When France surrendered in 1940, Germany only occupied the northern half of the country and France set up a fascist regime in the south under General Pétain. The capital of unoccupied France gave this fascist regime its name: Vichy. Claude Chabrol's L'oeil de Vichy [Eye of Vichy] uses news footage and other propaganda from the time to tell this history. The movie is interesting not only for its depiction of France in these times, but also as an illustration of how a society can move from democracy to fascism to anti-Semitism and active collaboration with the Nazi Holocaust. Historian Robert Paxton was one of the writers.

Roberto Rossellini's, Roma, città aperta [Rome, Open City] (1945) explores the problems of resistance and collaboration near the end of the war. Rossellini began work on the film before the war was even over.

Mrs. Miniver (1942) was an Academy Award winning British film designed to persuade Americans to enter the war. Note the use of class and gender in this film about the homefront.

Wolfgang Staudte's Die Mörder sind unter uns [Murderers among us] (1946) is set in a Berlin filled with rubble and wrecked lives. The main female character returns from a concentration camp and finds a doctor who is constantly drunk and tormented by the memory of an atrocity on the Eastern Front. Later he meets the man who ordered this slaughter.

[originally published on History Survey on 9/27/2007]

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