The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (78 page)

As in earlier empires, it was dangerous to be caught challenging

imperial authority. Children and teenagers, who tended to blame their

elders for failing to stand up to the Nazis, were often the most daring.

In November 1940, a group of Parisian university students marched

400 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

up the Champs-Élysées to lay a wreath of the Tomb of the Unknown

Soldier to protest the arrest of one of their antifascist professors. This

explicitly political protest crossed a line, and the Nazis arrested more

than one hundred of the marchers. Similarly, when coal miners in

northern France struck for better wages and rations, German troops

forced them back to work at gunpoint. Generally speaking, the MBF

was relatively patient in allowing the French their minor expressions of defi ance, but it would not tolerate direct challenges to Nazi

interests.

This was one of the primary reasons that there was little armed

French resistance before 1942. Britain’s Special Operations Executive,

which promoted resistance and sabotage in occupied Europe, had very

little success in stirring up the French during this period. Riddled by

informers and divided by disagreements over the nature and leadership of postwar France, the fi rst resistance groups initially focused on

just making their presence known by publishing underground newspapers and putting up broadsides.

It was the French communists, who had refused to help defend

France after the Nazi-Soviet pact, who became the most active resisters once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Beginning in August 1941,

they sought to open a “home front” through sabotage, arson, and

assassination. While their efforts were of little strategic consequence,

communist assassination teams killed the
Feldkommandant
of Nantes

and a few other German soldiers and military administrators in the

fall of 1941. The Nantes case was the most serious, for the dispatch

of a
Feldkommandant
was the equivalent of an African murdering a

British provincial commissioner in Kenya. No imperial state could

tolerate this kind of opposition because it exposed the inherent fragility of indirect rule. Like all imperial offi cials, the Germans could

govern France only if the majority of Frenchmen believed active resistance was futile. This is why Hitler and the German high command

took a direct role in formulating a response to the attacks. Vowing

to execute one hundred French communists for each slain German

soldier, the MBF ordered each district in occupied France to compile

suitable lists of hostages. The military governor General Otto von

Stülpnagel actually opposed these “Polish methods” on the grounds

that the collective punishment tactics of the east would undermine

collaboration and play into the hands of the British, but his superiors

overruled him. The Nazis consequently murdered forty-eight French

France under the Nazis 401

hostages in Nantes before von Stülpnagel arranged a pause to give

the population a chance to cooperate.

The French response to these executions was telling. Rather than

seeing the communist assassins as heroes, the city government in

Nantes added seven hundred thousand francs to the German reward

for the capture of the
Feldkommandant
’s killers and posted placards that eulogized the slain imperial offi cial as a man of “intelligent understanding.” An editorial in the local newspaper declared:

“All good French people, all those who have a sense of honor, are

outraged and have poured scorn on the criminals who acted under

the cover of darkness, shot from behind, and ran away.
The assassins

must be found
.”44 Most Frenchmen in 1941 blamed the communists

for pushing the Germans to behave so brutally, particularly after further assassinations led to more retaliatory executions. Pétain tried

his best to restrain the Nazis, but he blamed the communists for the

crisis. While he disagreed with the marshal, de Gaulle also discouraged his followers from provoking the Nazis by attacking individual

soldiers. Their rare point of accord refl ected the implicit recognition

that resisting a dominant empire was futile.

Although the Third Reich initially appeared impregnable, it was

built on a relatively short-lived military imbalance that produced

quick and easy victories at the beginning of the war. This came to an

end in the winter of 1941 when the blitzkrieg in the Soviet Union

bogged down at the gates of Moscow and the renewed German offensive the following year resulted in the bloody debacle at Stalingrad.

Driven to desperation by the Nazis’ genocidal version of settler colonialism, common Russians and Ukrainians put aside their divisions

and formed guerrilla bands that made the Nazi predicament worse

by wreaking havoc behind German lines. The partisans even murdered the
Gauleiter
of the Reich Commissariat of the Ukraine in his

bed. The Nazi security forces responded with an unrestrained fury

that made the execution of the Nantes hostages appear tame, but the

necessity of fortifying their lines of communication diverted men

and matériel from the front. The Red Army, by comparison, swelled

to more than four hundred divisions by 1943 and handed the Germans another crushing defeat in a decisive tank battle near Kursk. By

1944, Soviet troops were advancing into Poland.

In the west, the Nazis faced similar reverses. Upholding their obligations under the Tripartite Pact, Hitler and Mussolini declared war

402 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

on the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The resulting

American economic and military aid helped the British defeat the

Afrika Korps decisively in Egypt at El Alamein. In November 1942,

an Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa known as Operation Torch caught the Nazi armies in a vise that forced their surrender entirely in May 1943. Two months later, a seaborne assault

on Italy opened up a new front and led Italians to overthrow Mussolini. The demise of his fascist ally in the fall of 1943 forced Hitler

to occupy northern Italy to block the Allied advance. Additionally,

attacks by British and American bombers brought the war home to

the German people. All told, the Allies’ relentless air assault killed six

hundred thousand people, injured eight hundred thousand more, and

destroyed two million homes.45 No privileged metropolitan imperial

population ever faced this level of immediate and crushing retribution at the hands of their intended victims.

