FDR Called Operation Torch a “Great Jihad of Freedom.” It Was Nothing of the Kind.

Robert Satloff has written eloquently about Jews and Arabs whose interaction has been the stuff of history in the Middle East for long tumultuous years, with more of the same certain to come. His book Among the Righteous (2006) does justice to Arabs who, during the German occupation of North African countries in World War II, saved Jews from concentration camps and probable death just as other Righteous Gentiles did in Nazi Europe. The war had knock-on effects well worth exploring; in “The Jews Will Have to Wait,” Satloff now directs our attention to another one.

The blitzkrieg of 1940 had left Hitler in control of France. The northern part of the country was to remain under the rule of the military and the SS. Marshal Philippe Pétain, a World War I veteran by then in his eighties, had taken the lead in negotiating the cease-fire and the French surrender. Hitler allowed him to be head of state in the truncated southern part of France, with its capital in the spa town of Vichy.

Nominal at best, Pétain’s independence was conditioned on his willingness to collaborate with Hitler. In whichever half of the country they found themselves, Frenchmen at all levels had to decide to what extent they would lend themselves to Nazi purposes. Collaboration was to make a great many of them accomplices in the Holocaust.