The French city of healing springs, Vichy, received a very unusual visit this week: for the first time in 43 years, a French president came to visit it.
Vichy, in the heart of France, is synonymous with cooperation with the enemy.
Following France's military defeat to Germany in June 1940 and the country's temporary division into "free territory" and occupied territory, the seat of the regime established by French Marshal Philippe Petain to manage "free territory" affairs in the city of Vichy was established.
Since then - the name of the city has become an integral part of the name of the regime.
Attempts by city leaders to break free from this fateful link have so far failed, as have attempts to get another regime adopted.
The Vichy regime between 1940 and 1944, the year of the liberation of France, saw itself as the epitome of French nationalism and sought to preserve France for the French, as far as possible under the conditions made possible under German occupation.
It was a nationalist, authoritarian, ultra-conservative and anti-Semitic regime, like other regimes in European countries that cooperated with Germany and the Axis Powers.
French Marshal Philippe Petain, Photo: GettyImages
On the other hand, there were the French elements who refused any cooperation with the Germans and advocated the continuation of the struggle for the occupation: from London, the French government-in-exile headed by General Charles de Gaulle operated; In the territories of occupied France (from the summer of 1942 the Germans also occupied the "free territory") there were underground movements that belonged to various political currents - from the right wing to the left wing. Two different national conceptions - of cooperation and resistance, are still struggling in the French political arena and have become one of the main issues in the French presidential election campaign. This is also due to the controversial positions of the Jewish presidential candidate, journalist and author Arik Zamor, who presents a different interpretation of the Vichy regime's role in the Holocaust.
For decades, official France refused to recognize France's role in the Holocaust, claiming that the Vichy regime did not represent France.
In 1995, the then conservative president, Jacques Chirac, buried the tradition of denial and applied the responsibility of the French state to Vichy crimes, a position that was acceptable to all his successors on the right, left and center.
Now a Jewish presidential candidate is coming up and raising the issue of the Vichy regime's role in the Holocaust from an unacceptable angle.
A Macron visit to Vichy - part of the election campaign
During his brief visit to Vichy, French President Emmanuel Macron observed a minute of silence in front of the city's Opera House, to which members of the French parliament were summoned on July 10, 1940 to decide on the abolition of the French Republic. The "free" part of France into an absolute dictatorship.
At the Opera House, Macron honored the memory of the 80 MPs who refused to raise their hand in favor of the dictatorship.
Macron left the opera house for the former Vichy residence, where the decision was made on August 26, 1942 to hand over to the Germans more than 6,000 "foreign" Jews, including many children, who had been sent to die in Auschwitz.
In an interview he gave before visiting Vichy, Macron said: "Vichy takes us back to history. This history has been experienced and documented by historians. It is better that we respect, study history and allow historians to build a historiographical truth based on evidence and documents. Let us not manipulate and rewrite it."
President of France Macron,
Macron did not mention in this context the name of his potential rival in the presidential race, Eric Zamor, but for many the presidential visit to Vichy was part of Macron's campaign, which has not yet officially announced his candidacy, and the efforts of Zamor's political opponents to secure his defeat. Zamor is still struggling to get the 500 signatures of the elected officials, which are required to make his candidacy official.
At the launch of his election campaign earlier this week, Zamor did not mention the Vichy regime in a single word in his long speech.
However, in his books and interviews over the years, Zamor reiterated his version that the French cooperative regime saved almost all French Jews from deportation to German extermination camps and handed over to the Germans only "foreign Jews", ie Jews who came to France as immigrants from Eastern Europe, Germany and other Western European countries. In the hands of the Germans until the conquest of France in World War II.
France's attitude to the Vichy regime: purification or integration?
Before turning to Zamor's historical version of the Vichy regime, here is a reminder of the development of France's attitude towards the Collaborative regime: immediately after the liberation of France began a fairly widespread persecution of the French and French women who worked with the Germans and for them. Thousands of collaborators were executed in popular revenge operations. The new French government began clearing the ranks of the French administration of the Vichy people. 120,000 were punished by military and civilian courts, which issued 1,500 death sentences - not all of which were carried out. Vichy, Pierre Lowell, was executed.
In retrospect de Gaulle worked for national reconciliation between the Vichy trustees and the trustees of "Free France" on its various streams.
In a speech on the steps of Vichy City Hall, on a rare visit to the city on April 17, 1959 - some 15 years after the liberation of France, de Gaulle declared with humor that did not match the class: "I will tell you a secret, you will not repeat it. I must say That an official visit to Vichy evokes a little emotion in me. You understand the reasons for that. But, we are bound by history, we are one people in spite of everything we have been through. The complications were as they could be, the events that happened happened. Boyishi ".
This speech was not included in de Gaulle's official collection of speeches, and not in vain.
But, it symbolizes more than anything the post-war approach to France: national reconciliation necessitates completion and continuation.
