PMT 33 2015

rhinoceros weekly transmission

rwt-33

Andral, Murat, June 1944

thursday 20 august 2015 : french resistance

transmission 33 contents : selection of photographs french resistance, an english wikipedia article

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The e-bulletin presents books, albums, photographs and ancient documents as they have been transmitted to us by their creators and by amateurs from past generations.

The physical descriptions, attributions, origins, place and date of printing of books and photographs have been carefully ascertained by collations and comparisons with other prints or comparable samples (from our picture library).

The books and photographs from all around the world are presented in chronological order. It is the privilege of ancient and authentic things to be presented in this fashion, mirroring the flow of ideas and creations.

All the items presented are available at the time of transmission.

The prices are denominated in euro. Paypal is accepted. Priority is given to the first outright purchase, confirmed by email to

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32nd week 2015

jack andral. Untitled (French Resistants), Murat, Cantal, June 1944 Ten vintage silver prints, 90x61 mm. “La rafle de Murat, Le 12 Juin 1944 à Murat, des miliciens et un détachement d’allemands raflent 119 Muratais. Ils fusillent 4 hommes aux alentours de Murat et encerclent la ville. Ils arrêtent 13 personnes et les amènent pour « interrogatoire » à la mairie. Ces interrogatoires sont menés entre autres par Hugo Geissler, allemand parlant le français très couramment, à la tête, dès 1943, du «sonderkomand »chargé de la lutte contre le maquis. Des maquisards prévenus de l’arrivée des forces de répression se postent sur les hauteurs de la ville et mitraillent Geissler et ses soldats. Bilan : 6 soldats allemands tués ainsi que Geissler. Cette action fut suivie de représailles : 25 otages emmenés à Soubizergues, près de Saint-Flour, seront fusillés au petit matin du 14 juin. Parmi eux se trouvaient trois personnes arrêtées l'avant-veille à Murat...” € 1.200

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32nd week 2015

french resistance, An English Wikipedia Article, 2015 The French Resistance (French: La Résistance française) is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that ferociously fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II. Résistance cells were small groups of armed men and women (called the Maquis in rural areas), who, in addition to their guerrilla warfare activities, were also publishers of underground newspapers, providers of first-hand intelligence information, and maintainers of escape networks that helped Allied soldiers and airmen trapped behind enemy lines. The men and women of the Résistance came from all economic levels and political leanings of French society, including émigrés; academics, students, aristocrats, conservative Roman Catholics (including priests) and also citizens from the ranks of liberals, anarchists, and communists.

The French Resistance played a significant role in facilitating the Allies' rapid advance through France following the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944, and the lesser-known invasion of Provence on 15 August, by providing military intelligence on the German defenses known as the Atlantic Wall and on Wehrmacht deployments and orders of battle. The Résistance also planned, coordinated, and executed acts of sabotage on the electrical power grid, transportation facilities, and telecommunications networks. It was also politically and morally important to France, both during the German occupation and for decades afterward, because it provided the country with an inspiring example of the patriotic fulfillment of a national imperative, countering an existential threat to French nationhood. The actions of the Résistance stood in marked contrast to the collaboration of the French regime based at Vichy, the French people who joined the pro-Nazi milice, and the French men who joined the Waffen SS. After the landings in Normandy and Provence, the paramilitary components of the Résistance were organized more formally, into a hierarchy of operational units known, collectively, as the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). Estimated to have a strength of 100,000 in June 1944, the FFI grew rapidly and reached approximately 400,000 by October of that year. Although the amalgamation of the FFI was, in some cases, fraught with political difficulties, it was ultimately successful, and it allowed France to rebuild the fourth-largest army in the European theatre (1.2 million men) by VE Day in May 1945...

Defining the precise role of the French Résistance during the German occupation, or assessing its military importance alongside the Allied Forces during the liberation of France, is difficult.

The two forms of resistance, active and passive, and the north-south occupational divide, allow for many different interpretations, but what can broadly be agreed on is a synopsis of the events which took place.

French Resistance As Seen In

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An English Wikipedia Article

Following the surrender of fascist Italy in September 1943, a significant example of Résistance strength was displayed when the Corsican Résistance joined forces with the Free French to liberate the island from General Albert Kesselring's remaining German forces.

On mainland France itself, in the wake of the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, the FFI and the communist fighting groups FTP, theoretically unified under the command of General Pierre Kœnig, fought alongside the Allies to free the rest of France. Several color-coded plans were co-ordinated for sabotage, most importantly Plan Vert (Green) for railways, Plan Bleu (Blue) for power installations and Plan Violet (Purple) for telecommunications. To complement these missions, smaller plans were drafted: Plan Rouge (Red) for German ammunition depots, Plan Jaune (Yellow) for German command posts, Plan Noir (Black) for German fuel depots and Plan Tortue (Tortoise) for road traffic. Their paralysis of German infrastructure is widely thought to have been very effective. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill later wrote in his memoirs praising the role the Résistance played in the liberation of Brittany, "The French Resistance Movement, which here numbered 30,000 men, played a notable part, and the peninsula was quickly overrun."

The Liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944, with the support of Leclerc's French 2nd Armored Division, was one of the most famous and glorious moments of the French Résistance. Although it is again difficult to gauge their effectiveness precisely, popular anti-German demonstrations, such as general strikes by the Paris Métro, the gendarmerie and the police, took place, and fighting ensued.

The liberation of most of southwestern, central and southeastern France was finally fulfilled with the arrival of the 1st French Army of General de Lattre de Tassigny, which landed in Provence in August 1944 and was backed by over 25,000 maquis.

One source often referred to is General Dwight D. Eisenhower's comment in his military memoir, Crusade in Europe: — Throughout France, the Free French had been of inestimable value in the campaign. They were particularly active in Brittany, but on every portion of the front we secured help from them in a multitude of ways. Without their great assistance, the liberation of France and the defeat of the enemy in Western Europe would have consumed a much longer time and meant greater losses to ourselves.

General Eisenhower also estimated the value of the Résistance to have been equal to ten to fifteen divisions at the time of the landings.

French Resistance As Seen In

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An English Wikipedia Article

(One infantry division comprised about ten thousand soldiers.) Eisenhower's statements are all the more credible since he based them on his GHQ's formal analyses and published them only after the war, when propaganda was no longer a motive. Historians still debate how effective the French RĂŠsistance was militarily, but the neutralization of the Maquis du Vercors alone involved the commitment of over 10,000 German troops within the theater, with several more thousands held in reserve, as the Allied invasion was advancing from Normandy and French Operation Jedburgh commandos were being dropped nearby to the south to prepare for the Allied landing in Provence.

It is estimated that FFI killed some 2,000 Germans, a low estimate based on the figures from June 1944 only. Estimates of the casualties among the RĂŠsistance are made harder by the dispersion of movements at least until D-Day, but credible estimates start from 8,000 dead in action, 25,000 shot and several tens of thousands deported, of whom 27,000 died in death camps.

For perspective, the best estimate is that 86,000 were deported from France without racial motive, overwhelmingly comprising resistance fighters and more than the number of Gypsies and Jews deported from France...

French Resistance As Seen In

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An English Wikipedia Article

In coming to terms with the events of the occupation, several different attitudes have emerged in France, in an evolution the historian Henry Rousso has called the "Vichy Syndrome".

Immediately following the liberation, France was swept by a wave of executions, public humiliations, assaults and detentions of suspected collaborators, known as the épuration sauvage (savage purge). This period succeeded the German occupational administration but preceded the authority of the French Provisional Government, and consequently lacked any form of institutional justice. Approximately 9,000 were executed, mostly without trial,] notably including members and leaders of the milices. In one case, as many as 77 milices members were summarily executed at once. An inquest into the issue of summary executions launched by Jules Moch, the Minister of the Interior, came to the conclusion that there were 9,673 summary executions. A second inquest in 1952 separated out 8,867 executions of suspected collaborators and 1,955 summary executions for which the motive of killing was not known, giving a total of 10,822 executions.

Head-shaving was a common feature of the purges, and between 10,000 and 30,000 women accused of having collaborated with the Germans or having had relationships with German soldiers or officers were subjected to the practice, becoming known as les tondues (the shorn).

The official épuration légale began following a June 1944 decree that established a three-tier system of judicial courts: a High Court of Justice which dealt with Vichy ministers and officials; Courts of Justice for other serious cases of collaboration; and regular Civic Courts for lesser cases of collaboration. Over 700 collaborators were executed following proper legal trials.

This initial phase of the purge trials ended with a series of amnesty laws passed between 1951 & 1953 which reduced the number of imprisoned collaborators from 40,000 to 62, and was followed by a period of official "repression" that lasted between 1954 & 1971. During this period, and particularly after de Gaulle's return to power in 1958, the collective memory of "Résistancialisme" tended toward a highly resistant France opposed to the collaboration of the Vichy regime. This period ended when the aftermath of the events of May 1968, which had divided French society between the conservative war generation and the younger, more liberal students and workers, led many to question the Résistance ideals promulgated by the official history.

The questioning of France's past had become a national obsession by the 1980s, fuelled by the highly publicized trials of war criminals such as Klaus Barbie and Maurice Papon.Although the occupation is often still a sensitive subject in the early 21st century,] contrary to some interpretations the French as a whole have acknowledged their past and no longer deny their conduct during the war.

French Resistance As Seen In

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An English Wikipedia Article

After the war, the influential French Communist Party (PCF) projected itself as "Le Parti des Fusillés" (The Party of Those Shot), in recognition of the thousands of communists executed for their Résistance activities. The number of communists killed was in reality considerably less than the Party's figure of 75,000, and it is now estimated that close to 30,000 Frenchmen of all political movements combined were shot, of whom only a few thousand were communists.

The Vichy Regime's prejudicial policies had discredited traditional conservatism in France by the end of the war, but following the liberation many former Pétainistes became critical of the official résistancialisme, using expressions such as "le mythe de la Résistance" (the myth of the Résistance), one of them even concluding, "The 'Gaullist' régime is therefore built on a fundamental lie”.

Number Thirty-two of the weekly Transmission has been adapted to a new format for iphones and mobile devices uploaded on Thursday, 20th August at 15:15 (Paris time).

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