Free Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 by Allan Mitchell Page B

existence of a Vichy regime, and the nimbus of glorification that surrounded Marshal Pétain also gave collaboration an aura of respectability. Even the Communist Party, at first restrained by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, adopted a stance that verged on acquiescence. Raucous political activity was all but eliminated from the public sphere, and with rare exceptions the Church hierarchy meekly complied with admonitions to maintain a low profile. Before June 1941, in short, collaboration seemed an eminently sensible arrangement between victors and vanquished.
    Germany's assault on the Soviet Union changed that ambiance by setting off a wave of terrorism and repression in the Occupied Zone. Assassinations and attacks on German military personnel brought on prompt retributions by Occupation authorities, who hoped thereby to master the situation and restore order. They largely failed to do so, however, and a hostage crisis became the big stinking albatross of the Occupation. These developments not only caused a change in the military command in Paris, they cleared the way for the arrival of the two most unsavory characters in the entire German cadre of administration, Carl Oberg and Fritz Sauckel. By seizing control respectively of the police and the economy, this pair of officers contributed significantly to altering the atmosphere in 1942 and consequently to redefining collaboration. Previously held in abeyance, an unapologetic brutality now reached the surface. In effect, the Occupation thereby underwent a process of Nazification, for which the police razzias and roundups of Jews—notably that of the Vel d’Hiv—were the signature events. This context explains the pivotal figure of René Bousquet, whose pact with the devil, by supposedly trading alacrity for autonomy, gave collaboration a new and more sinister meaning. There could be no scientific measurement of the response of the French population, but analyses by German propaganda officials were unanimous on two points: that the majority of Parisians had adopted a more tentative attitude toward their nation's cooperation in a Nazi-dominated Europe, and that public opinion depended entirely on the military progress of the war.
    The verdict was rendered at the outset of the third phase of the Occupation by the Allied invasion of North Africa and the crushing defeat of the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. Now entirely occupied, France had already slipped far down the slope of collaboration. When Pierre Laval, speaking for Vichy, announced that he wished for a German victory, he was doing no more than drawing the ultimate logical conclusion from his regime's prior actions and policies. It was altogether appropriate, therefore, that Laval increasingly leaned on Joseph Darnard and his Milice, a vigilante force representing a desperate attempt to maintain law and order. But after early 1943, it was clear that Germany was losing the struggle for hegemony in Europe. It was also obvious that the collaborationists had long since crossed a line, and there was no turning back. Their options were limited to victory or defeat. Laval desired the first, to which he and his followers were irrevocably attached, but he would soon have to accept the other. The same was true of German authorities in Paris. Some of them still talked a good game, but the encroaching military reality now dictated that preparations be made to abandon their post. Many tasks of the Occupation were thus left unfinished, due in part to the half-hearted cooperation of French functionaries during the last phase of its existence and to the increasingly open hostility of the French population, but also to the unresolved internal conflicts of the German regime and the ever more acute shortage of its administrative manpower. Amply documented in this study, these factors proved in the end to have far-reaching ramifications for the Occupation's lagging attempts to exploit the French economy, repress the mounting waves of public violence, and