Pierre Lowell and Marshal Petten, Photo: Wikipedia
Senior officials in the Vichy regime were integrated into the mechanisms of the Fourth and Fifth Republics. One of them reached the top of the French government: François Mitterrand, the first socialist president. It was only towards the end of his second term (each term lasted seven years unlike the serpent today) that the fact of Mitterrand's service in the Vichy regime as head of captivity was revealed, an activity for which Mitterrand received a medal of honor from Marshal Petten himself. However, Mitterrand was credited with the fact that in parallel with his service in the Vichy regime he passed secret information to the government-in-exile in London and was part of the network of underground activities against the Germans. In one of his last interviews as president, Mitterrand was asked about the antisemitic legislation of the Vichy regime. His evasive answer was: "It was - and it does not change anything and does not justify anything in the laws against foreign Jews. I did not know anything about them at the time."
It is very hard to believe that Mitterrand was unaware of the very extensive antisemitic legislation that the Vichy regime passed from its earliest days as part of its antisemitic policy, which included denial of citizenship, work ban, expropriation, establishment of concentration and detention camps and deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to German concentration and extermination camps. 78,000 of the Jews who stayed in France at the time of its occupation, a figure that constitutes a quarter of the total Jewish population in France - "foreigners" and "roots", were murdered in the Holocaust. Mitterrand also aggressively attacked, with clear antisemitic tone, the Nazi hunters who during his presidency worked to prosecute senior members of the Vichy regime who were involved in deporting Jews to their deaths, including his associate Rene Bosque, who was police secretary in the Vichy regime and was senior in deporting Jews To the death camps. Bosque was murdered before his trial began.
Mitran the Socialist also attacked those who demanded France to apologize for Vichy crimes: "France has no reason to apologize and neither does the French Republic. "The French. This is the continuity of hatred and not hatred will heal France. I despise these people."
With these harsh words, in fact, Mitterrand expelled the French Jews - some of them Holocaust survivors, from the whole of French society and made them "foreigners" in vain.
Drancy Concentration Camp in France, Photo: Wikipedia
Eric Zamor, he said, twice voted for Mitterrand when he was elected president - in 1981 and 1988. Although Zamor presents himself as a follower of de Gaulle, when it comes to the Vichy issue he sounds just like Mitterrand: he distinguishes between "French Jews" and "foreign Jews", and claims that blaming France in the context of the Holocaust, through the Vichy regime, was intended to castrate pride The French nationalism and to create among the French feelings of guilt which enabled, in effect, the "importation" of Muslim immigrants into France in the name of the beating for sin of the expulsion of the "Jewish immigrants." Zamor also states that blaming the French for the Holocaust made it possible to reduce the sole responsibility that should be placed on Germany's shoulders.
The Israeli historian of French descent, Alan Michel, is one of the sources on which Zamor relies in his lenient treatment of the Vichy regime.
Michelle, who previously worked at Yad Vashem, published the book "Vichy and the Holocaust, A Study on a French Paradox" in 2012.
In a conversation with "Israel Today", Michelle admits that he disagrees with many of Zamor's positions and proposals, but not with his remarks regarding Vichy.
"The Vichy government did everything in its power to protect French citizens, including Jews, and negotiated an agreement with the Germans to give them a number of foreign Jews in exchange for the French Jews not being arrested. The agreement was signed in early July 1942, thanks to Pierre Lowell who was Vichy Prime Minister Varna Bosque, who was the police secretary general.
Vichy regime militiamen arrest members of the underground, Photo: Wikipedia
The agreement lasted until August 1943, when the Nazis expressed dissatisfaction with Laval and Petan's refusal to pass a law abolishing the French citizenship of foreign Jews who had become French before the war.
In response, the Germans announced that they would no longer make a distinction between French and foreign Jews.
"Most deportations of French Jews began then. This is a historical opinion, which appeared in 1951 with the great historian of anti-Semitism, Leon Polyakov, who was also adopted by many other historians including Raoul Hilberg, who is considered the greatest expert on the Holocaust.
This is not a historical approach of a minority.
"In the 1980s, American historian Robert Paxton and Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld forced a different interpretation, which I think is anti-historical, but accepted by the media, the Jewish community and politicians that became the official version that the Vichy regime was worse than the Germans," the historian explained.
Everything for the unity of the lines?
"The Vichy regime did what other governments in Europe did when they tried to protect their Jewish citizens. This was the case in Bulgaria, in Romania. Governments that collaborated with the Nazis stopped the Holocaust," Michelle said, emphasizing: "Normal. But, he does not deny the Holocaust. It is very important to distinguish between the two. He does not question the fact that about 80,000 Jews from France were murdered in the Holocaust. He questions the interpretation of the way it happened."
And why is he doing this?
Apparently, Zamor's associates, out of a desire to finally produce a unity within the French right, are valued between the loyalists of Charles de Gaulle, the Republican "golists," and the nationalist right-wingers who remain loyal to Marshall Petten and the way he chose to save French national honor.
Only the unity of such a line, Zamor estimates, would make it possible to produce a solid right-wing majority that would put France back on a path of national greatness and cease to bow and surrender to the left, forcing France to lose identity.
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