The Vichy Regime and the Rise of Nazi Anti-Jewish Laws | SLICE | Full Documentary

Apr 9, 2025 | By June 1940, Nazi Germany had already attacked Norway and Denmark, invaded Belgium and the Netherlands, crossed the Maginot Line and occupied Paris. France was cut in two: north of the demarcation line was the German-occupied zone, to the south was a zone headed by Marshal Pétain, whose seat of government was in the central spa town of Vichy. The Vichy regime very quickly – as early as October 1940 and without pressure from the Germans – passed the first Jewish laws. With the first of these, prefects in the southern zone had the right to lock up foreign Jews and Jewish refugees in camps, to which the Nazi regime deported Jews from the Rhineland and Westphalia. The German minister of foreign affairs had at first planned to deport German Jews to Madagascar, and Heydrich had instructed Eichmann to draw up a plan, but this was rapidly abandoned.

After the French capitulation, Nazi propaganda in which Jews were likened to rats was shown in all cinemas across the continent, from Poland to the English Channel, from Norway to Italy. Winston Churchill’s Britain was still holding out. For the Third Reich, the territories to be conquered lay to the east, in the USSR, which had been its ally since the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939. According to the German plans, Moscow would fall in a matter of weeks and the Jews would then be deported to Siberia. For Hitler, it was an ideological war. On 21 June 1941, the German armies entered Soviet soil, through the Baltic states and into Ukraine. A series of pogroms followed, like in Kaunas in July 1941. And the Einsatzgruppen, who in 1939 had eliminated the Polish elite, were sent in to hunt down Jews and Communists in the wake of the Wehrmacht, which was advancing at lightning speed. The conquered lands fell under the Nazi jackboot right along the front, and Jewish men aged between 16 and 40 were shot. They had the backing of the army, the military and civilian administrations in the occupied zones. From August 1941, Jewish women and children were also targeted by the Einsatzgruppen and its local collaborators. On 29 and 30 September 1941, they methodically shot 33,000 Jewish men, women and children in the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev.

Documentary: Annihilation
EP3 : Nazi Machine (2014)
Directed by William Karel & Blanche Finger
Production: ZADIG Productions