the Netherlands and Greece knew very little about those places and many of them really believed they were just being resettled. They were often sent to those death camps on passenger trains, sometimes even in first class. Witnesses report that some Jewish women were even seen putting their make-up on after getting off the train at Treblinka, because they really had no idea about the whole mass extermination plan. Fast forward about two hours and those same women were nothing but a cloud of smoke going up the crematorium chimney.

"historical fiction book"

Or, as other people know it, a novel.

r12 thank for your contribution. Sounds absolutely horrifying.

OP really likes to keep current.

And the point of this thread is...?

R15 The point could be that what happened in France is pretty frighteningly similar to what's happening in the US with our own current, orange version of Hitler. The right wing lunatics are just substituting Mexicans for Jews. History repeats itself...

r16 this country has always been fucked up. American's joined a World War then went went on and on about liberating the Jews (no mention of the Soviet sacrifices) thanks to the "Greatest Generation". Then those men came home to lynch black people or ignore the rights of black and brown Americans, until they were forced to deal with it. We even fought a Civil War over slavery and had a President proudly show The Birth of the Nation in the WH. I'm honestly shocked when people act like Trump doesn't represent the evil that's been lurking here since day one.

[quote] The point could be that what happened in France is pretty frighteningly similar to what's happening in the US with our own current, orange version of Hitler. The right wing lunatics are just substituting Mexicans for Jews. History repeats itself...

Except none of that is happening in the US.

Trust me, people knew about the concentration camps. Just look at films made during the war: concentration camps are mentioned in many of them (Casablanca, Watch on the Rhine, The Conspirators, etc.).

R19 Concentration and extermination camps are two different things.

Exactly, R18. What's happening in the U.S. right now isn't remotely like France in 1940. First of all, and the biggest reason there's no parallel with France and Germany in WW2, is that another country didn't invade the United States.

There is no difference between concentration camps and extermination camps. Concentration camps are defined as massive detention camps where people are kept who have not been arrested

We have had them for a while in the good old UfuckingS. Look at the cages at the border

As the virus runs through them unabated they too will magically turn into extrrmibb ng stein camps

[quote] What good would an exiled government do when your army has been defeated and the German's held key cities?

The point is that the French didn’t just acquiesce and only obey the occupier’s orders. They became willing collaborators who literally embraced the enemy and joined their cause. Yes, there was a resistance, but that was a minority.

There was active collaboration, but it was not the majority of the French, who were living through an occupation. There was the Vichy government, a puppet regime which collaborated with Germans. It did not represent the majority of ordinary French citizens who, again, were living under the total control of the Germans. And then there was the active resistance movement, represented by the exiled DeGaulle. To say the majority of the French were happily collaborating with their oppressors is absolutely absurd and patently untrue.

OP, get your history right. After June 1940, the Germans occupied northern and western France. The Vichy government oversaw the remaining southern parts of the country. The Vichy government was a dictatorship and collaborationist...a puppet state of the Germans, if you will. Before the Germans even asked for French Jews, the Vichy government rounded them up.

The Free French government in exile in London was headed by Charles de Gaulle.

French partisans fighting Germans and sabotaging the German War Effort were mainly communist.

The Nazi news sources were like Fox News. You probably never heard about the concentration camps - or they were described as necessary isolation. Fox News is a study in how such a large portion of the population can believe things that are blatantly untrue - and ignore really horrible things - because information source is pure propaganda.

The upside is, Hitler didn't lay waste to Paris with aerial bombardment. Capitulation kept French cities relatively intact and pretty.

[quote] the majority of the French were happily collaborating with their oppressors

That part is true, then when the Allies turned the tide the French flipped again.

The Milice and the Carlingue were the Proud Boys of their day. Young thugs who willingly did the bidding of the Gestapo.

Hot Stupid Deplorables like the title character in Louis Malle's classic film, "LACOMBE, LUCIEN."

