Sigmaringen Castle and the end of Vichy
N 48° 05.219 E 009° 12.963
32U E 516089 N 5325990
On September 7, 1944, following the Allied invasion of France, Henri Philippe Pétain and members of the Vichy government cabinet fled to Germany and established a government in exile at Sigmaringen.
Waymark Code: WM1Y3V
Location: Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Date Posted: 07/31/2007
Views: 151
Access to the castle is by guided tour only. The tour does not visit the quarters of Petain but does visit the quarters of Laval. Photo taking is not permitted.
Excerpt rom the book Paris after the Liberation by Antony Beevor & Artemis Cooper.
"The castle of Sigmaringen on the Danube was supposedly the crade of the Hohenzollern dynasty. As the setting for the Götterdämmerung of French fascism, its position, history and even quasi-Wagnerian name seem fittingly ironic. But the reality was far from grand opera. If anything, the claustrophobic squabbling sounded more like a parody of the ante-chamber of hell in Sartre's play "Huis clos", which had opened in Paris some ten days before D-Day. That brilliantly crazed writer, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, with his unfailing eye for the grotesque, was the perfect chronicler of Sigmaringen. In "D'un Chateau a l'autre", he described the vain rivalries as 'un ballet de crabes' (A crab ballet).
"Petain was a privileged prisoner. He benefited from special menus - the Germans allotted him sixteen ration cards - and escorted walks in the countryside. His suite was on the seventh floor. The hierarchy, as Henry Rousso describes in his book, "Un Chateau en Allemagne", descended floor by floor. On the sixth floor, Laval and ministers were lodged. Laval complained about his four-poster bed - 'Je suis un paysan, moi!' ('I am a peasant'). He spent the first part of each morning in a study lined with blue silk preparing and practising his defence for the day of temporal judgement, when he would face de Gaulle's new Haute Cour de Justice (High Court of Justice) on charges of treason. Laval had brought out 20 million francs of the government's petty cash, but German banks refused to change it.
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"The tricolor was raised over Sigmaringen to a roll of German drums and a milicien guard of honour presenting arms. The French state exchanged ambassadors with that other puppet-theatre of the absurd, Mussolini's Salo republic.
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"News of the Ardennes offensive in December produced an outburst of almost hysterical optimism in the castle. Some people declared that they would follow the German army back into Paris by the New Year, not knowing that Field Marshal von Rundstedt's tanks had run out of fuel."