Maxime Weygand - Collaboration During The Vichy Regime

Collaboration During The Vichy Regime

In June, Weygand was appointed by Pétain to the Bordeaux-Vichy cabinet as Minister for National Defence for three months (June to September 1940), and then Delegate-General to the North African colonies. While there:

• He convinced the young officers, tempted to resistance, of the justice of the armistice, by letting them hope for a later resumption of combat.
• He deported opponents to concentration camps in Southern Algeria and Morocco. There, he locked up, with the complicity of Admiral Abrial, adversaries of the Vichy regime (Gaullists, Freemasons, communists, etc.), the foreign volunteers of Légion Etrangère, foreign refugees without employment (but legally admitted into France), etc.
• He applied Vichy's racist laws against Jews very harshly (see Vichy France). With the complicity of the Recteur (University chancellor) G. Hardy, Weygand instituted, on his own authority, by a mere "note de service n°343QJ" of 30 September 1941, a school "numerus clausus" (quota), driving out from the colleges and from the primary schools most of the Jewish pupils, including small children aged 5 to 11. Weygand did this without any decree of Marshal Philippe Pétain's, "by analogy," he said, "to the law about Higher Education".

Weygand acquired a reputation as an opponent of collaboration when he protested, in Vichy, against the Protocols of Paris of 28 May 1941 signed by Admiral Darlan, agreements which granted bases to the Axis in Aleppo (Syria), Bizerte (Tunisia), and Dakar (Senegal) and envisaged an extensive military collaboration with Axis forces in the event of Allied countermeasures. As Simon Kitson demonstrated in his book The Hunt for Nazi Spies, Weygand remained outspoken in his criticism of Germany.

Nevertheless, the Weygand General Delegation (4th Office) collaborated with Germany by delivering to Rommel's Afrika Korps 1200 French trucks and other French army vehicles (Dankworth contract of 1941), as well as heavy artillery pieces accompanied with 1000 shells per gun.

Weygand was apparently favorable to collaboration with Germany, but with discretion. Additionally, when he opposed German bases in Africa, he did not intend to be neutral or to help the Allied camp, rather he only sought to prevent France from losing prestige with the natives and keep its colonial empire. Nevertheless, since Adolf Hitler demanded full unconditional collaboration, he pressured the Vichy government to obtain the dismissal and recall of Weygand in November 1941. One year later, in November 1942, following the Allied invasion of North Africa, Weygand was arrested. He remained in confinement in Germany and then in the Itter Castle in North Tyrol with General Gamelin and few other French Third Republic personalities until May 1945, when he fell into the hands of the Americans.