"JEAN-MARIE Le Pen, the leader of the French far-Right National Front, went on trial at the weekend accused of condoning the Nazi occupation of his country. He was prosecuted for allegedly conspiring to justify war crimes in an interview with a magazine. The offence carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison and a E45,000 ($75,300) fine....
The 79-year-old provoked outrage when he told Rivarol, a weekly publication, in 2005: "In France at least, the German occupation was not particularly inhumane, even if there were a number of excesses - inevitable in a country of 550,000sq km. "If the Germans had carried out mass executions across the country, as the received wisdom would have it, then there wouldn't have been any need for concentration camps for political deportees."
Rivarol editor Marie-Luce Wacquez, who is also on trial, said: "If you exclude the deportations, the occupation was pretty moderate compared with what happened in the Netherlands and Belgium."
Source
Le Pen's comments were too close to the truth. The French and the Germans DID generally get on fairly well during the occupation. Widespread French antisemitism was one factor in that. And any reader of Trotsky will be aware that 19th century French "Bonapartism" was a precursor of Fascism.
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3 comments:
i'd bet 1000 sous lepen would've been a collabo - or was.
iow: vichy all the way.
or merely opposed to the intrusive/alien germanic fascism and desiring a homegrown version a la francaise.
prosecuting him for theses repulsive views is repulsive.
This quote is from Tony Jugt's book, "Postwar- a History of Europe Since 1945."
p.39
"The local administrations in France, Norway and the Benelux countries had not covered themselves in glory. On the contrary, they had on the whole performed with alacrity the occupiers' bidding. In 1941 the Germans were able to run occupied Norway with just 806 administrative personnel. The Nazis administered France with just 1,500 of their own people. So confident were they of the reliability of the French police and militias that they assigned (in addition to their administrative staff) a mere 6,000 German civil and military police to ensure the compliance of a nation of 35 million. The same was true in the Netherlands. In postwar testimony the head of German security in Amsterdam averred that 'the main support of the German forces in the police sector and beyond was the Dutch police. Without it, not 10 percent of the German occupation tasks would have been fulfilled.' Contrast Yugoslavia. which required the unflagging attention of entire German military divisions just to contain the armed partisans."
The French don't like to be reminded of this. In their own minds, they were all in the underground and hiding jews.
I am not a big fan of Le Pen. But I am damn sure not a fan of locking up someone for espousing his beliefs.
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