Thanks OP now I've gone down a rabbit hole to see what Monaco was up to during this time. Apparently, they had a large Italian population that supported Mussolini's fascist regime. Italy invaded and occupied the country. The Prince supported the Vichy Government because he was palls with some of its leaders, though Monaco remained officially "neutral". After Mussolini's fall, the German's took control and extradited 360 Jews from the principality. Seems like Monaco would accurately fit OP's description of the French.

[quote] There is no difference between concentration camps and extermination camps.

Of course there's a difference: concentration camps were large camps with hundreds of barracks for prisoners (those weren't only the Jews, but also political prisoners, Slavic people, gypsies, homosexuals etc.), who were used as forced labor by the nazis.

But extermination camps (those were mostly located in Poland) were pretty small affairs, built solely to murder the prisoners (mostly Jewish) and destroy their bodies in less than two hours after they arrived there. They consisted only of a gas chamber, crematorium and a few other buildings. The Nazis usually kept only a few living Jews around those places, members of the so-called Sonderkommandos. Those were the Jews who shaved the prisoners' heads before they were gassed and later helped to dispose of their bodies. But members of Sonderkommandos were regularly killed too and replaced with others, because the Nazis didn't want the word about those places to get out. For instance, take the Chelmno extermination camp: about 200,000 poor souls were killed there and only seven people who passed the door of that camp lived to tell the tale; they were Sonderkommando members who either managed to escape or were shot in the head by the nazis and left for dead (by the way, the last living Sonderkommando survivor, Dario Gabbai, died less than a month ago, but he was interned in Auschwitz, not Chelmno). Because those camps were so small they were also easy to dismantle and the Nazis did just that before closing them down. That's why there's not much left of those places, which of course is a catnip for Holocaust deniers.

The concentration camps in Germany were around since the early 1930s and were hardly a secret, even before the war started (that's why you hear them mentioned even in Hollywood movies). But not many people knew about the extermination camps, which were erected only in 1941. So Jews who were deported from France mostly thought they were being sent to labor concentration camps. I already said above that the Jews in the East had a better knowledge of extermination camps, but even many of them refused to believe it, because the whole idea of mass extermination seemed too bizarre to be true. And allied countries, like the UK and the US, also knew about those places long before the information became public, but for some reason they didn't act very quickly.

When I started summer exchange as high school student in the early 70s, the French people over 50 that I met loved to boast how they were ALL in the Resistance, or actively helped those in the Resistance. I was too young and naive to doubt them.

In retrospect, LOL.

The fact that the moron on this thread didn't know there was a difference between concentration camps and extermination camps is just one of the many pieces of misinformation of that history stinking up this thread. Add to that the ridiculous "comparison" to the U.S. now and this thread is a fiesta of foolishness.

R25 is the Way the Truth, and the Light. No one will come to true history but through the Bonnie Prince! OP, fuck off.

R32, that's just like the Austrians after the war claiming they were as much victims of the Germans as the actual victims themselves. And if you want to talk about active collaboration with the Germans, especially regarding the fate of the Jews, look no further than the Austrians. And look at the Eastern European "shithole" countries that welcomes and hoped the Nazis. Another reason this thread is just so much bullshit.

Norway had a pro-German government and de Gaulle ran a free government from London and then Morocco.

* "shithole" countries that welcomed and helped

R36 - Norway’s pro-German government was installed by the Nazis AFTER they invaded.

R36 Norway had a London-based government in exile. And it took a while before de Gaulle's Free France was recognized as being a legitimate representative of France by the Allies. Before that the Vichy regime was still seen as the nominal French government.

Who cares about the dead Jews 27, we’ll always have Paris! I’m giving you the biggest eye roll.

Oops, meant R27

No discussion about WWII is complete without being taken over, utterly pre-empted by Holocaust musings, of which there is little new left to be said.

