Who was assuming that? Churchill and the UK were remaining quite defiant in the face of defeat on the continent. At any rate, if the war was presumed to be all over bar the shouting, then there was no need to attack the French fleet.
Do you have a cite for this? All that I have ever read is his words in person to Churchill were “No French ship will ever come into the hands of the Germans”, nothing about sailing for British ports. Ironically the time that he did call on the French Navy to defect was after the Allied landings in French North Africa when the Allies recognized him as the head of the French North African colonies and he ordered all French forces in North Africa to cease resistance to and join the Allies on November 10, 1942. On the 12th he called upon the French fleet at Toulon to defect and sail for North Africa.
As I said, it is perhaps understandable for Churchill to feel he couldn’t risk the French fleet falling into German hands, but it was even more understandable that the French fleet would reject an ultimatum. With the advantage of hindsight the possession of the French fleet would have been of questionable value anyway. Hitler wasn’t interested in more than neutralizing them, and even if they had been seized, who was going to man them? Darlan’s word was kept when Hitler tried to ‘simply seize them’ at Toulon. The Germans were only able to seized three disarmed destroyers and four badly damaged submarines; the rest of the French fleet, 3 battleships, 7 cruisers, 15 destroyers, 13 torpedo boats, 6 sloops, 12 submarines, 9 patrol boats, 19 auxiliary ships, 1 school ship, 28 tugs and 4 cranes were all scuttled before or while the Germans could seize them. There’s a good account of the scuttling here, including this amusing bit:
ETA: Nothing other than Churchill’s decision to present the French fleet with an ultimatum made hostilities with Vichy inevitable, as evidenced by the fact that the only hostilities with the French fleet in Vichy hands occured at the instigation of the Allies, not due to Britain blockading the continent.
As a curious aside, when the Soviet troops finally occupied Hitler’s bunker in May '45 the last troops left defending were a group of French volunteer SS troops, perfidious Albion my arse.
P
Is this actually true? I had in mind that British *willing *volunteers were in the very low hundreds, and that Irish volunteers were only just in double figures?
Croatia is an obvious example. Hungary was a very enthusiastic puppet after the Arrow Cross took over, cheerily shipping the Jews away to Auschwitz. You can’t really get any more cooperative than Austria, can you? It’s rather easy to provide examples of European countries who were enthusiastically fascist.
I don’t want to get into this, as I’m sick of interest in nazis — except to say that the French ( who fought valiantly against the invasion, as valiantly as they had frequently invaded everyone else ) are being unfairly singled out; but an amusing sidenote I recently noticed when reading Dr. Evans on the 1870 war was that one officer POW was well-trusted to administer funds: this was Col. du Paty de Clam.
This is unlikely to be Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Armand Auguste Ferdinand Mercier du Paty de Clam, persecutor of Dreyfus, unless he was colonel at 17, ( 1853 - 1916 ) but the latter’s son became Commissioner General for Jewish Affairs in the Vichy Government… ‘Doing the old man proud’, as we would say in this country.
To be fair the Paty de Clams, being a distinguished family, appear to serve all the regimes since the monarchy with equal loyalty. To suggest they were ‘right-wing’ would only apply in time and place: I am sure that had the communists taken France they would have become colonels in the Soviet Armee Francais eventually. Very few aristocratic families anywhere remain true, but instead pursue their family interests with zeal — which applies to non-aristos such as an avarious butcher like Soult, who was instantly loyal to any replacement on demand, but aristocrats find it easier to betray.
Armand — Wikipedia
The Commissioner - TIME ( requires log-in )
A Clampett Family document on the Paty de Clams
The main reasons that many Jewish Germans were practicing Christians at that time was that, for quiet a few generations, there had been strong social and economic pressures on Jews to convert. In many areas it was next to impossible to advance your career very far if you were a practicing Jew, and converting yourself and your family to Christianity was the only way to open up the path to advancement. This is hardly evidence that pre-Nazi German society was not anti-semitic. By modern standards it was extremely, and very openly, anti-semitic. It wasn’t as bad as it was in some other countries, perhaps, and certainly it wasn’t nearly as bad as it became under the Nazis, but is that saying very much?
Examples here, ranges from a few to dozens to thousands, depending. E.g. says UK is 1500+. It says the Estonians and Latvians were conscripts (all of them? What happened to Lithuania?) although I imagine they hated Germany less than the USSR.
You’re high even on those figures; but Britain and Ireland were never occupied by Germany, which is what tomndebb was presumably referring to. The British Free Corps only had 59 members in total, some only for a few days, and its peak strength was 27. The Irish figures from Friesack Camp did only just reach double digits at 10, but that includes Cromwell O’Neill, a civilian who had been captured on an interned freighter who turned himself in to the British when sent by the Abwehr on a mission to spy in Northern Ireland, so you could make the case that the figure was really only 9.
Those figures are simply wrong. In the footnote for those figures it notes:
Whatever his source was for those figures was, it is incorrect. In listing the names of 165 BFC members, he is probably using the figures of those who attended BFC recruitment drives at camps for British POWs. Some of those didn’t have the interest to actually sign up after attending the meetings, and some had been ordered to attend by British officers at the camps to see what exactly the Germans were up to. Regarding the Baltic States, again the statement from the article that
is simply wrong; some were volunteers and some were conscripts. See for example the 3rd Estonian SS Volunteer Brigade which was formed from volunteers which was later used as the core in forming the [20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian)](20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian)) which did include conscripts.
Just as a note on the SS and foreign units and soldiers who either volunteered on were conscripted into it, by the end of the war Himmler was able to get almost all foreign units serving in the German armed forces to be part of the SS rather than the Wehrmacht in order to expand his personal empire in Nazi Germany. The popular image of the SS as ‘Aryan’ tall, blonde haired and blue eyed is true when it was first formed and in the prewar years, but as a result of incorporating all foreign units this was not the case by the end of the war, when the size of the Waffen-SS was nearing a million strong. The SS ironically included large numbers of those considered untermensch by Nazi ideology.
I probably should have said every occupied country in Europe provided thousands of volunteers.
If it would make anyone more comfortable, I will further re-word it to “Thousands of volunteers were recruited from every occupied country in Europe,” so that the numbers of each country do not have to hit a thousand–although I believe that every occupied country did provide at least 1,000 volunteers.
Numbers, (that I have not reviewed and cannot defend), may be found on this Wikipedia page.
That is so entirely off topic I won’t even give a warning. But do it again - or anything like it - and I will. Stay on topic and avoid anything that seems like hate speech, please.
Oliver Stone has said that his only mistake with the film JFK was not to put at the very beginning “This is a work of FICTION”.
The movie is just a story.
As for this documentary, did he make it? Or is just doing the voice over? Did he write it? He says it with such conviction because he is (voice) acting. If you narrate a documentary you say things like; maybe, l don’t know, that’s what I heard.
Not all of them. The Estonian and Latvian units had a core of volunteers surrounded by conscripts. In Lithuania, the original attempts to form an SS unit failed because of refusal by the Lithuanians. Eventually, a “Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force” was formed, commanded by Lithuanian officers, that did anti-partisan operations.
The Lithuanians also created police battalions that participated in the Holocaust (the Ponary Massacre, the killings in the Ukraine, guarding Majdanek, putting down the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, etc), but there was never a Lithuanian SS unit.