That is hardly a surprise since The Vichy Government supported and aided the Nazis. They were based in Southern France.

I wasn't aware of that specifically, but every war has it's share of collaborators, so maybe it's true. I would, however, like to see the source of this claim.

I didn't know that but it doesn't surprise me. There were lots of collaborators with the Germans. There were also lots of underground free French fighters.

Do you know, that Nazis encouraged Jews emigration from Germany (until 1938, I think), but US closed doors?

I wasn't aware of it but it isn't surprising to me either.

i didn`t know that but i`m not suprised.+5

Not only does it not surprise me but I sadly expect that very few young French people know this. The slant on the whole WW11 experience taught in French schools right up to quite an advanced age is extraordinarily denial based and French society seems to perpetuate a lot of untruths about the war. That's not to say I judge collaborators (Hitler's regime was a tough one to defy), but I am continually horrified to hear French people claim that a) only small parts of France were ever occupied, b) EVERYONE's grandad was in the resistance, c) the American troops in France raped and pillaged their way through France and so on. I wish more of them would check their facts. Knowledge is the only way we have to avoid future atrocities if we have a mind to.

Not only did they guard a concentration camp they also went through the police and town record voters lists and then rounded up all the Jews.They then interned them and handed them over to their masters the SS.This is well documented and cannot be denied. They had a chance to resign from the police but preffered to do the Germans dirty work for them.Incidently, French railways got paid money per head for every Jew on the transports that left France for the east.As the SS were using French rolling stock and french railway lines they were paid this fee

I am not surprised. Frequently people feel helpless to resist the tide of government. So, things just kind of snowball. 1939-1945 was a scary time to live. People were being sent away to die in death camps. If I had been a policeman, with a family to support, I probably would have done the same thing, to save my family!

Trout Fishing in.... The transports had to pay a levy to every country that they passed through on the way to the death camps it was not done free but had to be paid for. The rich Jewish businessmen from Paris and their families went first class by Pullman style coaches to Auschwitz, and they paid first class tickets,as they thought they were being resettled in the east. When they arrived the Germans had built an eastern European railway station with baggage carts on the platform. If they had bothered to look at the station clock they would have seen that it was a painted dummy.Ticket clerks clipped their tickets. Then they walked down Himmel Strasse (Street Of Heaven) which was lined with cypress tree’s,and at the end was a roman temple frontage which hid the gas chamber. To give them a further sense of security a white ambulance was parked outside with two SS Officers in white coats. In the ambulance were the canisters of Cyklon B.This truth is well documented too!!

Did you know that the entire South used black people as slaves and still would if we didn't knock the crap out of them? What is your point? Everyone has a shameful history that we continue to learn from. I assure you there are no French that want to fry any Jewish people today.

