When Carlo Schmid, Weimar-era jurist of dual French-German parentage and later leading Social Democratic statesman in the Bonn Republic, was ordered to report to the German army commander in Lille in wake of the Nazi conquest of France in June 1940, he inquired about the responsibilities he would have there. “That depends entirely on you,” he was told. “You will have the range of authority that you assert. Your mandate according to military-government instructions is to assure that the French judicial system functions normally again as soon as possible.” (Carlo Schmid, Erinnerungen, 1979, p. 176). This answer nicely captures the reality in the first year of the World War II German occupation in France, as Allan Mitchell describes it in the first section of his book: he notes an astonishing lack of planning, combined with an eagerness for smooth collaboration with established French authorities for a swift restoration of order. Allan Mitchell sums up the occupation in that inaugural year in “three generalizations” that 1) “the quotidian circumstances of Paris in the opening months of the Occupation (capitalized by Mitchell for practical reading clarity) were peculiar to that moment and far different from what they were to become”; 2) “the internal conflicts of the Occupation were uncontainable,” thus precluding any “single purpose”; and 3) the occupation was, in fact, “an inextricable part of the continuum of French history and not an altogether exceptional period to be isolated from the rest” (pp. 43–44). In other words, the history of France under the occupation is the story of rapidly changing conditions, increasingly destabilized and radicalized by the uncontainable internal conflicts of the Nazi occupation, but the daily necessity of French-German interaction on all levels of society for more than four years also left marks on the shared history of the French.

Mitchell tells the story of the occupation essentially from the top down, as such a comprehensive history can only be written, primarily from the vantage point of the occupiers and their French administrative underlings, recipients of orders, or collaborators. For each of the chronological phases (June 1940 to 1941, to November 1942, to June 1944, and August 1944), which make up parts I–IV of the book, he chose five topic areas—roughly general governance, enforcement/policing, economic policy, culture/propaganda, and specific victimization rooted ultimately in Nazi Judeocide. Particularly impressive and innovative is the full, sophisticated attention he gives to the economic policy and conditions, both from the perspective of the occupation government and the population. Like other chroniclers of the occupation and especially reminiscences, he found the great emphasis the occupiers placed on high-cultural offerings, not merely as plain propaganda, and the relative receptivity by the French remarkable. Even in June 1944 high culture continued with the support of the occupation.

Nazi Paris is a masterwork of clear, comprehensive analysis, based on the full range of French and German archival sources, including the most important memoirs of the leading actors. Mitchell was even able to include an assessment of the French police files, still classified at the Archives Nationales in Paris. His perusal left him with the impression, however, that those records are unlikely to yield much information that contradicts what we know because very few reports were written before August 1944. By then the grand myth of a French nation united in resistance against a few collaborators had already taken hold. The records do confirm that Marshal Pétain did oppose the deportation of Jews.

To be sure, the title of the book is splendidly enticing, but it is not very precise, even with the subtitle. Paris was the center of much of the action and top-level administration. But the occupied parts of France governed from Paris, and covered in this book, stretched as a fat crescent around the erstwhile quasi-autonomous Vichy France all the way to the Spanish border in the southwest and to Switzerland in the southeast—roughly half of prewar France. Moreover, this was not the only German-occupied area in France, even beyond the wartime reannexation of Alsace-Lorraine. While the characteristics of the occupation described by Carlo Schmid very much paralleled those around Paris, he served in a different “Zone of Belgium and Northern France,” governed from Lille. These configurations are described briefly in the first chapter, but while such more complex details matter little in the overall assessment of this splendid book, they point up the dire need for a map to clue in readers to the real meaning of “Nazi Paris.”

In a remarkably eloquent epilogue, Allan Mitchell redeems his promise to historicize the occupation. This is not just meant in the obvious sense that the French and a more limited number of Germans lived actively through well over four years in the same spaces and therefore shared memories and thus history—despite all the very real terror of the Nazi occupation. Mitchell suggests that, especially on the leadership level, “the Occupation had a salutary effect of demystifying both sides and dispelling tired myths about hereditary enemies. Otherwise there may be no adequate explanation for the emergence of a united postwar Europe.” Some years ago, John Gillingham argued in a similar vein that cooperation between French and German industrialists of the Ruhr-Rhine-Saar coal-iron regions, forced by successive French and German occupations, had created personal networks of trust, which eventually facilitated the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community.