Dutch, Danish, Norwegian... French too. Close call for London. Sweden not all that pure. Let's not even mention Switzerland

Haakon VII of Norway was granted the opportunity to validate the puppet PM appointed by the Germans, following their invasion of Olso. The King and the government had already fled the capital. Their war ship was able to engage with the German navy, buying the government and royal family enough time to take an emergency train out of the capital. After the Germans took Olso and appointed a puppet PM, they called up the King and demanded his seal of approval. The King delayed the German's demand, asking to consult with his government ministers. At that meeting the King rightfully stated that he couldn't support the puppet PM because the people wouldn't accept him as their leader. He offered to abdicate if the official government disagreed. They supported their King and the offer was rejected. The German's retaliated by bombed the town that that temporarily housed the government and the royal family. Once again, the Government was then on the run. They could have gone to nearby Sweden, but their government vowed to arrest and detain the King. He held a grudge against the Swedes for the rest of his life.

The government went north then hopped on a ship to the UK once they German's started advancing into the northern territories.

I'm actually amazed at the coordination between so many countries and the UK. If the UK were conquered so much would have been lost.

Indeed, r44; there's a recent movie about that:

The British lost an aircraft carrier and three war ships (1500 sailors) during their attempt to smuggle the Norwegian government and British troops out of northern Norway. The royal made it safe and sound. But the Brits were under orders to maintain radio silence so they didn't notify their own ships about the German ships in the vicinity.

The Americans came and freed the French of the Nazis and the French immediately went back to hating the Americans as they still do now.

There's always something Vichy about the French!

Did Coward say that, R48? That's funny.

[quote] The Americans came and freed the French of the Nazis and the French immediately went back to hating the Americans as they still do now.

Maybe they had a good reason for mistrusting Americans. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Klaus Barbie a.k.a. Butcher of Lyon. He was one of the most notorious Nazi torturers in Vichy France. After the war he immediately became a secret agent for the USA , because 'Mericans thought he could help them fight those pesky communists.

A few years after the war Frenchies began looking for Barbie, because he was also responsible for having Jean Moulin executed (the president of the French Resistance) and the trial on that was about to start. The US lied to France and said they had no idea of his whereabouts, but in reality they helped Barbie to escape to the Bolivia, where he became a torturer once more. He was working closely with their dictator Hugo Banzer (who just happened to become a dictator with a little help from the Nixon administration).

Let's face it - post WWII US history is shady as fuck. But that's a topic for another thread.

If you happen to have 4.5 hours to spare you must watch watch this Oscar-winning documentary on Barbie. The same director also made Annie Hall's favorite documentary "The Sorrow & the Pity" and another brilliant documentary called "The Memory of Justice" (also available on YT).

Those three films are going to change the way you look on WW2 and the usual winners/losers dichotomy.

France at least has an honest leader unlike the US, where average people can’t even get help while friends of the administration are loading up.

Yes, R48, it was a parody of another song he wrote, 'There's always something fishy about the French'.

Thanks, R45. I've seen "The King's Choice".

An excellent film.

So did the Belgians. There king was all like, "no England for me."

France was like, "OK you win, here's our Jews." And Hitler was all like, "No, we don't want them, we got too many of them already." And France was like, "No, no, fair is fair, you win, we're shipping them over as I speak."

There's a documentary 'The Sorrow and the Pity' about French who collaborated with the Nazis. It's mainly just interviews, but it's interesting.

French celebs were more than happy to work with the Germans too. Only a handful of them, like Jean Gabin, Michele Morgan and Jean Pierre-Aumont (who was actually Jewish and born as Jean-Pierre Salomons) fled the country. Here's a curious postwar newsreel of Maurice Chevalier, stating that he's not a nazi (this clip is also featured in The Sorrow & the Pity). A clip of actresses like Danielle Darrieux and Suzy Delair boarding a train to tour Germany was also included in that film.

And the famous French diva Arletty came under fire for having an affair with a German officer. Apparently her response was: "My heart is French but my ass is international".

