Volume 55, Number 3 · March 6, 2008
Vichy vs. the Nazis
By Robert O. Paxton
The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France
by Simon Kitson, translated from the French by Catherine Tihanyi
University of Chicago Press, 218 pp., $25.00
At first it sounds implausible. Did Marshal Pétain's Vichy French government, notoriously ready to collaborate with Nazi Germany, actually arrest and execute Nazi spies? Simon Kitson, a young British scholar at the University of Birmingham, shows that it did. His exhaustive search of French military, police, and judicial archives found that between 1940 and 1942 Vichy police and counterintelligence officers arrested between 1,500 and 2,000 agents working for Nazi Germany. Some 80 percent of them were French nationals. About forty German agents were executed, though none of them appears to have been a German citizen; some German citizens were imprisoned, however. The arrests stopped in November 1942 when the German army overran the unoccupied southern half of France, following the American landing in North Africa.
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