Mackintosh, Paul St. John Vichy's last Castle

Pétain's Puppet Regime in Exile at Sigmaringen

Sigmaringen continues to fascinate long after its demise at the end of the Second World War. This enclave of French Vichy officials and fascists on German soil refugees and hostages held at the whim of the Nazis played out the last vestiges of French collaborationism in the final months of the war under the leadership of the sluggish figurehead Marshal Pétain against the fairytale backdrop of Sigmaringen Castle. There is no single English-language history of the Sigmaringen enclave, but it brought together some of the most colourful and controversial collaborators, from the militant French SS officer Joseph Darnand to the mad writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, in a Petri dish for the last remnants of the collaborationism that had infected and brought down France. Vichy's Last Castle combines contemporary documents, eyewitness accounts, diplomatic communiqués and protests, and personal chronicles with post-war analyses, war crimes trials, apologetics and memoirs to provide a complete picture of the Sigmaringen enclave, from daily life to political machinations. From Marshal Pétain's futile formal protests to Céline's hallucinatory stream of consciousness, the book draws on contemporary photographs and texts to describe this bizarre milieu, where ordinary people starved and suffered while the elite played out and planned their tragicomic endgame in a sublime, fitting Wagnerian setting.