DVD to watch on 60th anniversary of Normandy invasion

by philg

Stuck at home for the last couple of days with a sore throat and earache and catching up on my TV viewing…  Just finished “Eye of Vichy”, a 1993 collection of newsreels produced in France during the period of the Vichy French government.  As the victors we’ve tended to write the history of World War II and forget that not everyone was unhappy in the France of 1940-44.


The film is a chronological assemblage of newsreels with a touch of commentary but mostly just subtitled translation.  Occupation and surrender initially usher in a great wave of optimism.  The French dream of a unified Europe from Japan through Siberia and west to the shores of France and Spain.  (Remember that at the time of the German invasion the Soviets and Germans were allies).  It was upsetting to have lost the war in a matter of weeks but the future of European union looked bright.


For the speakers featured in the newsreels “collaboration” is a good word.  They are proud of the millions of Frenchmen working in Germany, fighting in the German army (mostly on the Russian front), and building military hardware for the German army.  Cheerful young people are shown leaving France on special trains to take up apprenticeships in German firms where they are then shown alongside cheerful helpful German workers.  A narrator notes that France contributed more labor and war production to Germany than any other country; invading France really seems to have been one of Hitler’s best ideas.


The Jews come in for a bit of beating in these newsreels as you might expect and are blamed for having led a “peace-loving nation” into war.  Jews are compared to rats as a danger to the human race.  They are cowardly but are still dangerous due to their “superior numbers”.  [This is an odd claim considering that French Jews numbered only about 225,000 in 1933, less than one percent of the total French population.   For an explanation of how any of these Jews survived the war, see this review of the book IBM and the Holocaust]


As in German films of the same era the final year of the war brings a lot of sad coverage of bombed-out homes and cities.  The British and American air forces are the villains here, of course, bombing the innocent civilians that they were hypocritically claiming to be saving.  There is a clever animated film in which airplanes piloted by Disney characters drop “Made in USA” bombs on the home of some French suburbanites who’d been chatting about how much they were looking forward to liberation by the English and all of the beloved foods they’d be able to eat again as well as the English cigarettes that they’d be smoking.


If you’re a World War II buff this is worth seeing because of the 60th anniversary of Normandy.  If you’re an imperialist it might be worth seeing as an example of how to make invading and occupying a country pay off big time economically (cf. American invasion of Iraq 2003 for what not to do).

9 thoughts on “DVD to watch on 60th anniversary of Normandy invasion”

  2. Oops. Thanks. My brain is a bit fogged from this disease and all the drugs (Zithromax for the ear/throat, ibuprofen for the headache, vitamins for the placebo effect, etc.).

  3. Interesting to review what actual propaganda looks like when it can be labelled as such.

    Today, Iraqi collaboration with the coalition is a good thing, and the terrorist villains are hypocritically bombing the innocent civilians they claim to be fighting for. Islamic terrorists are a danger to the human race and have led a peace-loving nation into war. They are cowardly and dangerous.

    Note also that WW2 resistance fighters in France and across Europe were labelled “terrorists”, literally.

    Of course, the situation is not comparable, because Iraq was not a free nation before the US arrived. The circumstances are very different, but the war propaganda runs along time-tested lines.

  4. I think those reels use the term “news” quite loosely. Sounds like pure propaganda to me.

    The Vichy goverment doesn’t get much attention in history, but while there no doubt were “happy collaborators”, I think for the most people there just did what they could: survive. The rest of the country tried to survive under German Nazi rule, in the Vichy area, they had to make do with French Nazi rule. Which to be honest was probably the better option for an unarmed, pennyless homemaker trying to keep a family alive.

    It’s easy to look at that region as filled with jew-hating, Nazi loving people. Fact of the matter is that when the Germand invaded, they were there, they didn’t move into the region by choice afterwards. Nazi-loving local leadership struck a deal with the Germans and there was as much the average citizen could do about it as those stuck elsewhere in France could.

  5. Funny, one man’s propoganda is another man’s “Fair and Balanced” news coverage.

    The films probably would have complained about the jewish-controlled liberal media, if they hadn’t been sent off to camps already by then. Some things never change.

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