Vichy France

Under the armistice of June 1940 Germany occupied the north and the western coast of France, and the government moved to Vichy. On 10 July parliament gave Marshal Philippe Pétain full powers, which ended the Third Republic; in its place came the authoritarian French State. Officially neutral, it collaborated closely with Germany. From October 1940 it issued its own anti-Jewish laws, and in 1942 the French police carried out round-ups, among them the Vel d'Hiv round-up in Paris. Of the some 77,000 Jews from France who lost their lives, most were deported to Auschwitz.

In November 1942, after the Allied landings in North Africa, Germany occupied the rest of the country and Vichy's authority became a fiction. In the summer of 1944 the Germans took Pétain to Sigmaringen. After the war Pierre Laval was executed, and Pétain's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.