The Hunt For Nazi Spies. Fighting Espionage In Vichy France

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Jacket Condition: Very Good
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Publisher Place: Usa
Publisher Year: 2008
Edition: First Edition

Description: 218 pages. Ex-Library. (only one small stamp on inside page). Book and Jacket are both in Very good condition throughout.

Publishers Description: From 1940 to 1942, French secret agents arrested more than two thousand spies working for the Germans and executed several dozen of themall despite the Vichy governments declared collaboration with the Third Reich. A previously untold chapter in the history of World War II, this duplicitous activity is the gripping subject of The Hunt for Nazi Spies, a tautly narrated chronicle of the Vichy regimes attempts to maintain sovereignty while supporting its Nazi occupiers. Simon Kitson informs this remarkable story with findings from his investigationthe first by any historianof thousands of Vichy documents seized in turn by the Nazis and the Soviets and returned to France only in the 1990s. His pioneering detective work uncovers a puzzling paradox: a French government that was hunting down left-wing activists and supporters of Charles de Gaulles Free French forces was also working to undermine the influence of German spies who were pursuing the same Gaullists and resisters. In light of this apparent contradiction, Kitson does not deny that Vichy France was committed to assisting the Nazi cause, but illuminates the complex agendas that characterized the collaboration and shows how it was possible to be both anti-German and anti-Gaullist. Combining nuanced conclusions with dramatic accounts of the lives of spies on both sides, The Hunt for Nazi Spies adds an important new dimension to our understanding of the French predicament under German occupation and the shadowy world of World War II espionage.

ISBN: 9780226438931