Free The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide by Peter Grose Page A

south, forming what came to be known as the Second Expeditionary Force. But by 18 June the British had evacuated this Force as well, which meant all British troops had abandoned France, leaving the French alone and at Hitler’s mercy. Some 192,000 men returned by sea from eight major ports on the Atlantic coast.
    On 18 June the Germans captured Brest, one of the ports used as an escape route by the Second Expeditionary Force. On 19 June theycaptured Nantes, close to Saint Nazaire, another of the escape ports. So the British got out in the nick of time. On 20 June the Germans took Lyon in the southeast. They now controlled a huge swathe of France. The French had lost, and everybody could see it. Meanwhile, on 17 June the French premier Paul Reynaud had resigned in favour of his 84-year-old deputy, Marshal Pétain. On 18 June, with the British gone, Pétain asked the Germans for an armistice.
    He was not the only Frenchman making dramatic moves that day. A certain Brigadier-General Charles de Gaulle, a cabinet minister in the Reynaud government, had fled to England on 15 June after bitterly opposing the idea of an armistice. On 18 June, speaking on the BBC, he launched what is still widely regarded as the most influential radio broadcast of all time, telling the French people all was not lost. ‘Honour, common sense, and the interests of the country require that all free Frenchmen, wherever they be, should continue the fight as best they can,’ de Gaulle declared. His message was broadcast (in French) on the English language service of the BBC, and very few French people heard it. By all accounts, most of those who did thought de Gaulle was mad. The broadcast was not recorded, and might have been lost for all time and missed its place in history if de Gaulle had not asked to be allowed to repeat it. On 22 June he did so, this time to a larger and more responsive audience. The seeds of a French Resistance had been sown.
    On the day of de Gaulle’s second broadcast, the Armistice was duly signed by Hitler and Pétain. As we’ve already seen, under the terms of the Armistice, France was divided up. The Northern, or Occupied, Zone—occupied by the German Army, in other words—spread over three-fifths of France down as far as the River Loire, taking in Paris and all the vital northern industrial areas, together with a huge triangle of land along the Atlantic coast as far south as the Spanish border. The Germans wanted to control the major Atlantic ports in thewest—Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle—as well as France’s major factories and mills in the north. In what was left—the Southern, or Unoccupied, Zone—a government led by Marshal Pétain held sway from a base in the central town of Vichy. The terms of the Armistice were crippling. Marshal Pétain led a government committed to help the Germans industrially and militarily. Although technically ‘free’, the Vichy government would run its part of France in accordance with German principles. In particular, Jews were to be excluded and hunted down. Those who were caught could then be shipped off to work as slave labourers in German factories. As we shall shortly see, Pétain was personally and directly involved in the persecution of Jews.
    It is important to be clear on two points. First, Pétain enjoyed widespread support in France after the Armistice. He was hailed as the saviour of the nation: although France had been defeated, a nominally French government still controlled a large part of the country. Pétain already enjoyed hero status dating back to his military leadership during World War I and his historic victory at Verdun. Now, in the eyes of most of the French population, he had rescued France again. Second, the Vichy government was a willing rather than a reluctant partner with the Germans in proclaiming a series of repressive laws. Far from championing French independence and traditions of liberty, equality and fraternity, Pétain was full of