DOI:
Abstract. The paper analyzes the history of persecution of the Jews in Southern France during World War II. The relevance of the work does not raise any doubts, as in the domestic science the problem has received no attention for a long period of time. In France and other countries, the problem of collaborationism and holocaust has long been “uncomfortable” from the perspective of the modern political realia. A new resurgence of discussion on the question was caused by the words of the president E. Macron, who called Petain –dictator who used to be a leader of Vichy regime – a great soldier in 2018. Nowadays, an average person gets an impression that France has taken maximum efforts to defeat the Nazi regime together with the other countries of anti-Hitler coalition. There is still a perception that the French dictator H. Ph. Petain protected the French Jews and tried to avoid cooperation with A. Hitler. The Jews who found themselves in the South of France fully experienced the seriousness of the persecution of the authorities. In author's opinion this conclusion is especially obvious coming from documentary evidence about the cruel policy aimed at Jews eviction from non-occupied resort areas and to the joint raids in cities and villages in 1943-1944 taken by the French and German police in South France, after that Jews and representatives of other ethnic groups were sent to the death camps and having been subjected by Nazis to mass destruction in Auschwitz death camp. The author of the research considers the facts of Jews’ eviction and harassment in Vichy during the noted period to be not only the manifestation of anti-Semitism but the proof to holocaust organized by Petain administration
Keywords: World War II, Henri Petain, France, Holocaust, Vichy, modern history.
Author:
Artem E. Lyubetsky, Ph.D. in History, associate professor at the Department of World History, Institute for the Humanities, Nosov Magnitogorsk State Technical University, Magnitogorsk, Russia; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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For citation
Lyubetsky A. E. Vichy Regime: Holocaust in the South of France, Gumanitarno-pedagogicheskie issledovaniya [Humanitarian and pedagogical Research], 2021, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 27–32.