France / Jewish Holocaust

Disclosed: The Zealous Way Marshal Pétain Enforced Nazi Anti-Semitic Laws
By Lizzy Davies
The Guardian, October 3, 2010
Photo:  Time-Life Pictures/Getty Images
"The direct role played by France's collaborationist leader in the second world war persecution of the Jews was emphasised today after the draft of a decisive memo, annotated by Philippe Pétain, was made public for the first time. A hitherto unseen copy of the original statute on Jews, vehemently antisemitic legislation passed in October 1940 after defeat by the Nazis, reveals that Pétain 'completely redrafted' the memo to make it even harsher and wider-ranging, according to France's foremost Jewish historian. 'The statute on Jews was a statute that was adopted without pressure from the Germans, without the request of the Germans: an indigenous statute,' Serge Klarsfeld, a veteran lawyer, told French radio. 'And now we have decisive evidence that it was the desire of Marshal Pétain himself.' Handed by an anonymous donor to the Holocaust memorial in Paris and authenticated by experts, the papers show for the first time how Pétain, the reactionary head of Vichy, wrote his personal antisemitism into the politics of the new-born French state. Led by the Vichy government, that state would go on to aid the deportation of 77,000 Jews to concentration camps until liberation in 1944.
Already an 'extremely antisemitic' text that barred foreign Jews from large swaths of public sector jobs and other parts of society, the statute that emerged from Pétain's office extended those measures to French Jews. The caveat protecting 'descendants of Jews born French or naturalised before 1860' is clearly crossed out in the document brandished by Klarsfeld. Scribblings in handwriting, which experts insist is that of the Vichy leader, indicate he broadened the exclusion of Jews, barring them completely from jobs in education and the law, and stopping them from running for elected office. [...]"