From Potential Friends to Potential Enemies: The Internment of ‘Hostile Foreigners’ in France at the Beginning of the Second World War

Abstract

After Hitler came to power, France had been one of the most important host countries for emigrants from Germany. In spring 1939 another wave of refugees reached the country after the Spanish Civil War, whereupon the government of Édouard Daladier reacted by building internment camps in the south of France. The Third Republic used this huge potential of human labour and resources for its own economy by creating special colonies and brigades of foreign workers. As a result of external tensions, but also on the basis of the great number of internees, the government prepared to integrate the immigrants in additional foreign units in the French army, thus establishing a common aim of fighting the nazi dictatorship. The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 and the outbreak of the second world war caused the French Home Office to do an about-turn. In an atmosphere of anti-communist hysteria, antisemitism and xenophobia, Daladier articulated his mistrust of communists and ‘hostile foreigners’ and as well as arrests, ordered the mass internment of immigrants originally from the territories of ‘Greater Germany’. With such repressive measures the Third Republic robbed itself of the opportunity to use the political ambition of declared enemies of nazism in the fight against persecution and tyranny.