ON JUNE 5, 1944, the BBC broadcast coded messages to the Resistance to carry out sabotage and armed attacks that night to assist the D-Day invasion that would begin the next morning. Maquis in the Vercors, Mont Mouchet, and Limousin attacked two Wehrmacht divisions.1 Open resistance by fighters donning the FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, or French Forces of the Interior) armband replaced underground resistance. Sabotage of the rail system supplemented Allied arial attacks to impede German troop transports sent to meet the Allies in battle.2
In the coming days, with Wehrmacht forces rushing to defend the Atlantic Wall against the Allied onslaught, Resistance forces struck, liberating parts of France. The Germans fought back bitterly, wiping out FFI forces, executing prisoners, and massacring civilians in the area.
“Oradour-sur-Glane. That was the pretty name of a little village near Limoges,” wrote Jean Guéhenno. “A German officer was killed there…. They razed the village and machine-gunned the assembled population until no one was breathing or screaming anymore.”3 Numerically, this massacre of 642 men, women, and children on June 10 was the worst German atrocity of its kind committed in Western Europe during the entire war. Troops of Der Führer Regiment of the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division, Das Reich, avenged the killing of Wehrmacht soldiers by Resistance fighters by shooting all the men in the village and, after forcing all the women and children into the church, setting fire to the church and burning them alive.4
The Waffen-SS commander in charge, Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, reported that his unit “occupied the village and immediately conducted an intensive search of the houses…. [L]arge quantities of weapons and ammunition were found. Therefore, all the men of the village were shot, who were surely Maquisards.” He added that while the women and children were locked into the church and the village set on fire, hidden ammunition in most houses and in the church’s roof caused the burning to death of the women and children in the church.5
However, witnesses later testified in war crimes trials that no evidence existed of arms or ammunition in the village.6 A participant in the massacre, Untersturmführer Heinz Barth, testified at his trial in 1983 that no arms, ammunition, or explosives were discovered at the village.7
The same day as the above, the Wehrmacht attacked some 2,500 Maquisards at Mont Mouchet in the forested Auvergne region. The Germans conquered the area within three days, killing 125 partisans. While the Maquis were defeated, this illustrated how they helped to tie up German forces. “The Resistance rose up too soon and the repression is appalling,” opined Guéhenno.8
On July 21, the Germans committed 10,000 troops to attack the Maquisards in the mountainous Vercors, in the Grenoble region. US Flying Fortresses had parachuted 1,700 rifles and 1,400 Sten guns to them, but half the fighters were still unarmed, and they received no heavy weapons. After several days of fighting, SS troops landed in gliders to turn the tide in the Germans’ favor. While 500 Maquisards and civilians were killed, many escaped to fight another day.9
In the Vercors and in the Tarentaise, the FFI forces prematurely attacked and sought to defend against superior, better trained and equipped German forces, instead of engaging in hit-and-run guerilla tactics. They could not hold the territory they liberated. Still, notes historian Peter Lieb, “the FFI in the Alps helped the Allied troops to pave the ground for the liberation of their country on a tactical level by delivering invaluable intelligence, carrying out diversionary attacks, and cutting the German lines of retreat.”10
In this period, American operatives were seeking to procure arms in Switzerland for the Resistance. OSS operative Allen Dulles reported from Bern, “We now have the chance to obtain a number of modern arms by completely legitimate means, ostensibly for storing here but actually we intend to use them chiefly in French and Italian Maquis, especially to arm escapees and internees who have come back….” He added that codename “520” (U.S. Brigadier General Barnwell Legge, who was the military attaché to Switzerland) “can legitimately and openly buy a number of arms, after which, with his assistance, I can get them out.”11
By now, the Germans began to mistrust the French police with whom they had previously collaborated so closely. Garrison headquarters Limoges, on July 18, reported that the higher SS and police leaders ordered that seized and confiscated arms held by the French police be surrendered to the German order police (Ordnungspolizei). Some of these weapons held by French police had been stolen by terrorists. To prevent these incidents, such arms were to be turned in to the nearest SD or Wehrmacht department.12
