Refugee workers in Vichy France
The refugee organizations employed or took on volunteers of many nationalities, including French people resident in Vichy.
France's traditional view of itself as the "home of universal rights and the refuge for the persecuted in Europe" eroded in the 1930s as a result of large numbers of refugees fleeing communist rule in the Soviet Union, Nazi rule in Germany, and the defeat of the Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War.
[6] Additional anti-Nazi refugees also arrived in France from countries coming under control of Germany such as Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.
[7] The large-scale flows of refugees, the economic hardships and unemployment of the Great Depression, and antisemiticism contributed to more restrictive policies by the French government during the 1930s.
The aim of Vichy was to reinvigorate the country and exclude those, especially foreigners, Jews, Romani (gypsies), homosexuals, and communists, who it considered harmful to the renewal of what they saw as the traditional values of France.
About six thousand children were housed in group homes or given false names and histories and lived with cooperating French families.
American Donald A. Lowrie, working with the YMCA in Vichy, said in September 1942: "...it must be noted that for the first time since the Armistice [June 1940], deep public feeling has united all the decent elements in France...this feeling gives each one something he can do, and the doing, i.e. aid to hunted Jews, involves resistance to the authorities at Vichy.
In January 1943, the Germans and their French collaborators rounded up the few remaining Americans in the country and interned them in Baden-Baden, Germany.
[15] Historian Julian Jackson listed 31 refugee and internment camps established in Vichy France from 1940 to 1942.
People in the camps included "Communists and other dissidents, Jews, foreigners, gypsies, black-marketeers (from June 1941), abortionists (from February 1942), and prostitutes (from August 1943).
[17][18] In the years 1940 through 1942, more than 100,000 refugees of all nationalities, religions, and political persuasions left France, either legally with a visa to another country, most commonly the United States, or illegally by crossing the border into Spain or Switzerland.
