Hello, thinking about it, I find wm claim not good. First, he repeat the myth that vichy protected french jews, second he make the claim vichy administration didn’t knew about it, wich I find odd since hitler intention could’ve already been known before the war as shown by french press report from the book “la seconde guerre mondiale sous le regard de la presse” where the false idea that vichy france wanted to protect the jews come from? - Axis History Forum I wonder what you think of those claim and if vichy really didn’t knew about the holocaust (wich doesn’t make them less criminal, they still participated in it, collaborated with nazi germany and I don’t think the “statut de sjuifs” was made to protect french jews and vichy didn’t protected french or foreign jews)
Of all the occupied countries I think only Denmark did anything to protect their population.
Italia did imprison their Jewish population but they did not turn them over to the Germans until after the fall of Musolini , in that way they did more to protect them then any other nation besides Denmark.
There were individuals who tried to help but with so many collaborators and profiteers and scared people who went along with the nazi’s .
Only at the end when governments were starting to see that the war was going bad for the nazi’s and after the war a lot of “facts” were changed to a narrative that they tried to help and did the best they could
One thing you need to remember is the Germans were experts at hiding the reality of the death camps. It has been well documented that even those civilians living nearby the death camps had no real inkling of what was going on in those camps until they were pressed into service by the allies to help clean up the camps and even then denial was high.
So the countries that sent the Jews, invalids, undesirables and so forth to these camps likely did not have a real idea either. No doubt there were those in the Vichy and other state governments that knew but often kept silent about the goings on in said camps for many reasons.
People tend to forget that in this time period everyone got the news by three methods. Radio, newspaper and word of mouth and the radio and newspapers were easy to control whereas word of mouth was treated either as rumour or something to scare the populace with.
Even then I don’t think it make people who deported them less responsible (even less for pierre laval or bousquet per example,I still don’t get the point of transferring the “vichy protected french jews” rhetoric to him instead of pétain[who didn’t protected french jews either, edited to make what I said clearer, pétain’s usually the one claimed to have protected french jews when he didn’t]).