Indeed, some French police were joining the Resistance. The Communist journal En avant decried the lack of weapons but urged resourcefulness in obtaining revolvers, rifles, and hunting guns to be used to attack and disarm Germans. It added, “There are many policemen and gendarmes who have decided to contribute their arms or to join the ranks of our militias. We must denounce those who keep their weapons and refuse to distribute them to those who fight to wipe out the boches and assume the liberation of our homeland.”13
By this point, Wehrmacht officers at the highest level were conspiring to assassinate Hitler. On July 20, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb under a table right by the Führer at Wolf’s Lair, excused himself, heard it explode, flew back to Berlin, and set the coup d’état in motion. But fate intervened—someone moved the briefcase with the bomb over where a portion of the table shielded the blast and Hitler survived.14
Exposed to constant shelling and bomb attacks from both sides since D-Day, Normandy resident Marie-Louise Osmont heard the news and wrote in her diary: “Dynamite attack against Hitler, who is burned and shaken up … an indication of disintegration. Speech by the Führer—police measures. May this first crack be followed by a collapse that would stop this war, which is going to destroy everything in France.”15
None other than Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel led the plot in Paris. He directed Wehrmacht troops to arrest SS personnel, including Karl Oberg, the senior SS and police leader. But news arrived that fate saved the Führer, and the conspiracy collapsed. Implicated in the plot, Stülpnagel was ordered to Berlin. Along the way, he shot himself in the head, but survived, only to be tried by the people’s court and hung with piano wire. Hitler enjoyed himself watching films of the conspirators’ hangings.16
But the days of the occupation of Paris were numbered. On August 15, the Paris police went on strike to protest the disarming of police in the suburbs. On the 19th, insurrection broke out. Policemen joined with hundreds of armed civilians to seize the prefecture of police, located just across from Notre Dame. A detachment of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI) fired on a German convoy on the Pont Neuf. German vehicles were set on fire, barricades went up, and government offices were seized.17
Original film footage shows the street fighting, with snipers shooting Germans and seizing their rifles and citizens building barricades.18 Jean Galtier-Boissière, a participant, noted that “one comes home to lunch carrying one’s rifle; the whole neighborhood is at the windows to have a look and to applaud; the milkman, the greengrocer, and the man in the bistro won’t chalk anything up on the slate [keep a tab].”19 Photographs of the struggle depict civilians with revolvers (even the obsolete model 1873), semiautomatic pistols, and rifles shooting from buildings or at the barricades. As usual, insufficient arms inhibited the struggle.20
Jean Guéhenno saw two German sentries on the bridge of the rue Manin: “With their grenades in their belt, their submachine guns in their hands, they were terrified, waiting for an inevitable death—the passerby with an indifferent air who would fire a revolver at them through his pocket almost at point-blank range.” When he passed by again later, the soldiers were dead. Guéhenno almost felt sorry for them, but resisted: “All my heart is with those boys of Paris who are fighting almost without weapons, and my pity is reserved for them.”21
Some 20,000 German soldiers remained in Paris, along with 80 Panzers and 60 pieces of artillery. They were arrayed against partisans armed with an estimated 600 handguns and an unknown number armed with who knows what.22 De Gaulle wrote that the partisans numbered some 25,000 armed men of autonomous groups operating in the neighborhoods, unsubordinated to hierarchal orders from above.23
Simone de Beauvoir described FFI ambushes on August 21: “Men were hidden behind the balustrades along the quais, … and there were more in the neighboring apartment blocks, and yet more in the Place Saint-Michel, on the steps leading down to the Métro station.” She saw two German soldiers drive by and be killed twenty yards later. “F.F.I. men cycled up and down the quais asking invisible combatants if they had enough ammunition.” The FFI had also taken over the printing presses and newspaper offices, allowing Combat and Libération to be sold in the streets. Every time armored cars left the Sénat, they were greeted with a hail of bullets.24 The Sénat was housed in the Luxembourg Palace, which was a German strong point for defending Paris.
