German military administration in occupied France during World War II

• 1. Introduction

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  The German military administration in France arrived in Paris in June 1940, and within weeks a swastika flag hung from the Hôtel de Ville while another flew above the Eiffel Tower. Many Parisians could not get over the shock of seeing it. The British historian Ian Ousby later wrote that even now, photographs of German soldiers marching down the Champs Élysées still produce a small shock of disbelief. He compared the sight to a Dada prank, an unreal collision of French and German. It felt, he wrote, less like the sober record of history than a staged prank. Ousby also described how, by the end of summer 1940, the occupiers had become so embedded in daily life that their presence was simply taken for granted, even while it was still hated and feared in private.

  That shock sets up the questions this documentary follows. How was the country split into occupied and unoccupied zones? Who ran daily life under German command, who collaborated, and who resisted? What did the war ultimately cost in French lives?

• 2. Two Zones, Two Governments

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  France split into two zones by the armistice: a zone occupée in the north and west, a zone libre in the south. Both were first drawn in June 1940. Alsace-Lorraine had already been annexed once, by the German Empire after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, then returned to France after the First World War. The Third Reich annexed it again in 1940, and its men became subject to German military conscription. The departments of Nord and Pas-de-Calais fell under a separate military administration, the one governing Belgium and northern France. That same administration also controlled a 20 kilometre wide coastal strip called the zone interdite. A second forbidden zone stretched across Lorraine and roughly half each of Franche-Comté, Champagne and Picardie. There, returning war refugees were barred from their own homes, land meant instead for future German settlers under the planned Neue Ordnung.

  In November 1942, the occupied zone, including both forbidden zones, was renamed zone nord. The free zone in the south, minus the western half of Aquitaine along the coast, stayed under Vichy's nominal sovereignty. That sovereignty was bound tightly by the armistice's heavy tribute and by economic dependency on Germany. The free zone covered 246,618 square kilometres, roughly 45 percent of French territory. It held about a third of the nation's labor force. Crossing the demarcation line between the two zones required special authorisation and a laissez-passer from German authorities.

  The French Third Republic had already dissolved in defeat. In its place stood the État français, the 'French State,' under Marshal Philippe Pétain. Because Paris sat inside the occupied zone, Pétain's government set up instead in the spa town of Vichy in Auvergne. That is why it became known simply as Vichy France. Vichy claimed sovereignty over the whole country, but in the occupied zone the military administration ran as a de facto Nazi dictatorship. French authority there was badly hollowed out.

  Along the Alps, Italian forces held only a narrow strip of territory, backed by a 50 kilometre demilitarised zone along the same border. That changed on the 11th of November 1942. Germany and Italy invaded the free zone under the codename Case Anton, in response to the Allied landings in French North Africa three days earlier, known as Operation Torch. Vichy's government stayed in place, though its authority was cut down sharply. The newly occupied south was renamed zone sud and placed under the same military administration. Italy's occupation zone then grew to cover the entire left bank of the Rhône, except for Lyon, Marseille and Corsica. Italy's surrender in September 1943 handed that territory to Germany as well. Only Corsica escaped, liberated instead by Free French forces and local Italian troops who had become Allied co-belligerents.

  Governing all of that took more than a signature on an armistice. It took a chain of command running from Berlin down to the smallest French town.

• 3. Building the Administration

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  On the 22nd of June 1940, Colonel General Wilhelm Keitel signed the armistice for the Third Reich. General Charles Huntzinger signed for Marshal Pétain's government. The signing took place at the Rethondes clearing in Compiègne Forest. It was held in the same railroad carriage where Germany had signed its own surrender at the end of the First World War. Because of that, historians call it the Second Compiègne armistice.

  Article three of the agreement set the terms plainly. It read, in part: 'In the occupied region of France, the German Reich exercises all of the rights of an occupying power. The French government undertakes to facilitate in every way possible the implementation of these rights, and to provide the assistance of the French administrative services to that end.' French officials in the occupied zone were bound by that clause to obey German military authorities directly.

  Civil affairs in the occupied zone ran through a layered system of Kommandanturen. Oberfeldkommandanturen sat at the top, followed by Feldkommandanturen, then Kreiskommandanturen, then Ortskommandanturen at the local level.

  A central Paris office, the Höheres Kommando der Marinedienststellen in Groß-Paris, coordinated German naval affairs across all of France. It reported up to a senior officer known as the Admiral Frankreich. After the invasion of the free zone, that post was broken into smaller commands, each answering directly to Navy Group West.

