Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses the Nazi occupation of Paris during WWII, the Holocaust, war, concentration camps, extermination camps, antisemitism, intense racism, and genocide.

The Second World War (WWII) was the largest and deadliest global conflict of the 20th century, lasting from 1939 to 1945. One of the major causes of WWII was the fascist, aggressive expansionist foreign policy of Nazi Germany, which saw many European countries invaded and brought under the control of the Third Reich through the late 1930s and early 1940s.

France declared war on Germany following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and was itself invaded by German troops eight months later. The German Wehrmacht far outmatched the French army, bypassing their Maginot Line of defense with ease and forcing the French government to surrender after mere weeks of fighting. The armistice saw Paris along with much of the North and West of Metropolitan France brought under German occupation, while the rest of the country and its colonial territories remained nominally independent. Vichy France, named for its new seat of government, remained beholden to its German allies until it too was invaded and fully incorporated into the Third Reich in 1942.

Occupied France was stripped of any resources that could aid the German war effort, and its citizens were subject to oppressive German rule.