On August 22, as described by Jean Guéhenno, “[t]he town halls of each arrondissement and the ministries were occupied by the FFI and Vichy vanished like a puff of smoke. The Germans no longer control life in Paris. They only hold the points where they have dug in. There is fighting all over. Place de la République, Place du Panthéon, on the Île de la Cité, and in front of the Senate.” “They’re fighting all over Paris this morning,” continued Guéhenno the next day. “The Resistance had occupied the Grand Palais and the Germans attacked and set fire to it.”25
Wanting to continue the fight against major German forces, the Allied Command had opposed diverting forces to Paris, but that became politically impossible. The French 2nd Armored Division, consisting of 16,000 soldiers and 200 tanks, was sent to help, arriving on the 24th and 25th and being joined by an American infantry division. German forces put up a violent resistance but were overcome.26
On the morning of the 24th, Guéhenno continued, “American radio was announcing yesterday that the FFI had liberated Paris, and this morning that General Leclerc entered the city at the head of his army.” But he considered the actual facts to be far broader, in that “Paris is no longer accepting German control: it has given itself free institutions, and that simple affirmation is being paid for every minute with a great deal of blood.” Fighting continued at the Île de la Cité, on rue Manin, and at the Porte des Lilas. “They’re building barricades that they don’t have the weapons to hold.”27 De Gaulle verified that “since morning, groups of partisans with only the most meager weapons had bravely assisted the regular troops in mopping up the nests of German resistance.”28
General Dietrich von Choltitz had assumed his post as the commander of Greater Paris on August 9, 1944, with orders not to surrender Paris without the Führer’s directive.29 When the occupation began to collapse, Hitler ordered him to torch the city. To his credit, Choltitz refused to carry out the order and capitulated on the 25th. The ordeal is depicted in the book and film Is Paris Burning? (Paris brûle-t-il?).30
An estimated two thousand Parisians, eight hundred FFI and police, and more than one hundred Free French and American soldiers died to liberate Paris.31 As Guéhenno concluded his diary, “Freedom—France is beginning again.”32
The liberation of Paris was only another step toward victory. The continuing struggle involved both great and small incidents, leading to both triumph and tragedy. In a letter to me, Marcel Demnet related how, in the evening of August 15 in Vierzon, two German soldiers, quartered in the Château of the rue Etienne-Dolet, quietly talked over a bottle of wine at the Café de l’Eglise.33 Two FFI Maquis entered the café and sat down. They hatched a plan to retrieve their guns from their car, then to pretend being cooks who would serve the Germans, then seize their arms and take them prisoner. The plan worked.
The following day, after searches for the two missing soldiers proved unsuccessful, the Germans rounded up several citizens of Vierzon. After identities were checked, all were released except four who were kept as hostages. They were taken away by the Gestapo in cars in the direction of Bourges, a nearby town. The hostages included Madame Rolland, mother of the cafe’s owner; Madeleine Chantelat, her employee; Alice Curdled, café manager; and Camille Lurat, a bus driver. They simply vanished. Post-war research revealed nothing of their fate. Of the two Maquis who captured the Germans, Charles Hemel was caught and executed, the other one escaped.