  Running the ports and coastline was one thing. Filling them with soldiers, aircraft and submarines was another matter entirely, one that grew heavier as the war dragged on.

• 4. Manning the Occupation

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  By December 1941, roughly 100,000 German soldiers were stationed across the whole of occupied France. Numbers rose and fell as the war shifted. When the bulk of the Wehrmacht fought on the eastern front, units rotated through France to rest and refit.

  The Dieppe raid marked the real beginning of a larger buildup, as fears of Allied invasion grew. Canadian and British Commandos struck German troops there, and Hitler branded the raiders irregular fighters. In his Commando Order, he stripped captured commandos of lawful combatant status. He ordered them handed to the SS security service and, in practice, summarily executed.

  In 1940, Luftflotte 2 and Luftflotte 3 flew from northern French airfields during the Battle of Britain. Luftflotte 3 stayed on to defend against Allied bombing until it retreated in 1944. In 1941, the battleship Bismarck tried to reach French Atlantic harbors after its commissioning, but was sunk before it arrived. By 1942, the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich and the 4th SS Police Regiment were stationed in the country.

  At the height of the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943, between 60 and over 100 German U-boats sheltered in French submarine pens. Those pens lined ports including La Rochelle, Bordeaux, Saint-Nazaire, Brest and Lorient. By 1944, units defending against invasion included the 157th Mountain Reserve Division, Panzer Lehr and the XIXth Army. They also included the 716th Static Infantry Division and the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. Garrisoning the Atlantic Wall and suppressing the resistance became steadily heavier duties as the war went on.

  Keeping that many troops fed and unmolested depended on more than firepower. It depended on French hands willing to do the Gestapo's work.

• 5. Collaboration

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  To suppress partisans, the military administration worked closely with the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst and the Sicherheitspolizei. French police forces were bound by the armistice to cooperate too. Together they rounded up Jews, anti-fascists and other dissidents, making many of them disappear under the policy called Nacht und Nebel, 'Night and Fog.'

  Notable French collaborators lent their names to the effort, among them Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon. Auxiliary forces did the rougher work: the Milice, the Franc-Gardes and the Legionary Order Service. Two collaborationist parties organized politically, the French Popular Party and the National Popular Rally, each counting 20,000 to 30,000 members.

  The Milice worked alongside the Gestapo to seize resistance members and minorities, including Jews, for shipment onward. Many passed through the Drancy internment camp before deportation to Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald or Mauthausen.

  Some Frenchmen volunteered directly for German forces, joining outfits like the Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism. Recruits from that legion and others later formed the cadre of the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne. Historians including Robert Paxton and Jean-Pierre Azéma later adopted a term coined by Stanley Hoffmann in 1974. They called committed fascist sympathisers 'collaborationnistes,' distinct from those who cooperated merely out of self-interest. PPF leader Jacques Doriot, the writer Robert Brasillach and Marcel Déat exemplified that ideological strain, driven above all by anti-communism.

  Not everyone in France chose that path. Some chose instead to answer a call broadcast from London, one that reached only a small number of listeners at first.

• 6. Resistance and Its Price

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  General de Gaulle's Appeal of the 18th of June, broadcast from London by his Free France government in exile, had little immediate effect. Few joined his French Forces of the Interior beyond those already living in exile.

  That changed somewhat after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The French Communist Party, until then ordered by the Comintern to stay passive, began mounting actions against the occupiers. De Gaulle sent Jean Moulin back into France to link the scattered irregulars to his exile government. Moulin brought eight major Résistance groups into agreement, forming the National Council of the Resistance.

  Moulin was eventually captured and died under brutal Gestapo torture. Resistance intensified once it became clear the tide had turned after the Reich's defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943. By 1944, large remote areas had slipped out of German military control, becoming free zones for the maquisards, named for the maquis shrubland that sheltered guerrilla fighters.

  Vercors saw the most significant anti-partisan action of the whole occupation. Oradour-sur-Glane saw its most infamous massacre. Other atrocities followed at Tulle, Le Paradis, Maillé and Ascq. Major maquis strongholds included the Vercors, Limousin, Glières, Mont Mouchet and Saint-Marcel; major German round-up operations included one at Marseille.

