Tag: Père Lachaise Cemetery

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Noah’s Ark

Official stamp of the Réseau Alliance. Photo by anonymous (date unknown).
Official stamp of the Réseau Alliance. Photo by anonymous (date unknown).

My attention is always drawn to stories about the brave members of the resistance movements who fought the Germans in their respective occupied countries. These men and women were always aware of their potential fatal outcomes if caught but largely ignored it to continue the fight for liberation. I’ve written in the past about some of these fighters including Nancy Wake (read here), the Boulloche sisters (read here), the Sussex Plan (read here), Rose Valland (read here), and the SOE—Special Operations Executive (read here).

Today, I’ll introduce you to the remarkable Hedgehog and the other animals of Noah’s Ark, one of the most successful résistance réseaux (resistance networks) operating in France during the German Occupation.

Did you Know?

Nazi concentration camp prisoners (i.e., those chosen for labor and not sent directly to the gas chambers) received a number tattooed on their arm. The misconception is that all camps tattooed their prisoners. That is not true. Only Auschwitz and two of its sub camps, Birkenau and Monowitz, practiced tattooing the prisoners. Learn more in our next blog, The Auschwitz Tattooist.

 The French Resistance

Most people have the mistaken idea that the French resistance movement was a single organization comprised of men and women with the same motivation: identify and sabotage strategic German targets for the purpose of driving the occupiers out of France. It’s not that simple.

Strasbourg France memorial for the Réseau Alliance agents executed by the Nazis on 23 November 1944. Photo by Rolf Krahl (2014). © Rolf Krahl. PD-Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0. Wikimedia Commons.
Strasbourg France memorial for the Réseau Alliance agents executed by the Nazis on 23 November 1944. Photo by Rolf Krahl (2014). © Rolf Krahl. PD-Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0. Wikimedia Commons.

The French Resistance movement was largely comprised of hundreds of independent networks, each with its own set of politics, motivations, and specific purposes. These networks were Communist, apolitical, right-leaning, left-leaning, and Christian democratic. Resistance activity began to gain strength after Hitler attacked Soviet positions in eastern Poland on 22 June 1941 in violation of the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Prior to the German attack, French communist resistance activities were not allowed by Moscow.

Eventually, Charles de Gaulle assigned Jean Moulin the task of uniting and organizing the various resistance networks. In May 1943, Moulin created the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR) under which the primary networks would coordinate their activities with the Free French Forces of the Interior. Read More Noah’s Ark

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Statuemania

So you read the title of this blog and automatically assumed I was going to share my opinion with you concerning recent events around our country. You were interested to know what I thought about the desire and the movements to destroy or relocate certain statues, paintings, or other memorials that certain people might find offensive.

No, I wanted to talk with you today about the deliberate destruction of approximately 1,750 bronze statues throughout France during the German Occupation of World War II. Not since the French Revolution had so many statues been destroyed (albeit for different reasons).

The Victor Hugo monument in Paris. Photo by anonymous (1908). Georges Lafenestre, L’œuvre de Ernest Barrias, Paris, Renouard, 1908. PD-70+. Wikimedia Commons.
The Victor Hugo monument in Paris. Photo by anonymous (1908). Georges Lafenestre, L’œuvre de Ernest Barrias, Paris, Renouard, 1908. PD-70+. Wikimedia Commons.

During the latter part of the 19th-century, the French government known as The Third Republic began a wide-spread campaign to erect bronze statues. These men (Joan of Arc being the lone woman) were considered heroes of France but in the minds of the citizens, they were closely associated with a widely considered corrupt government. This period of time was sarcastically dubbed “Statuemania.”  Learn more.

What Happened?

Well, first of all, the Nazis invaded France on 14 June 1940 and began a four-year occupation. Hitler created two zones in France: The Occupied and Unoccupied (Paris was in the Occupied Zone). After seventy years in existence, The Third Republic was replaced by the Vichy government headed by Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval.

Pétain’s collaborationist government was located in the small spa town of Vichy—the Unoccupied Zone. By November 1942 with the Allied successes in North Africa, all pretenses of a separate government were gone when the Germans eliminated the Unoccupied Zone and began to increase their direct role in running occupied France including higher demands for agricultural products and other resources (including non-ferrous metals) to feed the Nazi military machine. Learn more about the Vichy government here.

After France was liberated in August 1944, it became clear that Pétain and Laval had sanctioned laws, decrees, and actions that far exceeded Nazi expectations (including quotas for the deportation of Jews). During their separate trials, Pétain and Laval tried to argue in their defense that they were only trying to keep the Nazis happy and so avoid greater hardships for the French—at least as long as you weren’t a Jew, Freemason, communist, gypsy, homosexual, political opponent or any other type of untermensch (inferior person). Read More Statuemania