Not all French were OK with this.

R59 Maybe he was crying tears of joy (though it certainly doesn't look like it).

But I still remember this particular pic from our high school history book, of a woman crying upon seeing the Germans annexing the Czech Sudetenland. The caption below the pic said that she was crying in despair but since she was from Sudeten there's a good chance she was actually German and that those were really tears of happiness.

And had they not been attacked by the Japanese the USA would be enjoying a cozy relationship with the Father;land to this day. What's your point OP?

The Czechs were out in the streets cheering when the Nazis rolled in. They didn't mind at all. Same with the Austrians. They were more than happy to round up their Jews for the Nazis.

R62 Bohemia was actually among the least anti-semitic places in Europe. That was because the local Jews happened to be very liberal and the local gentiles weren't nearly as religious as people like Poles and Hungarians were. Intermarriages between the two weren't rare at all. The Czech Republic is still the European country with the highest percentage of atheists to this very day.

My English grandfather's RMS ship was bombed by the Germans in WWII off the coast of Africa. They didn't sink, but there were a lot of injuries. They approached the coast of French West Africa, still in French hands, and they were denied entry to take care of the injured. They were denied at three different ports. My grandfather never forgave the French. One of his buddies died onboard. Everyone knew not to bring up the subject of France and the French in his presence.

French Resistance put up one hell of a fight. And the Basques in the Pyrenees were quietly fierce. I think the French just had a different way to fight. They lost a whole male generation in World War I. So they didn't take on the Nazi's directly.

R64 Many Frenchies hated the Brits during the war, because of the attack on Mers-el-Kebir in 1940: that was when the Brits attacked and sank the French ships off the coast of Africa, because they were afraid the Nazis were planning to take over the French navy. Many men died in that attack and it probably made quite a few French people to start sympathizing with the Germans.

France lost 1.4 million men in World War I. That's 1 out of 20 of their total population. That war left around 700,000 war widows, and 1 million orphans. Twenty years later, the French were still reeling from the psychological traumas of the past war and were not willing to go through that ordeal again. So they capitulated to the conquering Nazis. Sure, that doesn't sound heroic, but like a battered spouse, you surrender to your abuser than risk harming the home and the children.

R56, you're pretending other countries didn't collaborate with the Germans, and that's a lie.

[quote] R33: Add to that the ridiculous "comparison" to the U.S. now and this thread is a fiesta of foolishness.

I think people are comparing the potential the Trump Administration has, and comparing that to Nazi Germany.

It’s like those people, only a week ago, who were dismissive of the comparison IV COVID-19 to the flu, and finding the flu to be so much worse. They didn’t have the foresight to understand that CIVID was only getting started and the flu numbers were for the entire year. These people see to have shut-zap, now, as the COVID number grow like crazy.

Likewise, everyone by now should understand Trump’s lack of empathy, delusions of grandeur, and ruthlessness. the moment he thinks he could overthrow the constitutional order is the moment he does so.

Hungary not only collaborated with Hitler, they were Axis allies by treaty. However, when the royalist government saw that the Russians were winning, and tried to negotiate a peace, Hitler invaded, and transferred power to the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s fascist party. These people were particularly brutal toward Jews and gypsies, and assisted in the deportation of nearly 700,000 of them to Auschwitz.

So, it can hardly be said the Hungarians were anti-Nazi.

[quote] R66: Many Frenchies hated the Brits during the war, because of the attack on Mers-el-Kebir in 1940: that was when the Brits attacked and sank the French ships off the coast of Africa,

You forgot that Churchill gave the French every opportunity to move their fleet to a British port, or to a anither port in South America, and the French refused to do so.

I’ve read that the French hate the Germans and recall WWII, WWI, the Franco-Prussian War, and Napoleonic wars, where they were on opposite sides. Contrast that with their allies in those wars, the British, who they truely despise.

The British were hardly the allies of France in the Napoleonic Wars, R72- they were Enemy no. 1 that subsidised the rest.