  Listening to the banned BBC's Radio Londres was one common act of passive resistance, even though most French civilians never joined the resistance outright. Others gave food and shelter to Resistance members. Some helped downed American or British airmen escape, often guiding them through Spain back to Britain.

  By the eve of liberation, between 100,000 and 400,000 combatants across nationalist, anarchist, communist and socialist factions were actively fighting the occupation. The Special Operations Executive and the Office of Strategic Services air-dropped weapons and supplies to them. Agents like Nancy Wake were parachuted in too, teaching radio operation and demolition. Together they sabotaged railway lines, destroyed bridges, cut German supply lines and fed intelligence to the Allies.

  German anti-partisan operations killed an estimated 13,000 to 16,000 French people, including 4,000 to 5,000 civilians with no part in the fighting. By the end of the war, around 580,000 French people had died, 40,000 of them in the first 48 hours of Operation Overlord's bombardments. Military deaths reached 92,000 in 1939-40, and about 58,000 more French died fighting for the Free French forces between 1940 and 1945. Some 40,000 malgré-nous, Alsace-Lorraine residents drafted against their will into the Wehrmacht, also became casualties. Civilian deaths totaled roughly 150,000: 60,000 from aerial bombing, 60,000 among resistance fighters, and 30,000 murdered directly by occupation forces. Prisoners of war and deportees together numbered around 1.9 million. About 240,000 of them died in captivity: roughly 40,000 prisoners of war, 100,000 racial deportees, 60,000 political prisoners and 40,000 slave labourers.

  Fighting was not the only way the occupation touched ordinary households. It also emptied their pantries.

• 7. Daily Life Under Occupation

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  A census on the 1st of April 1941 counted 25,071,255 people living in the occupied zone, and 14.2 million in the unoccupied zone. Those figures left out 1.6 million prisoners of war, 60,000 French workers in Germany, and the residents of Alsace-Lorraine.

  A 300,000-strong occupying army was one driver of the scarcity, one that the armistice required France to pay for at 20 million Reichsmarks a day. An artificial exchange rate, fixed at 1 Reichsmark to 20 French francs, let German buyers requisition goods as a form of organized plunder. That plunder fed chronic food shortages and malnutrition, especially among children, the elderly and the urban working class.

  Transport was also in disarray, except for the railways, which still ran on French domestic coal. International trade had been cut off by the Allied blockade, and France had no oil production of its own, so petrol and diesel ran short too. Labor was scarce as well, especially in the countryside, because so many French prisoners of war remained in Germany and because of the Service du travail obligatoire.

  Wood gas generators, burning charcoal or wood pellets, replaced gasoline in French trucks and cars, one of many ersatz substitutes filling wartime gaps. Wooden soles replaced leather in shoes. Households made their own soap from fats and caustic soda, drank toasted barley and chicory instead of coffee, and sweetened food with saccharin instead of sugar.

  Germans seized about 80 percent of French food production. French farm output fell by half for lack of fuel, fertilizer and workers, yet the occupiers still took half the country's meat, 20 percent of its produce and 80 percent of its Champagne. Real wages fell across occupied France as stores ran short of nearly everything.

  The government answered with rationing, issuing food charts and tickets exchangeable for bread, meat, butter and cooking oil. The system was rigid but poorly managed, breeding malnourishment and black markets. Official rations provided only 1,300 calories a day or fewer, stretched further by home gardens and black market purchases.

  Hunger prevailed especially among young people in cities, as shop queues lengthened and meat and potatoes ran out. People turned instead to unusual vegetables like Swedish turnip and Jerusalem artichoke. Remote villages fared better, sustained by clandestine slaughtering, vegetable gardens and milk products. In the black market, farmers diverted meat for high prices, and counterfeit tickets circulated. Direct bartering for cigarettes was common too, though all of it risked confiscation and fines.

  Nights brought a curfew, enforced with an Ausweis required for anyone going outside. Windows and shutters had to stay shut and dark, denying Allied bombers any light to navigate by. Letters home could only use pre-filled cards, where senders simply checked boxes such as 'in good health,' 'wounded,' 'dead,' or 'prisoner.' The occupied zone even ran on German time, one hour ahead of the free zone.

  Other rules applied only in the occupied zone: a curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., a ban on American films, and a bar on displaying the French flag or singing the Marseillaise. Vichy paramilitary groups and the Veterans' Legion were banned there too. Schoolchildren were made to sing 'Maréchal, nous voilà!' while Marshal Pétain's portrait hung in classrooms, building a personality cult around him. Unlike in occupied Poland, French teachers were not imprisoned and school programs stayed largely unchanged. In the Catholic private sector, some school directors hid Jewish children and kept educating them until the Liberation.

