Posted
on August 25, 2015
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| U.S. soldiers during the Liberation of Paris |
Wars
are horrible, and World War II was certainly one of the most horrible
of wars! One of the places Hitler and the Nazis conquered during World War II was
France and its capital city, Paris.
Nazi
Germany took over France in just six weeks of
battles. It was a stunning turn of events – because the French army
was considered one of the best in all of Europe.
After
the Nazi takeover, almost two million French soldiers became
prisoners of war who were sent to Germany to work to be imprisoned
and assigned to dangerous or difficult work duty. Some French soldiers
escaped to Britain and other places and were able to become the Free
French Forces under Charles de Gaulle.
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| The Nazis had controlled France for four long years! |
The
citizens of France had varied experiences while the Nazis
occupied their nation. Some people joined the French Resistance,
small groups of armed men and women who helped Allied soldiers and
airmen escape the Nazis, who spied on the Nazis, who published
underground newspapers to communicate with one another and with the
Allied troops, and who took part in guerrilla warfare on Nazi troops.
And sometimes the members of the French Resistance attacked the last category of French people:
The
Nazi collaborators!
The Nazi collaborators were French people who who went along with the Nazis in
order to save their own skins. The Vichy government ruled the
southern half of French, with fascist-like laws, and most French
colonies, overseas, were also under Vichy control. Some of these collaborators did horrible things as they went along with the Nazis - the Vichy opened concentration camps in which they imprisoned and mistreated Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others; they sent Jews off to German death camps; they participated in Gestapo raids.
De
Gaulle, from his exile in Britain, tried to rally his fellow French citizens to join in resisting
the Nazis; later he invaded Northern Africa and took back Algiers,
Algeria, where he moved the base of the Free French Forces. At that
point, members of the Resistance became the French Forces of the
Interior, and the two groups fighting the Nazis inside and outside of
France's borders grew from 100,000 to 400,000 to 1,200,000 soldiers!
Finally, on this date in 1944, French General Jacques Leclerc reentered Paris
and began to free French civilian prisoners. The Free French Forces
started mopping up all the Germans who continued to fight, and some
of the French people, when they saw Nazis, attacked them – even the
Nazis who had given up and were trudging off to become prisoners of
war!
French
collaborators were often killed the minute they were captured. Other collaborators faced trials and death sentences or other, lesser, punishments. A few were found guilty of crimes against humanity.
Despite the high death count and the desire for revenge, the Liberation of Paris was a time of great joy!
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| The Free French Forces and the U.S. Army were both involved - and both joyfully greeted and celebrated - during the Liberation of Paris. |
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