Panicked by the Allied advances, the Nazis demanded even more

wealth and manpower from their subjects. Conscripted civilian laborers from the occupied territories, prisoners of war, and concentration camp inmates became central in expanding war production and

preserving living standards as German combat losses approached

four million by 1944. As a result, foreign workers were so prevalent in the German heartland in the later years of the war that the

Reich Offi ce of Racial Purity worried that their presence and sexual

availability would contaminate the
Volk
.46

Although they espoused a doctrine of racial purity, the vaunted Nazi

legions eventually similarly relied heavily on non-German imperial

auxiliaries. In addition to pressing Italian and Eastern European allies

for more units to fi ll out their eastern lines, the Nazis enlisted subject

peoples directly into the SS military arm under the guise of defending

Christian Europe in a grand anticommunist crusade. At fi rst Himmler

insisted that only Danes, Norwegians, Dutchmen, and other nationalities with “Germanic blood” were eligible for the Waffen-SS, but as

casualties mounted his recruiters became more practical in meeting

their manpower needs. In addition to giving the French LVF SS status

and raising a sixteen-thousand-man French SS grenadier regiment,

the Nazis put aside their racist rhetoric by raising foreign legions of

supposedly subhuman Bosnian Muslims and Ukrainians.

This racial pragmatism had no bearing on the Third Reich’s assault

on Jews and other “inferior” peoples. Nazi ideologues at fi rst claimed

France under the Nazis 403

that they intended to resettle the Jews imprisoned in ghettos and

concentration camps somewhere in the vast eastern spaces of their

empire, but the Red Army’s westward advance led Hitler and his men

to turn to genocide. Working largely in secret, they built death camps

near the main concentration complexes where they systematically

murdered millions of Jews, Slavs, Roma (Gypsies), and other racial

enemies of the
Volk
.

Relatively few Frenchmen suffered this fate, but the Third Reich’s

failing fortunes had a substantial impact on the Nazi imperial regime

in France. From the Vichy standpoint, Operation Torch was not a liberation but an invasion of sovereign French territory. An outraged

Pétain declared: “We are being attacked, we shall defend ourselves.”47

Consequently, many French units in Morocco and Algeria fought

back against the Allied invasion until common sense led Darlan,

who by chance happened to be visiting his son in Algiers, to negotiate a cease-fi re. Claiming Pétain’s secret blessing, the Vichy premier

formed a council of senior French offi cials and offi cers to govern the

“liberated” colonies. It is diffi cult to know if Darlan truly intended to

switch sides because a young monarchist offi cer assassinated him in

late December 1942.

Surprisingly, the Americans and British allowed the Vichy administration to remain in power in North Africa because they suspected

de Gaulle aspired to become a military dictator. They hoped to install

General Henri Giraud as the leader of the Comité Français de Libération Nationale (French Committee of National Liberation), but de

Gaulle got the better of both the Allies and the Vichyites by depicting himself successfully as the legitimate leader of the true France.

His establishment of Algiers as the next French capital in exile after

Brazzaville was the fi rst step toward asserting his authority over the

disorganized French resistance and liberating France on his terms.

In France, Hitler used Darlan’s passive response to the Operation Torch landings as an excuse to occupy the entire Vichy zone

and disband the remaining units of the token French army. He did

not, however, extend the MBF’s authority into southern France. Still

lacking the manpower and resources to govern all of France directly,

he needed to preserve the illusion that Pétain was still in charge.

For his part, the marshal also remained willing to play his assigned

role. Although Operation Torch shocked them, the Vichyites were

prisoners of collaboration.

404 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

The Germans never really trusted Pétain, and after Darlan’s

murder they forced their client to reappoint his old rival Laval to

the premiership with enhanced extralegal powers. Although the marshal remained the nominal head of state, Laval gained the authority

to appoint ministers. He also took direct control of the ministries of

Internal Affairs, Foreign Affairs, and Information, which gave him

the means to expand the Vichy security apparatus. At his postwar

trial Laval claimed that he did this to protect France, but in reality

he had become a creature of the Nazis. On the second anniversary of

the armistice agreement he made this clear by issuing the declaration

that would later hang him: “I desire the victory of Germany, because,

without it, Bolshevism would tomorrow establish itself everywhere.

France cannot remain passive or indifferent before the immensity

of the sacrifi ces Germany is willing to make in order to construct a

Europe in which we must take our place.”48

Using the fallacious excuse that collaboration tempered German demands for men and material, Laval stood by as the imperial

regime’s claims on the French economy increased from one-third to

one-half of the country’s total prewar revenues. He also bowed to

Sauckel’s demand for French labor by introducing a program called

the
relève
(relief shift) that was supposed to send 150,000 voluntary

skilled workers to Germany in exchange for the release of 50,000

French POWs.49 When only a fraction of the promised workers materialized, Laval turned to conscription, for there was no way he could

refuse the Nazi manpower demands and remain in power. In early

1943, the Vichy premier became Sauckel’s recruiting agent by creating the Service du Travail Obligatoire (Mandatory Labor Service,

STO). Required to supply almost half a million workers for the Nazi

war effort, the STO combed France for available men. Facing censure for missed recruiting quotas, Vichy prefects even emptied jails

to meet their targets. Ironically, the Nazi armaments minister Albert

Speer did a better job of protecting French workers from conscription. Unlike Sauckel, Speer believed that Frenchmen best served the

Reich’s extractive needs by keeping France’s economy functioning.

However, Sauckel was not to be denied, and more than one in fi ve

Frenchmen ended up working in Germany as either civilian laborers

or POWs during the war.50

Nearly universal revulsion over labor conscription played a central