Pétain's Crime

The crime of Marshal Philippe Pétain, hero of World War I and "national savior" after the fall of France in 1940, was to preside over France's enthusiastic and autonomous contribution to the extermination of European Jews. As head of state of the "free" Vichy government after the Nazi occupation, Pétain directed the French collaboration in the Holocaust.

These facts of France's complicity have long been covered by secrecy and censorship, and Pétain has been seen as a benign and humane leader. Mr. Webster sets the record straight, detailing concentration camps in France set up even before the war began; systematic persecution of Jews under a purely French government; the leading role of French police in mass roundups ordered by Pétain.

The Marshal was personally involved from the first anti-Semitic legislation of July 1940 up to the deportation of the last trainload of French Jews to the death camps in August 1944. As Mr. Webster shows, ideological anti-Semitism had been part of the French political and philosophical tradition for many years before the fall of France. This disturbing book, a controversial best-seller in Paris, reveals that Pétain's government represented the appalling culmination of a century of persecution.

ISBN-13: 9781566632492
Author : Paul Webster
Publisher: Ivan R Dee
Publication date: 10/18/1999

Editorial Reviews - Publishers Weekly

A controversial bestseller in France, this shocking book by the London Guardian 's Paris correspondent charges that French complicity in the Holocaust ran far deeper than previously known. Webster traces the history of French anti-Semitism to its climax in 1940, when Marshal Philippe Petain, head of the collaborationist Vichy government, signed into law a statute declaring French Jews enemies of the state. Petain then launched a program of arrest and deportation that resulted in the deaths of 72,000 French, foreign and stateless Jews in the extermination camps of the East. Purportedly, four thousand others were killed in a gas chamber on French soil. The book presents evidence indicating that the program was conceived, organized and carried out independently of the Germans. In addition to providing details on what he calls ``the most shameful period in French history,'' Webster exposes the postwar coverup based on the false impression that Vichy resisted German demands to assist in the ``final solution.'' Photos. (Apr.)

Meet the Author

Paul Webster is the Paris correspondent of the Guardian, a London newspaper. He has also written Saint-Germain-des-Pres, an analysis of French postwar culture, and a novel, Kruger’s Gold.