In another incident, Jewish partisans ambushed a German train. Maurice Bernsohn recalled:
We pounced on them, I tearing a revolver from the belt of a German major (I have that gun to this day) and shouting: “Wir sind Juden! Wir sind Juden!” (“We are Jews!”) They turned quite white. We made them line up, and they were sure we were going to kill them right then and there. But we only made prisoners of them.34
The Maquis obstructed German routes through the Vosges and in the Ardennes. In October, 60,000 FFI Maquis surrounded Wehrmacht units at La Rochelle, Royan, and Verdon. Some 140,000 Maquis were absorbed into the Free French army.35
By fall 1944, with much of France liberated, a new government was in power with de Gaulle giving orders. Of the paramilitary Resistance groups, de Gaulle related in his memoirs, “I induced the government to decree the formal dissolution of the militias,” which passed on October 28. The National Council of the Resistance objected—de Gaulle met with them, but “I could answer only by complete refusal.” It was not the Communists who were vocal: “The most ardent in their protest were those who represented the moderate factions.”36 One can imagine the resentment and sense of mistrust felt by the partisans who fought and died in France while de Gaulle sojourned in London and Algiers.
On October 31, the Council of Ministers decreed that “any force which was not a part of the Army or the police was to be dissolved at once….” But the following measure went much further: “Any armament in the possession of private citizens was to be turned in within a week to the police commissariats or the gendarmerie brigades.”37 Was this a new version of a prohibition on firearm possession by citizens, with a week to turn them in instead of twenty-four hours, and the punishment being something less than the death penalty?
There is no reliable data on the number of firearms in France before the Nazi invasion. Handguns and certain rifles were required to be registered (those of possible military use were banned), but hunting guns were not. Registered firearms were more likely to be surrendered when the Germans so decreed, as the owners would be known.
There were three million hunting guns in France in 1939, according to the Saint-Hubert-Club de France, a hunting association. After the Nazi takeover and occupation in 1940–44, some 715,000 were surrendered by their owners in the occupied zone. In the zone that was not occupied until 1942, 120,000 hunting guns were turned in to French authorities. The hunting guns not surrendered were, if not lost or stolen, hidden by their owners and in some cases used by the Resistance.38
That means that only 835,000 of three million hunting guns—less than one-third—were turned in by French citizens threatened with the death penalty for not doing so. That is an incredible testament to the inefficacy of gun control in the most extreme circumstances.
What was the fate of the surrendered hunting guns? In the occupied zone, those in German custody were mostly destroyed, sent to Germany, or loaned or sold to Wehrmacht soldiers for hunting in France. A few, mostly in Vincennes, were abandoned by the Germans as they retreated. In the free zone, most of the arms surrendered to the French authorities were not shipped to Germany. Other than hunting guns, in both zones “war weapons,” pistols, revolvers, and rifled hunting carbines (carabines rayées de chasse) were completely removed or destroyed by the Germans.
When the Germans retreated, of the surrendered arms, all rifled hunting carbines and all of the best shotguns, with rare exceptions, disappeared. In the vicinity of Paris, the château of Vincennes had about 14,000 centerfire guns (fusils à percussion centrale) in poor condition, 7,000 pinfire rifles (vieux fusils à broche), and 4,000 percussion muskets (fusils à piston), mostly unusable. Of these 25,000 guns, about 4,000 had labels with the name and address of the owner.39
While it will never be known how many French citizens surrendered and had their firearms confiscated, far more significant is how many French lost their lives for possession of firearms, how the mere uncertainty of arms not surrendered tied up more German forces, and how private ownership of firearms contributed to the Resistance.
After the liberation, collaborators were held accountable. Informal justice and revenge were meted out to the worst offenders, who were summarily executed, as well as to those who simply got too close to the Germans, such as the women who were punished by shaving their heads.
One of the most pernicious degradations during the occupation was the practice of denunciations based on greed, revenge, or other base motive. Hélène Berr wrote in her diary that “Mme P. spoke to me about her plans to take revenge on the disgusting cowards who denounce other people and pillage their homes when they are arrested….”40 Many were denounced for hiding firearms.
