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Speakers): Wolfgang Seibel, Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor in German Studies

The German occupation of France from 1942 to 1944 claimed the lives of some 80,000 Jews. Between March 1942 and August 1944, 77,000 Jews were deported from France to Auschwitz and other extermination camps where almost all of them were murdered in the gas chambers or perished through forced labor, hunger, and violence. Approximately 3000 to 4000 people perished in the internment camps on French soil, were shot as hostages, or were killed as resistance fighters. Yet around 75 per cent of the approximately 320,000 Jews who were registered in the occupied part of France in fall 1940 and in the unoccupied part of France in 1941 survived. It is common knowledge that the French government, which took up residence in the spa town of Vichy after the military defeat of France in June 1940, not only did not put up resistance when the Germans asked for support in the persecution and deportation of the Jews. On the contrary, it initiated its own persecution agenda in the form of anti-Jewish laws and did not hesitate to place the French police and administration at the disposal of the Germans for the raids against and the deportations of Jews.

The collaboration of the French state notwithstanding, the relevant research literature confronts explicitly or implicitly a dual paradox. One aspect is the apparently low level of Jewish victimization in France, namely, 25 per cent in terms of deportees based on the size of the Jewish community in 1940, as compared with 49 per cent in Belgium and 76 per cent in the Netherlands. At first glance, this is puzzling given both the anti-Semitic ideological stance of the Vichy regime and its willingness to collaborate with the Germans in the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” A second paradoxical aspect is the conjecture that the relative independence and autonomy of the French government and, as a consequence, the dependence of the German persecutors on French police forces and French administrative support, not only implies that Vichy was jointly responsible for the fate of the 80,000 Jewish victims but also that it contributed in some way to the rescue of the majority of the Jews living in France during the German occupation.

In addressing these paradoxes, the lecture reanalyzes the actual process of decision making that led to both the initiation of the ‘Final Solution’ and its ultimate failure in France. The argument is that the rescue of the majority of the Jews in France cannot be explained by individual survival and rescue tactics. Instead, it was the mobilization of moral norms by key actors, specifically, a small number of nevertheless influential representatives of the two Christian churches, what made the rescue possible since it shifted the power calculation of the Vichy regime in a way that made it too costly to continue to collaborate with the Germans in the ‘Jewish question’. From September 1942 onward the government in Vichy refused to implement Eichmann’s deportation program as it had been planned and agreed upon, and the SS found itself unable to break the increasingly stubborn passive resistance.

Beyond the French case, the lecture emphasizes the importance of “disaggregating the Holocaust” (Charles King) in an attempt to identify the elementary social mechanisms that drove the action of the indispensable accomplices. Negotiation and bargaining within a division-of-labor based persecution machinery were such mechanisms whose nature not only reveals the dynamics of persecution but also the critical junctures at which intervention was possible. What is more, the analysis shows is that morality is not powerless in the face of genocide. Moral norms may become a power factor when moral and political judgment coincide and key players have the ability to influence the opportunistic political calculations of the indifferent and the accomplices.