Yes, I have heard about those things. "65,000 Jews were deported from Drancy, of which 64,000 were murdered including 6,000 children." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drancy_internment_camp "Vichy France, or the Vichy regime are the common terms used to describe the government of France from July 1940 to August 1944. This government, which succeeded the Third Republic, officially called itself the French State (État Français), in contrast with the previous designation, "French Republic." Marshal Philippe Pétain proclaimed the government following the military defeat of France by Nazi Germany during World War II and the vote by the National Assembly on 10 July 1940. This vote granted extraordinary powers to Pétain, the last Président du Conseil (Prime Minister) of the Third Republic, who then took the additional title Chef de l'État Français ("Chief of the French State"). Pétain headed the reactionary program of the so-called "Révolution nationale", aimed at "regenerating the Nation." Vichy France had legal authority in both the northern zone of France, which was occupied by the German Wehrmacht, and the unoccupied southern "free zone", where the regime's administrative centre of Vichy was located. Recent research by the historian Simon Kitson has shown that, in spite of extensive state collaboration, Vichy led an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to preserve the sovereignty of this southern zone by arresting German spies. Pétain and the Vichy regime willfully collaborated with the German occupation to a high degree. The French police and the state Milice (militia) organised raids to capture Jews and others considered "undesirables" by the Germans in both the northern and southern zones." "On October 3, 1940, the Vichy government voluntarily promulgated the first Statute on Jews, which created a special, underclass of French Jewish citizens, and enforced, for the first time ever in France, racial segregation. The Statute first made mandatory the yellow badges, a reminiscence of old Christian anti-semitism. Police inspector André Tulard participated in the logistics concerning the attribution of these badges. The October 1940 Statute also excluded Jews from the administration, the armed forces, entertainment, arts, media, and certain professional roles (teachers, lawyers, doctors of medicine, etc.). A Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs (CGQJ, Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives), was created on March 29, 1941. It was first directed by Xavier Vallat, until May 1942, and then by Darquier de Pellepoix until February 1944. Mirroring the Reich Association of Jews, the Union Générale des Israélites de France was founded. The police also oversaw the confiscation of telephones and radios from Jewish homes and enforced a curfew on Jews starting from February 1942. It attentively monitored the Jews who did not respect the prohibition, according to which they were not supposed to appear in public places and had to travel in the last car of the Parisian metro. Along with many French police officers, André Tulard was present on the day of the inauguration of Drancy internment camp in 1941, which was used largely by French police as the central transit camp for detainees captured in France. All Jews and others "undesirables" passed through Drancy before heading to Auschwitz and other camps. - The July 1942 Vel'd'hiv round-up: Main article: Vel'd'hiv raid In July 1942 the French police, under the orders of René Bousquet and his second in Paris, Jean Leguay, organized, along with responsibles from the SNCF, the state railway company, the Vel'd'hiv raid which took place on July 16 and July 17. The police arrested 12,884 Jews - including 4,051 children, which the Gestapo had not asked for - 5,082 women and 3,031 men, and imprisoned them in the Winter Velodrome in unhygienic conditions, from which they were led to Drancy internment camp (run by Nazi Alois Brunner, who is still wanted for crimes against humanity, and French constabulary police) and then to the concentration camps. This action alone represented more than a quarter of the 42,000 French Jews sent to Auschwitz in 1942, of which only 811 would come back after the end of the war. The Gestapo had hardly ordered it to act so; the police eagerly participated in the raid. On July 16, 1995, president Jacques Chirac officially recognized the active participation of French police forces in the July 16, 1942 raid. "There was no effective police resistance until the end of Spring of 1944", wrote historians Jean-Luc Einaudi and Maurice Rajsfus In total, the Vichy government helped in the deportation of 76,000 Jews, although this number varies depending on the account, to German extermination camps; only 2,500 survived the war. - August 1942 and January 1943 raids: Further information: Battle of Marseilles The French police, headed by Bousquet, arrested 7,000 Jews in the southern zone in August 1942. 2,500 of them transited through the Camp des Milles near Aix-en-Provence before joining Drancy. Then, on 22, 23 and 24 January 1943, assisted by Bousquet's police force, the Germans organized a raid in Marseilles. During the Battle of Marseilles, the French police checked the identity documents of 40,000 people, and the operation succeeded in sending 2,000 Marseillese people in the death trains, leading to the extermination camps. The operation also encompassed the expulsion of an entire neighborhood (30,000 persons) in the Old Port before its destruction. For this occasion, SS Karl Oberg, in charge of the German Police in France, made the trip from Paris, and transmitted to Bousquet orders directly received from Himmler. It is another notable case of the French police's willful collaboration with the Nazis." "There were, in 1940, approximately 350,000 Jews in metropolitan France, less than half of them with French citizenship (and the others foreigners, mostly exiles from Germany during the 1930s). About 200,000 of them, and the large majority of foreign Jews, lived in Paris and its outskirts. Among the 150,000 French Jews, about 30,000, generally native from Central Europe, had been naturalized French during the 1930s. Of the total, approximatively 25,000 French Jews and 50,000 foreign Jews were deported. According to historian Robert Paxton, 76,000 Jews were deported and died in concentration and extermination camps. Including the Jews who died in concentration camps in France, this would have made for a total figure of 90,000 Jewish deaths (a quarter of the total Jewish population before the war, by his estimate). Paxton's numbers imply that 14,000 Jews died in French concentration camps. However, the systematic census of Jewish deportees from France (citizens or not) drawn under Serge Klarsfeld concluded that 3,000 had died in French concentration camps and 1,000 more had been shot. Of the approximately 76,000 deported, 2,566 survived. The total thus reported is slightly below 77,500 dead (somewhat less than a quarter of the Jewish population in France in 1940). Proportionally, either number makes for a lower death toll than in some other countries (in the Netherlands, 75% of the Jewish population was murdered). This fact has been used as arguments by supporters of Vichy. However, according to Paxton, the figure would have been greatly lower if the "French state" had not willfully collaborated with Nazi Germany, which lacked staff for police activities. During the Vel'd'hiv raid of July 1942, Laval ordered the deportation of the children, against explicit German orders. Paxton pointed out that if the total number of victims had not been higher, it was due to the shortage in wagons, the Resistance of the civilian population and deportation in other countries (notably in Italy)." Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy_France Further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vel'd'hiv_raid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drancy_internment_camp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration_during_World_War_II#France