The courts of justice tried many for such denunciations. A municipal employee was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor because he denounced a young man to the Gestapo for hiding revolvers in his cellar. A wife denounced her seventy-five-year-old husband to the Gestapo, but the rifle found was so old that he was released; the man forgave his wife.41
A man was sentenced to forced labor for life for denouncing a neighbor for listening to the English radio, after which a rifle was found, leading to his execution. The death penalty was given to a landlord who denounced a tenant to the Gestapo for possession of a pistol, who was executed.42 A worker was condemned to death for denouncing coworkers to the Gestapo for possession of some automatic pistols, leading to one worker being executed by the Germans.43 A man was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment for denouncing his neighbors for possessing firearms.44
A woman got ten years of hard labor for denouncing her boss, an industrialist. A man got twenty years of hard labor for denouncing a neighbor for possession of military firearms. Another man got fifteen years’ hard labor for denouncing a firearm owner.45 A woman was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for denouncing her ex-husband to the German military authority for possession of firearms.46
A particularly revolting case concerned a woman who in December 1940 denounced her husband and son to the Germans for possessing firearms. The husband was imprisoned for nine months and the son for three months. Two years later, the husband was turned over to the Gestapo by a rural guard who the FFI resistance group shot during the liberation. Condemned the second time as a recidivist, the husband was sent to a deportation camp where he died. The wife informer was sentenced to just ten months’ imprisonment.47
Marcel Demnet, born in 1921 in Vierzon-Forges (Cher), was employed in the town hall from 1934 to 1979. After the war, he took charge of assisting both military and civilian victims of the war, and published a compilation about members of the Resistance and the victims of Nazi barbarism in the department of Cher.48 He would become president of the Fédération Nationale des Déportés et Enternés, Résistants et Patriotes (National Federation of Deportees and Externs, Resistants, and Patriots, or FNDIRP).49
In response to my questionnaire, Demnet provided a document entitled “Civilian Arrests During the Occupation in the Department of Cher for Possession of Arms (June 20, 1940–September 4, 1944).”50 The following shows some of the listings, beginning with the name of the town in italics and then the person arrested:
Bourges. Camille Vincent, arrested July 24, 1942, possession of hunting gun, died in deportation (S.A.R.).51
Chassy. Georges Pitrau, arrested July 24, 1942, possession of hunting gun, deported in October 1942 to Inzert, Diez, and Breslau, died in deportation April 21, 1943.
Gracay. Chalandre, woodworker, arrested in November 1942 for keeping and hiding abandoned weapons from the debacle of June 1940 (S.A.R.)
Gron. Raymond Blondeau, possession of a revolver, arrested June 16, 1944, would have been executed the same day.
Lignieres. Raymond Mahiet, arrested at the demarcation line at Cher in possession of a weapon where he would have died (S.A.R.)
Vierzon. Stanislaw Szymanski, arrested October 27, 1942, possession of a revolver and a cane gun (S.A.R.)
Vierzon. Marcel Mass, notorious poacher (I knew him well), arrested November 22, 1940, confined at the Bourges Jail, freed January 29, 1941. Conviction: Possession of hunting gun and hunting without authorization (and for reason!). If my memory is correct, he was arrested by the gendarmes of Vierzon for poaching and would have been judged by French Justice (it was not the first). He therefore did not need to be sent to the Germans.
Ivoy-le-Pre. Edouard Habert, arrested September 23, 1943, for hiding parachuted arms. Deported to Buchenwald, Dora, and Bergen-Belsen.
Calculating how many French were executed, deported, or imprisoned for all offenses, from possession of a firearm and spreading anti-German propaganda to listening to the BBC and sabotage, would be a difficult if not impossible task. De Gaulle wrote, “With the co-operation of a considerable number of officials and a mass of informers, 60,000 persons had been executed and more than 200,000 deported of whom a bare 50,000 survived. Further, 35,000 men and women had been condemned by the Vichy tribunals….”52 The numbers killed, whether as Maquis, Jews, or as noncombatants who were massacred for whatever reason, were exceedingly higher.
