Jacques Doriot - Collaboration

Collaboration

When France went to war with Germany in 1939, Doriot became a staunch pro-German and supported Germany's occupation of northern France in 1940. Doriot resided in collaborationist Vichy France for a time, but he eventually found that it wasn’t nearly as Fascist as he had hoped it would be and moved to occupied Paris, where he espoused pro-German and anti-Communist propaganda on Radio Paris. In 1941, he and fellow Fascist collaborator Marcel Déat founded the Légion des Volontaires Français (LVF), a French unit of the Wehrmacht.

Doriot fought with the LVF and saw active duty on the Eastern Front when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. When the LVF was all but destroyed, Doriot fought in the Wehrmacht, and was awarded the Iron Cross in 1943. In his absence leadership of the PPF officially passed to a directorate, although real power came to lie with Maurice-Yvan Sicard. In December 1943, Doriot travelled to Germany and made contact with the former members of Vichy regime and other collaborators who had gathered together at Sigmaringen. Doriot's PPF struggled to assume a leadership role within the French expatriate community, basing itself in Mainau and setting up its own radio station, Radio-Patrie, at Bad Mergentheim and publishing its own paper Le Petit Parisien. The PPF was also involved in conducting intelligence and sabotage activities by supplying some volunteers who the Germans dropped by parachute into liberated France. He was killed on 22 February 1945 while traveling from Mainau to Sigmaringen when his car was strafed by fighters. He was buried in Mengen.