X-Nico

20 unusual facts about Vichy France


44th Infantry Division Cremona

When Italy and Germany occupied Vichy France in Operation "Anton" after the Allied landings in French North Africa the division was ferried to Southern Corsica on 8 November 1942 to occupy the island, while the 20th Infantry Division Friuli occupied Northern Corsica.

Affiche Rouge

The Affiche Rouge ("Red Poster") is a famous propaganda poster, distributed by Vichy French and German authorities in the spring of 1944 in occupied Paris, to discredit 23 French Resistance fighters, members of the Manouchian Group.

Défense de la France

Essentially developed in the Northern Zone, Défense de la France distinguishes itself by an activity centered on the distribution of a clandestine newspaper created in August 1941 by a group of Parisian students, of the Christian faith.

Élisabeth de Rothschild

Following the German occupation of France in World War II, she and her then-estranged husband were arrested by the Vichy government and the vineyard property seized.

Francis Blanchard

During the Second World War Blanchard worked as an assistant to a member of the Vichy government, but was involved in resistance activities whilst there.

French destroyer Le Hardi

In November 1942, with the invasion of Vichy France by the Germans she was scuttled along with the French fleet at Toulon.

French state

Vichy France, 'French state' was the official name of the regime first directed by Philippe Pétain, explicitly opposed to the French Republic

Guy Môquet

After the occupation of Paris by the Germans and the installation of the Vichy government, he was denounced on 13 October 1940 and arrested at the Gare de l'Est metro station by three police officers of the French Anti-Communist Special Brigade.

Hamilton Lamb

The battalion sailed for the Middle East in April 1941, where they engaged the forces of Vichy France in Syria.

Jean Malaquais

His most famous work, about an international group of exiles in Vichy France, was Planète sans visa (1947), which has been translated into many languages.

Jocelyn Simon, Baron Simon of Glaisdale

He commanded a special service squadron of three Valentine tanks of the Royal Armoured Corps in the invasion of Madagascar in 1942 and the subsequent six-month campaign to liberate it from Vichy French control.

Julia Pascal

The final volume includes Crossing Jerusalem, which is about the conflict in the Middle East, The Golem, a version of the Prague myth of the Golem for young audiences, St Joan a satire based on a Jewish Black Londoner who dreams she is Joan of Arc and Year Zero which reveals World War II stories from Vichy France.

Kfar Blum

The kibbutz was named in honor of Léon Blum, the Jewish socialist former Prime Minister of France who was the focus of a widely publicized, and ultimately unsuccessful, show trial in 1942 mounted by the collaborationist Vichy regime.

Maquis du Limousin

But the Limousin was South to the line of demarcation and the resistance was mainly a passive one against Vichy France.

Operation Flagpole

Operation Flagpole (World War II) – a secret mission in 1942 to secure the cooperation of Vichy France officers to the Allied invasion of North Africa

Paul Rivière

After a first airdrop, he was arrested and detained four months by Vichy France police.

Rare Book Preservation Society

They controlled the entire coast of China except technically for the French Concessions (under Vichy control).

Réseau Morhange

The group organised direct action and counterintelligence against the German occupied and collaborators of Vichy France.

Robert Satloff

Algeria was then part of France, under the rule of the pro-German Vichy regime.

Wolf pack Hai

The Master and 20 men made landfall at Timiris, Senegal, after 18 days at sea, and were interned by the Vichy French, while the chief officer and 24 men were picked up by a Spanish fishing vessel after 14 days.


Alfred-Henri-Marie Baudrillart

Baudrillart initially supported the Vichy government of Marshal Philippe Pétain, along with Cardinal Suhard, and in August 1941 - as a fervent anti-communist - even supported the creation of a Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism; however in early 1942 he openly protested in public against the anti-Semitic measures of the Vichy government in shops and theatres; he also decried the Hitler regime as unhuman (in private conversation).

André Marquis

André Marquis (24 October 1883 - 15 October 1957) was a French Vichyist admiral, famous for the scuttling of the French fleet in Toulon.

Antonio Caggiano

Over the spring of 1946 a number of French war criminals, fascists and Vichy officials made it from Italy to Argentina in the same way: they were issued passports by the Rome ICRC office; these were then stamped with Argentine tourist visas (the need for health certificates and return tickets was waived on Caggiano's recommendation).

