PRO-ALLY FEELING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 April 1943, Page 5

PRO-ALLY FEELING

INTENSIFIED IN FRANCE. BY EXTENSION OF NAZI GRIP. To get news direct from France has become more difficult since the Germans, breaking the terms of the Armistice, pushed into Unoccupied France. All the same, refugees continue to get out of France, but letters and messages have grown less, A large number of people in the unoccupied zone made their way into Spain’, where they will be interned until the end of the war if they are unable to obtain permission to live in the towns. Already some of these have managed to reach Britain.

All agree that the occupation of the whole of France by the Germans has had as immediate result the general national strengthening of resistance. In the occupied zone of the north find Atlantic coast, where contact with the invader was constant, the proportion of anti-collaborationists was never below 95 per cent. In the hitherto unoccupied zone, which the Nazis have now occupied, collaborationists while in the minority, all the same numbered some 20 per cent. The presence of the Germans will be quite sufficient to convert the greater part of these 20 per cent and prove to them that collaboration with the Germans is an impossibility. By collaborationists it must not be understood that even five per cent of the population collaborate with Germany. Those who really and truly collaborate are very few in number compared with the whole population. The term collaborationist includes Frenchmen who, while individually opposed to collaboration, believe that France will have to collaborate with Germany. Unfortunately, the German conception of collaboration is always domination by Germany. The League of Nations was a vast system of collaboration, but Germany did not see it that way. The French were always willing to collaborate with all nations, within the framework of the League. Frenchmen escaped from France report that the feeling is entirely proAlly and pro-de Gaulle, whom they all look up to as embodying the national spirit. Free France and the right of every man to vote for the form of government he desires—that is what every refugee tells you every Frenchman wants today.