It would be difficult to provide even a rough estimate of the number of people arrested, imprisoned, executed, or deported specifically for firearm possession. Wehrmacht districts regularly reported statistics in their Lagebericht on the numbers of people arrested for firearm offenses. The reports are voluminous but incomplete. Newspapers published the names of some people executed for firearm possession by order of the military commander, but not every case.
Statistical reports on and identification of gun violators and other offenders were greatly reduced when the SS took over security functions and as a result of Nacht und Nebel, under which people disappeared without explanation. The Vichy police would have kept their own records of gun arrestees, although the extent to which records thereon survived is unclear. Suffice it to say that large numbers of French citizens were arrested and punished by imprisonment, execution, or deportation for gun possession.
This story would not be complete without relating the fate of the Vichy collaborators who made it all possible. As the Allies and the Resistance were pushing the Germans back during the summer of 1944, Pierre Laval hatched a plan to try and convince the Germans to allow the National Assembly to reconvene and to restore full powers to Pétain. Laval may have fantasized that the Americans would prefer an interim government of his own rather than of de Gaulle. Laval went to Paris just days before the battle there began in order to negotiate with the Germans, who instead took him into custody and transported him, along with Pétain who had been fetched from Vichy, to the more secure city of Belfort.53
The Germans wanted to maintain their puppet government, but at this point neither Laval nor Pétain wished to continue playing the game. Ultra-collaborationist Fernand de Brinon stepped forward to propose a new government with himself at its head. With the Allies advancing, the French entourage was transferred to Germany where they remained until the Nazi regime collapsed in April 1945. Pétain then returned to France, de Brinon surrendered to the Americans, and Laval fled to Spain, which after a brief sojourn delivered him to the Americans, who passed him on to the French.54
In the trials that followed of members of the Vichy government for their crimes during the occupation, Pétain was sentenced to life imprisonment—it would not do to execute an old senile World War I hero who had been beloved by many. De Brinon was condemned to death and shot.55 Laval received the same fate, but a few more details are in order.
Whether out of arrogance or delusion, Laval thought that he could persuade the jury that he protected France as best anyone could. He wrote a testament to justify his every act to save France from a worse fate.56 But as Albert Lebrun, the Third Republic’s last president, testified in Laval’s trial, “It would have been better for France … that the country be administered directly by a Gauleiter [Nazi administrative official] than by a French government, which was not going to have any power any longer except in appearance and whose essential role would consist, in sum, in guaranteeing all the decisions of the occupation authorities.”57
Given that general perception, it was no wonder that only a show trial would ensue, as Laval’s guilt and sentence had already been decided before it began.58 Given the mood of many French based on Laval’s crimes, he was lucky not to have simply been shot and hung upside down in public like Mussolini. The judicial formalities having been met, on October 15, 1945, Laval was tied to a stake in a courtyard at the Fresnes prison, south of Paris—where his Nazi partners had previously imprisoned and tortured countless French—and shot.59
1. Michel, Shadow War, 290.
2. Cobb, The Resistance, 245–46.
3. Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 258.
4. Meyer, Die deutsche Besatzung, Chapter 8. See also Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg oder NSWeltanschauungskrieg?, 368–69.
5. Otto Weidinger, Comrades to the End, quoted in www.oradour.info/ruined/chapter6.htm.
6. Michael Williams, In a Ruined State: The Full Story of Oradour-sur-Glane 10th June 1944 (2011), www.oradour.info/ruined/chapter7.htm.
7. Williams, In a Ruined State, www.oradour.info/ruined/chapter5.htm; Meyer, Die deutsche Besatzung, 166.
8. Cobb, The Resistance, 250–53; Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 258.
9. Cobb, The Resistance, 251–53.
10. Lieb, Vercors 1944, 91.
11. Telegram dated August 7, 1944, in Peterson, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 357.
12. BA/MA RH 34/342, Standortkommandantur Limoges, Standortbefehle Nr. 59–88, Februar – August 1944.
13. “Comment armer les milices,” En avant, organe régional des jeunesses communistes du Nord, août 1944.
