We all love to joke about the French, but they are in fact, a truly evil people. Consider one of the many atrocities which is the specialty of the French, and that is, killing their own defenseless citizens.

In fact, on a personal level, the French were even worse than the Nazis when it came to the murder of non-combatants. Not in raw numbers, of course, but while individual Nazis were obeying state policy and therefore their personal feelings didn't matter, the French murderers eagerly embraced the idea, and they did so because they liked it. Another reason why the French liked killing their own innocent civilians was they could commit any atrocity that they wanted to, knowing they would always be protected by their German occupiers.

France opened concentration camps even before the Nazis invaded. For example, there were camps at Gurs, Noe and Recebidou, and that's where the French imprisoned anti-fascist refugees from the Spanish Civil war, who had fled to Paris for sanctuary. Guarded by the Paris metropolitan police force, they were given over to the Nazis in order to gain favor. Naturally, all were quickly sent to Nazi death camps.

At least the Nazis did their dirty work in the East, purposefully isolating their crimes from their own people. But all the atrocities perpetrated by the French took place either right inside the city of Paris itself, or very nearby, and all the murderers were members of the metropolitan police force, in other words, the local Paris cops.


Drancy was France's biggest concentration camp. It was created and run by the French local police. In the only case in the West like this, the Nazis didn't have to bother rounding up their victims. The French were eager to do it for them. Proof exists that more than 3000 prisoners died in the French camps from lack of medical care or starvation.

In what is without doubt, the single most dishonorable act ever committed by the French people, occurred in 1942 in Paris. The Velodrome d'Hiver was a stadium in Paris designed for bike races. Asked by the Nazi administration to arrest all Jews older than 16, the French went even further and all on their own, they arrested all the children too. So closely did the French identify with their own operation that they even gave it their own code name, "Vent printanier" (Spring Wind).

All together, more than 12,800 French Jews (3031 men, 5802 women and 4051 children aged between 2 and 12) were transferred to the Velodrome d'Hiver. Locked inside in the sweltering July heat, the children were kept in there for 5 miserable days without any food or medical care and then they were transferred to Drancy, Beaune-la-Rolande or Pithiviers. The children were separated from their parents by the French police immediately after their arrival in Drancy. The parents were transported to Auschwitz and gassed. The children stayed sometimes weeks in Drancy, without care or adequate food. Babies and many very young children died in Drancy due to the lack of care and the ever present brutality of the French guards. Finally, they were all transported to Auschwitz and gassed upon their arrival. As for the rest of France, 6,000 Jewish children from all the other regions of France were arrested by the French themselves, brought to Paris, and then given over to the Nazis, to be transported to their deaths in 1942. Interestingly, and typically, there was no protest on the part of the French public over any of this.

For decades, the French Government steadfastly refused to admit the responsibility of their action and that of the French police, in the deportation of the French Jews to the death camps. But in 1995, President Chirac finally admitted the responsibility of the French people in these atrocities.

Forget about your ideas of French heroism in the face of Nazis tyranny. Forget about romantic movies like "Casablanca", making heroes out of the French. The French Resistance was tiny and powerless until just less than a year before the end of the war, when it was certain that their beloved Nazis would lose. Also, remember all those stories about the help that French farmers gave downed allied airmen? Well, all that help had to be bought with gold. That's why our pilots were equipped accordingly. Consider that thousands of allies were killed by the French military, in North Africa, when they were too afraid to kill Nazis. Here are but two selections from the more than a million citations on this subject, in Google, about how the French kill their own defensless people, but turn tail and run if faced by people with guns who fight back:

http://www.jewishgen.org/ForgottenCamps/Camps/DranEngl.html

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/cclist.html