The French hate everybody, whereas the British mainly just hate the French.

The Germans had death camps like Auschwitz where they exterminated Jews en masse and they had concentration camps like Dachau where the exterminations weren't en masse.

Dachau and other camps had been around since the early 30s when the Nazis took over and were used for Communists, gays, dissidents and other political prisoners. Many died there but it wasn't the sort of organized mass extermination of the death camps.

As for Nazi comparisons, fortunately for us, Trump is far more like Görring, a fat, vain, braggart with a fragile ego who was dumb as a box of rocks. Bannon is our Hitler.

DeGaulle and the Free French didn't do a whole lot and messed up an attempt to take Dakar, Senegal from the Vichy French early in the war.

The Allies let him claim all sorts of glory after as a way of ensuring that France did not become a communist country--if he was a national hero in France, then the reds had no chance

tell that to my dad, OP. he was stationed in Germany after WW II and on leave went to see Paris. he didn’t know any French but had picked up a but of German.

he was trying to find his way somewhere or another; a man he asked for directions didn’t speak English so my dad made the mistake of asking “sprechen sie deutsche?” the guy proceeded to chase my dad around the Metro with a knife.

De Gaulle hated having had to depend on Britain during the war, obsessed as he was with the 'Greatness of France' myth; that's one reason why he barred the UK from entering the EEC (as it then was) for so long. If Britain had joined earlier, we probably wouldn't have the Brexit disaster now.

When Kennedy or his surrogate went to De Gaulle to present evidence of nukes in Cuba, he was cut short. De Gaulle said something like, “If the US President says there are nuclear missiles in Cuba, I believe him, no need to prove it”. Of course, Bush II ruined that with the Iraq war.

De Gaulle wanted the vestige of American troops from WWII out of France during the Johnson Administration. The Sec. of State was handling the negotiations. . Johnson was so pissed, he insisted that the Secretary ask if this included the American dead from WWI and WWII, buried in France. The Secretary asked the question, and De Gaulle got up and left the meeting without responding.

I understand that the “American Cemetery” in Normandy is actually American territory, through some political maneuvering.

Eldergays, how big was de Gaulle's cock? He was 6'5" tall. Does a height like that automatically translate into a pendulous cock? And he definitely had a BDF as well.

Didn’t the British leave the retreating French troops on the beach during Dunkirk? I mean, that sucks.

R78 I’m sure the British wouldn’t let him forget about their hospitality. And probably used it as a negotiation tactic for years.

R80 did we leave troops there or was he talking about something else? Why would we need troops in France by the mid-60s?

Hey, Don't Forget About Me...Or...Vergeet Me Niet!

R80, R84, they weren't so much a vestige of WWII, but newly deployed USAF personnel and aircraft arriving in France between 1951 to 1966 to counter the buildup of Soviet Armed Forces in Eastern Europe.

[quote] R84, [R80] did we leave troops there or was he talking about something else? Why would we need troops in France by the mid-60s?

Yes, the US still had troops from WWII in France. It’s inertia, if nothing else; and they were also there to detour the Soviets from rolling through the West. The US still has troops all over, and that includes Germany, Japan and South Korea..

Nonetheless we practically gave France the design for its nukes.

As the fall of France in WWII became imminent. Churchill relayed a proposal to the French Republic’s government that they merge their two countries into one. He was rebuffed. I don’t know how that would have helped. If anyone knows, I’d like to hear why.

Last story about De Gaulle: After a Victory march through Paris, De Gaulle went to Notre Dame, despite there being snipers on route and inside the Church.

“He walked straight ahead in what appeared to me to be a hail of fire from somewhere inside the cathedral – somewhere from the galleries up near the vaulted roof. But he went straight ahead without hesitation, his shoulders flung back, and walked right down the central aisle, even while the bullets were pouring around him. It was the most extraordinary example of courage that I’ve ever seen.”