Auguste Ricord

An agent of Henri Lafont, a member of the Carlingue (French auxiliaries of the Gestapo), under the Vichy regime, he used part of the funds stolen by the Carlingue during the war to create drug laboratories near Marseille.

Battle of La Ciotat

Allied forces, engaged at the main landings in Vichy France, ordered a small flotilla of American and British warships to make a feint against the port city of La Ciotat as a diversion.

Calouste Gulbenkian

By the onset of the Second World War, he had acquired diplomatic immunity as the Iraqi Minister in Paris and he followed the French government when it fled to Vichy, serving the Pétainist Vichy France regime as its Iranian minister.

Ex parte Quirin

Burger, Dasch, Heinck and Quirin traveled from occupied France by German submarine U-202 to Amagansett Beach, Long Island, New York, landing in the hours of darkness, on June 13, 1942.

Faisceau

It worked hard to recruit people from the left, with some success: notably, Marcel Delagrange, former French Communist Party (PCF) mayor of Périgueux, and the anarcho-syndicalist (and future Vichy Régime minister) Hubert Lagardelle.

Felix Nussbaum

After Nazi Germany attacked Belgium in 1940, Nussbaum was arrested by Belgian police as a "hostile alien" German, and was subsequently taken to the Saint-Cyprien camp in France.

Frédéric Dorion

In 1949, Dorion spoke out against the extradition from Canada of Count Jacques Charles Noel Duge de Bernonville, a Vichy France police official who had been an aide to Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie and was wanted in France for having collaborated with the Nazis.

French Indochina

In September 1940, during World War II, the newly created regime of Vichy France granted Japan's demands for military access to Tonkin following the Japanese occupation of French Indochina, which lasted until the end of the Pacific War.

German submarine U-755

U-755 set out on her fourth patrol on 21 March, where she was to head to Morocco, and then head off to Toulon in Vichy France.

Heinkel He 177

In early September 1944, the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) was ordered to supply an aircrew for a He 177 that the French Maquis and Allied units in Vichy France would take control of at the airfield at Blagnac near Toulouse, where elements of both the He 177A-equipped KG 4 and KG 100 Luftwaffe bomber wings were based.

Heinrich Mann

During the German occupation he made his way through collaborationist Vichy France to Marseille where he was aided by Varian Fry in 1940 to escape to Spain.

Henri Braquenié

Following France's capitulation in June 1940, Braquenié evacuated south to unoccupied, Vichy France with other Bruno staff, and subsequently served at the "Cadix" center that was then established near Uzès, not far from the Mediterranean Sea.

Household Cavalry Composite Regiment

Following this, in July 1941 it was placed under the command of I Australian Corps and was involved in operations against the Vichy French in Syria, advancing from eastern Iraq near the Trans-Jordan border on Palmyra to secure the Haditha - Tripoli oil pipeline.

Jacques Doriot

Doriot resided in collaborationist Vichy France for a time, but he eventually found that it wasn’t nearly as Fascist as he had hoped it would be and moved to occupied Paris, where he espoused pro-German and anti-Communist propaganda on Radio Paris.

Laghouat prison camp

Laghouat prison camp was a detention centre at Laghouat in Saharan Algeria, maintained during the Second World War by Vichy France and later by the French Committee of National Liberation.

Latécoère 611

After being damaged in a collision with another flying boat, it eventually entered full service with the Vichy French Navy on 15 October 1941, operating with Escadrille 4E at Port Lyautey and Dakar.

Lorraine 37L

This Atelier de Bagnères had not made a single vehicle by the time of the armistice between France and Germany, but it was, like the other tractor-producing Fouga factory at Béziers, located in the unoccupied zone of Vichy France.

Passage to Marseille

By the time the Ville de Nancy nears the port of Marseille, France has surrendered to Nazi Germany, and a collaborationist Vichy government has been set up.

Rudolf Breitscheid

There, efforts were undertaken by the Refugee Committee, under Varian Fry, to get him out of Vichy France, along with Rudolf Hilferding.

Scott-King's Modern Europe

On arrival at a Mediterranean seaport, he finds himself surrounded by anarchists, monarchists, Trotskyites, prostitutes, ballet dancers, former Gestapo officers and Vichy collaborators.