When was France taken back from Germany?
Walter Fabian
The Germany army invaded Poland in September 1939: The French and British governments responded by declaring war on Germany a few days later, although military assistance to Poland was not significant. For most of the residents of Paris and London there was little immediate impact before May 1940 when the Germany army invaded France. By that time thousands of people who had been forced to escape from Germany to Paris for reasons of political activism and/or race had been identified as enemy aliens and arrested. (Similar steps were taken by the London government.) Walter and Ruth Fabian were briefly held in Paris and then moved to a detention centre at Marolles, a run down village near Blois. Walter Fabian was able to use his time here to read Nausea, a prescient and subsequently well regarded novel by a then little known novelist called Jean-Paul Sartre. He was also able to produce a few articles for newspapers in Switzerland. Some 25,000 German and Austrian political internees were by now being transferred to vast internment camps in the southwest of the country. In order to avoid that fate Walter Fabian volunteered for service in the French Foreign Legion at the start of January 1940, which involved service in North Africa. Ruth seems to have returned briefly to Paris where Annette, the couple's daughter, was born early in March 1940. She then headed back south with her baby and settled in the "Free zone", administered from Vichy by a puppet government and still, at this stage, permitted a significant measure of autonomy by the Germans.
Hermann Budzislawski
Having prevaricated between defiance and appeasement over the German occupation of Czechoslovakia during 1938, when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939 the French government (like the British) promptly declared war against Germany. Apart from the impressively underwhelming "Saar Offensive" it would be another eight months before the military aspects of war began to unfold in France, but in the meantime the government took action on the home front. Large numbers of political exiles and other German Jews who had fled to France to escape government persecution at home were promptly redefined as enemy aliens, arrested, and in a somewhat chaotic exercise taken to internment camps in the south of the country. Before the end of Hermann Budzislawski was among the detainees. However, in 1940 he was able to escape detention with help from the New York–based Emergency Rescue Committee, and fled to Portugal (which remained neutral during World War II). In October 1940, helped by the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, he emigrated to the United States.