Peter Metzger

We all know that the French hardly fought the Germans at all, and what fighting they did was without resolve. What is generally not known is that the French "resistance" was nothing at all until the end of the war, Hollywood movies notwithstanding. But the main thing people don't know about the French is how eagerly they killed their own defenseless citizens.

The German occupiers ordered the French of Paris to give up some of their Jews for transport to the death camps in the East. But as long as some French Jews were to be rounded up, a four-times Prime Minister of France reasoned, why not round them all up? So this led to what became an enthusiastic movement in France to round up all their Jews, and it was this that shocked even the Nazis. While the German order only wanted the men and older boys rounded up, the Paris cops rounded up Jews of all ages and conditions, to a degree that repelled even the Nazis.

You see, the German occupier of Paris was the Wehrmacht and not the SS. Accordingly, those Germans were not such a bad lot, as Germans go. Remember how the German commander disobeyed the Hitler Befehl to burn Paris? Remember the repeated Hitler telegrams of two words "Brennt Paris"? So whereas the occupiers didn't have their hearts in it, they gave the order to round up some Jews anyway. But when they saw how the French rounded up every Jew, and how brutally they did it, even the Germans were appalled. But what came next shocked them even more.

In 1942, the Paris cops crammed 7,000 Parisian Jews into an enclosed sports stadium known as the Velodrome. They were left there for five days without food, water, toilets or any needed facility whatsoever. Many very young children died there under terrible circumstances.

So in summary, the French fight all right, but only when they can ambush their friends and kill their own unarmed civilians.

In 1995, French President Jacques Chirac apologized for these events.

This is excerpted from a longer essay by Peter Metzger, a scientist-journalist who in 1978 first coined the term Coercive Utopians for the “liberals” opposed to economic growth.