Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 by Hanna Diamond

From the Publisher

As Hitler's victorious armies approached Paris, panic gripped the city and the roads heading south filled with millions of French citizens, fleeing for their lives, with scant supplies and often no destination in mind. All hoped, as famed author Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her diary, "not to be taken like a rat in Occupied Paris."
In Fleeing Hitler, historian Hanna Diamond paints a gripping picture of the harrowing escape from Paris, highlighting the hardships people suffered in their desperate flight, and underscoring the impact this exodus had on life under Vichy rule. Using eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and diaries, Diamond shows how this ordeal became for civilians and soldiers alike the defining experience of the war. She tells how, in the Paris region alone, close to four million people left their homes and fled south, swelling the numbers of refugees until is was impossible to direct the flow of humanity. The result was total chaos with an enormous price to pay in terms of human misery and suffering. Many lost their lives as this vast caravan of predominantly women, children, and the elderly faced truly harsh conditions, and even starvation. Then, after the German offer of peace, as the traumatized population returned home, preoccupied by the desire for safety and bewildered by the unexpected turn of events, they put their faith in Marshall Petain who was able to establish his collaborative Vichy regime largely unopposed, while the Germans consolidated their occupation.
The first time this important story has been told in English, Fleeing Hitler captures in moving detail the devastating flight and early days of occupation after the fall of France.

Publishers Weekly

In France, it is called l'exode,or "exodus": the flight from their homes of up to seven million residents before and during the German invasion of the country in May and June 1940 (events described in the bestselling novel Suite Française). Diamond, who specializes in modern French history at the University of Bath, combed dozens of memoirs and diaries about the flight for this first major study in English. She notes a number of reasons for the mass internal migration, including a belief in the "atrocity propaganda" about Germany from WWI; fears that the Germans would bomb Paris and other cities; a desire to avoid working for the Nazi war machine; and the flight of the French government itself from Paris. She captures how an initial "holiday spirit" gave way to a sense of displacement, loss and impoverishment for some and separation of families. Diamond also shows how the host communities, predominantly in France's south and west, often were overwhelmed by a doubling or tripling of their populations virtually overnight. Perhaps most important and interesting is her exploration of how Marshall Pétain exploited the exodus to discredit the government of the Third Republic. While Diamond's treatment of some topics, like fatalities during the exodus, is cursory, this is a solid work on a socially convulsive episode of WWII. 22 b&w photos. (June)

Kirkus Reviews

For many French people in 1940, the arrival of the German army meant "the collapse of civilization." Seven decades later, the specifics of that collapse are largely forgotten; this book is a remedy. When the Wehrmacht crossed the Maginot Line in May 1940, most Parisians, remembering the Marne a generation before, assumed that the theoretically superior French army would turn the invaders back. "The confidence in victory that the media and the government had projected until the very last minute," writes Diamond (French History/Univ. of Bath), "meant that when they finally realized that the Germans were likely to reach Paris, people had a very long way to fall." Some four million persons in the Paris region abandoned the city and its suburbs, choking every road out of the capital and blocking necessary military traffic. The situation was much the same throughout what would be called Occupied France, leaving the population of Vichy burdened with millions of refugees. The Germans, writes Diamond, urged these people to return: Not only did their absence make the German occupiers look bad, but the missing French also constituted a needed labor force in the grand plan to integrate France's economy into that of the Reich. Diamond recounts the terror and confusion of the first days of this mass migration, considers contemporary social movements and conventions (for instance, many refugees refused to flee to the colonies in North Africa, she writes, because these were considered places for those "who had committed some kind of indiscretion"), and looks at the complexities involved in the German campaign to organize repatriation, which was ultimately successful. Interestingly, Diamond also assessesthe lessons of that mass flight, which the British government studied closely as an example of what not to do when their turn came. "How can we remember what we do not know?" asks one French scholar. Diamond's book ably addresses these long-ago events, which merit remembrance.

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