14. The most thorough account is in Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 1933–1945, 3rd ed. (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1996).
15. Marie-Louise Osmont, The Normandy Diary of Marie-Louise Osmont, 1940–1944, trans. George L. Newman (New York: Random House, 1994), 100.
16. For a fascinating account by one of the conspirators, see Wilhelm von Schramm, Conspiracy Among Generals, trans. R.T. Clark (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956); see also Laub, After the Fall, 282–86.
17. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Is Paris Burning? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965), 107–8; de Beauvoir, Prime of Life, 715; Cobb, The Resistance, 259–60.
18. La Libération de Paris. Available at https://archive.org/download/LaLiberationdeParis1944/LaLiberationdeParis1944.mp4.
19. Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich, 204.
20. Christine Levisse-Touzé, Paris libéré, Paris Retrouvé (Paris: Gallimard Découvertes, 1994), 3; “Le Journal de la Libération de la France,” L’Événement du Jeudi, August 18–24, 1994, 21, 25, 30; Venner, Armes de la Résistance, 156; Cobb, The Resistance, 264.
21. Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 269 (entry dated August 19, 1944).
22. Cobb, The Resistance, 261.
23. de Gaulle, War Memoirs, 633.
24. de Beauvoir, Prime of Life, 717–18.
25. Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 270–71.
26. Cobb, The Resistance, 265–67. See Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg oder NS-Weltanschauungskrieg?, 480.
27. Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 271–72 (entry dated August 28, 1944).
28. de Gaulle, War Memoirs, 647.
29. Laub, After the Fall, 287; Mitchell, Nazi Paris, 149.
30. Is Paris Burning? and Paris brûle-t-il? directed by René Clément (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1966). The script was based on Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Is Paris Burning? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965).
31. Cobb, The Resistance, 270.
32. Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 272.
33. “Rafle du Cafe de l’Eglise aux Forges,” document attached to letter from Marcel Demnet to author, November 13, 2002.
34. Latour, Jewish Resistance, 49.
35. Michel, Shadow War, 344.
36. de Gaulle, War Memoirs, 712.
37. de Gaulle, War Memoirs, 712.
38. Le Saint-Hubert, n°1, janvier–février 1945, 1.
39. Le Saint-Hubert, n°2, mars–avril 1945, 9.
40. Berr, Journal, 242 (entry dated January 13, 1944).
41. André Halimi, La Délation Sous L’Occupation (Paris: Éditions Alain Moreau, 1983), 252–53.
42. Halimi, La Délation, 257–58.
43. Halimi, La Délation, 260.
44. Halimi, La Délation, 264.
45. Halimi, La Délation, 279–80.
46. Halimi, La Délation, 297.
47. Halimi, La Délation, 289.
48. Marcel Demnet, Livre-mémorial des résistants, patriotes et civils vierzonnais raflés, victimes de la barbarie nazie, “morts pour la France” 1942–1945 (Vierzon: la Gaucherie, 2005).
49. “Déportés politiques à Auschwitz, le convoy du 6 juillet 1942,” politique-auschwitz.blogspot.com/2010/12/lanoue-moise-lucien-alexis.html.
50. “Civils Arrêtés dans le Departement du Cher pour Detention D’Armes sous l’Occupation (20 juin 1940 – 4 septembre 1944),” document attached to letter to author from Marcel Demnet, November 13, 2002.
51. Unknown abbreviation.
52. de Gaulle, War Memoirs, 789.
53. Warner, Pierre Laval, 400–404.
54. Warner, Pierre Laval, 404–7.
55. Henry Rousso, Les années noires: Vivre sous l’Occupation (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 123–24.
56. Laval, Diary.
57. Shirer, Collapse of the Third Republic, 891–92 (emphasis in original).
58. See J. Kenneth Brody, The Trial of Pierre Laval (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010).
59. Warner, Pierre Laval, 408–16.