Milice

So many of them were communists and other leftist types, and to a guy who had joined a French group likened to the KKK, the Cagouillards, that was simply not a possibility.

So he became the leader of the Milice Française, the black-uniformed fascist militia of the Vichy regime.

Joseph Darnand and his thousands of Nazi collaborator Frenchmen hunted the resistance members ruthlessly, frequently torturing and executing them once captured.

Darnand also ordered the roundup and deportation of French Jews, thousands of whom died in the extermination and concentration camps.

On October 10th, 1945, he was lined up against the wall and shot.

According to author Brian Moynihan in his book Forgotten Soldiers, Darnand's best friend was a witness at his execution.

Father Bruckberger was another old soldier who'd fought with Darnand in 1940 and had later fought against the Milice as a Maquisard in the Resistance.

Father Bruckberger, quote, bore his old comrade no malice, end quote.

You'll die for this.

You'll die for this." And the man who'd been driving the car was a senior member of the Milice, which was the French police wh- who were there really to intimidate the French population.

Rifaud was bundled into the car and driven away.

A week later, Rifaud was being kept in the Gestapo headquarters on the Rue des Saussaies.

The resentment from the people would be visceral, and it would be personal.

During the horrors of World War II, the Milice was a French paramilitary group, and they were an organization that basically collaborated with Nazi Germany and helped to f- persecute French resistance and other perceived enemies of the, of the regime.

These are Frenchmen helping an invading occupy power suppress their own countrymen.

Imagine the Nazis have invaded your countries and your neighbors are suffering under this occupation, but then there's another neighbor that you have who chooses to work and, in fact, profit from the occupying forces.

And life in France grew considerably worse early this year, 1943.

In January, Vichy created a new paramilitary force, La Milice, which cruelly strives to outdo the Nazis at rounding up French Jews and crushing resistance fighters.

Only a month later, February 1943, came le service du travail obligatoire, a law conscripting young men in their early 20s to labor in Germany.

The goal here was to shore up Germany's growing casualties by forcing 1.5 million Frenchmen to carry the Reich's war economy, thereby freeing up more German men to fight at the front.

And lest the point be lost, Vichy, not the occupying Nazis, created La Milice and le STO.

Vichy did Adolf's dirty work.

And that is how Vichy's leader, the man we first met so long ago as a hero in our World War I episodes, the Lion of Verdun, Philippe Pétain, falls from his position as France's son of the morning to his own personal perdition.

The traditional conservative general and the leftist, suspected communist ex-prefect could hardly have been more different, but they believed in each other.