  One month into the occupation, a bi-monthly soldiers' magazine called The German Guide to Paris was published by the Paris Kommandantur, and it became a hit. Later guides steered German troops toward must-see spots like the Moulin Rouge, the Folies-Belleville and Bobino. The Germans used the motto 'Jeder einmal in Paris,' 'everyone once in Paris,' as units rotated through the city to rest. Some French artists launched their careers during these years, among them Yves Montand and, later, Les Compagnons de la chanson.

  Edith Piaf lived above L'Étoile de Kléber, a well-known bordello on the Rue Lauriston frequented often by German troops. The Django Reinhardt song 'Nuages,' performed with the Quintet of the Hot Club of France at the Salle Pleyel, won notoriety among French and German audiences alike. Reinhardt was even invited to play for the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. That wartime traffic in Paris nightlife left a mark afterward: the Loi de Marthe Richard closed the city's bordellos in 1946, and toned raunchy stage shows down to mere dancing.

  France ranked as the second most heavily bombed country on the Western Front, behind only Germany. Allied bombing grew especially intense before and during Operation Overlord in 1944. The Allies' Transportation Plan added to that toll, targeting French railway yards and bridges ahead of the invasion. On the 26th of May 1944, one bombing raid alone struck rail targets around five cities in south-eastern France, killing more than 2,500 civilians. Occupation was ending, but for some in France, danger was about to peak rather than fade.

• 8. Persecution and Liberation

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  Beginning in 1942, Jews in the occupied zone were required to wear the yellow badge in public, and allowed to ride only in the last carriage of the Paris Métro. Roughly 49 concentration camps operated across France during the occupation, the largest at Drancy. On the 16th and the 17th of July 1942, pro-Nazi French authorities carried out a mass arrest of 13,152 Jews from the Paris region, known as the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, and deported them to Auschwitz, where they were killed.

  Historian Serge Klarsfeld later produced a detailed count: slightly below 77,500 of the Jews living in France died during the war, most after deportation to death camps. France's Jewish population stood at 350,000 in 1940, meaning somewhat less than a quarter died overall. That mortality rate was lower than in some other occupied countries, including the Netherlands, where it reached 75 percent. One reason was that many Jews in France were recent immigrants, mostly exiles from Germany. In fact, more Jews lived in France at the end of the occupation than roughly a decade earlier, when Hitler first came to power.

  The Liberation of France followed the Allied Overlord and Dragoon operations in the summer of 1944, and most of the country was free by September. A handful of fortified Atlantic submarine bases held out as stay-behind fortresses until Germany's capitulation in May 1945. The exiled Free French government declared a provisional French Republic, keeping continuity with the defunct Third Republic.

  Using Free French Forces of the Interior fighters as cadres, the new French Liberation Army expanded rapidly with the help of Lend-Lease supplies. It grew from 500,000 men in the summer of 1944 to more than 1.3 million by V-E Day, becoming the fourth largest Allied army in Europe.

  The French 2nd Armored Division, spearheading the Free French forces, had liberated Paris on the 25th of August 1944. It went on to liberate Strasbourg on the 22nd of November 1944, fulfilling the Oath of Kufra that General Leclerc had sworn nearly four years earlier. The unit had grown from barely company-size, when it captured an Italian fort, into a full-strength armoured division.

  Further south, the French 1st Armored Division led the Free French First Army after its landing in Provence on the 15th of August 1944. It became the first Western Allied unit to reach the Rhône, on the 25th of August 1944, then the Rhine on the 19th of November, and the Danube on the 21st of April 1945. On the 22nd of April 1945, it captured the Sigmaringen enclave in Baden-Württemberg, where the Germans had been sheltering the last Vichy exiles, including Marshal Pétain, inside an ancestral Hohenzollern castle.

  Collaborators faced trial afterward in the épuration légale, the legal purge, and several were executed for high treason, among them Pierre Laval, Vichy's prime minister from 1942 to 1944. Marshal Pétain, the 'Chief of the French State' and a hero of Verdun, was condemned to death on the 14th of August 1945. Three days later, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Away from the courts, local Resistance forces carried out thousands of summary executions of their own, in what became known as the 'savage purges.'