October 3rd 1940 - How the French Vichy Government started the work that ened with the Endlosung

Raphael Alibert, the Minister of Justice prepared the First Statut des Juif which President Marshal Petain signd on October 3rd 1940.

Alibert was a staunch Catholic, a long time supporter of Action Francaise . He chose this moment to define a Jew by race not religious belief - 3 Jewish grandparents or just 2 if the spouse was Jewish was sufficient to brand you.

The Statute declared a numerus clausus or quota of Jews who could work in some professions and they were banned from teaching, journalism, film,theatre,radio, the officer corps and the civil service.

On that day a census of Paris was undertaken and the following day a decree was issued by the Vichy Government for the prefets of provincial France to round up all "foreign Jews" and put them into internment camps and use them for forced labour.

Later in the month General Huntziger removed all Jews, whether officers or men from the French Army.

Pastor Marc Boegner was the only voice raised in opposition to these actions. The silence of the Catholic Bishops was unbroken.

Internment Camps and Escape

After the fall of the Popular Front, Daladier's Government had set up internment camps to detain political refugees, foreigners in general and especially communists of whom some 3,500 had been interned by March 1940.

Some 350,000 Spanish Republican refugees were already interned, especially in the South and near the Pyrenees. These camps of quaintly titled "centres d'hebergemont" , (lodging centres) also received suspicious aliens, criminals and what President Sarkozy would today call "racaille" or 'scum'.

Republican France had prepared the ground well - the French population was not ignorant of these camps or they way their inmates were used as forced labour.

The Pyrenees were the worst camps, at Gurs, 30 people a day died in the winter of 1940/41 - it's cemetery is full of Spanish but also some Jews ... Hannah Arendt was in Gurs - but she escaped after 2 weeks, Arthur Koestler was sent to La Vernet - which he was later to describe as worse than Nazi concentration camps.

By the time of Petains First (others followed) Statut Des Juif there were many camps - Recebedou, Noe, St-Cyprien, Rivesaltes, Rivel, Argeles, Bram. Agde, Saliers, Langlade, Aubagne, Les Milles - by the end of 1940 mthere were up to 50,000 prisoners interendd in the Vichy Zone.

Hannah Arendt eventually escaped with her husband and her mother to the United States with the assistance of the American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV who was US Consulate in Marseille, who illegally issued visas to her and around 2500 other Jewish refugees.

Others he helped with the assistance of Varian Fry who hid people at the Villa Air-Bel until they could be smuggled out. More than 2,200 people were taken across the border to the safety of neutral Portugal from where they could sail to the United States.

Others escaped on ships leaving Marseille for the French colony of Martinique and then onwards to the US. Among Fry's closest associates were Americans Miriam Davenport, a former art student at the Sorbonne, and the heiress Mary Jayne Gold, art freak who liked the "good life" who had set up in Paris in the early 1930s - she wrote a memoir of the time "Crossroads Marseilles 1940," published by Doubleday in 1980.

Those helped by this network included sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, artist Marc Chagall, Nobel Prize winner, Otto Meyerhof who with Hill had determined the process glycolysis in muscle cell metabolism. The sculptor Jean Arp was able to flee to Switzerland where he stayed, Marcel Duchamp chose the US.

The writer Lion Fuchtwanger had chosen to live in Sanary sur Mer with his wife , and did not return to germany when Hitler was made Chancellor. His books were proscribed and [publicly burned in the 1933 book burning . On 25th August 1933, an official Nazi paper, Reichsanzeiger , included Feuchtwanger's name in the first list of those whose German citizenship was revoked because of "disloyalty to the German Reich and the German people."

Because Feuchtwanger had addressed and predicted many of their crimes even before they came to power, Hitler considered him a personal enemy and the Nazis designated Feuchtwanger as the "Enemy of the state number one".

At the fall of France he and his wife were captured and imprisoned in Le Milles internment camp and after his escape to the US via Portugal , he published in 1941, a memoir of his internment, The Devil in France (Der Teufel in Frankreich)

Success (Erfolg)

This novel by Feuchtwanger was started on in 1927, and published in 1930 when the Nazis received 18.3 % of the votes. In the eyes of Goebbels, Feuchtwanger became an un-German Jewish evildoer.

Success bears the subtitle "History of a Providence," i.e. Bavaria. The action is set in Munich seemingly cosmopolitan, but essentially a provincial town spawning National Socialism.

Years before Hitler assumed power Feuchtwanger created the fictional person Rupert Kutzner, who founded the party of "The True Germans."Kutzner "orated in a high and sometimes hysterical voice; the words flowed effortlessly from his broad, pale lips... .

The system of capital and interest, the Jews, and the Pope were to blame for the wretchedness of the Germans. The international ring of the Jewish financiers was trying to destroy the German people, as a tubercle bacillus tries to destroy a healthy lung. Once the parasites were eliminated, a healthy society would be created.

When Kutzner stopped speaking, his thin lips with the faint dark mustache and the sleek hair plastered over his head make his face look like a mask, but as soon as he opened his mouth, his face became curiously mobile with a hysterical vivacity...".

Which is why they burned his books....but he loved cats ...see pic