Occult Forces [1943]
by Peter Gebert
Monday, January 14, 2013
Occult Forces – 1943 (Director Jean Many)
You don’t often hear about someone being executed for making a film. In fact, this is the first time I have ever read of it occurring, but it makes me think it’s not the only time it has happened. I found this film on the INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW (IHR) website. After watching the film, I can’t help thinking similar forces are working in similar ways in western governments today. The film accuses Freemasonry and to a lesser extent Jewry of pushing France into declaring war on Germany in 1939. The people who made the film paid dearly for it after WW II ended. The IHR’s description of the film:
This 1943 French production is perhaps the most important anti-Masonic feature film ever made. It tells the story of a young member of the French parliament who joins a Freemason lodge at the urging of colleagues. Although made with German encouragement and support, it nonetheless reflected broad French sentiment. People recalled with outrage the notorious “Stavisky affair” of 1934, involving the fraud of a Russian-born Jewish embezzler, and the politicians’ decision to plunge the nation into needless war against Germany in 1939. After France’s “liberation,” the film’s director, producer and screenplay writer were severely punished for their role in this production. Director Jean Many (Paul Riche), a former Freemason, was sentenced to death, and executed. With English subtitles.
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His pseudonym was Mamy, not Many. He was executed not for making this film but for being a collaborator with the Vichy regime.
For what it’s worth, this is what wikipedia says about him:
Jean Mamy (8 July 1912, Chambéry, Savoie – 29 March 1949, Arcueil) was a French actor, producer, film and theatre director, screenwriter and journalist, notable for his collaboration with the Vichy regime (for which he was shot in 1949). He was also known by the pseudonym Paul Riche, and wrote for L’Appel.
He belonged to the inter-war left and was film editor on Jean Renoir’s 1931 On purge bébé, but on the fall of France he decided on collaboration. His last film was the anti-Masonic 1943 film Forces occultes, which he directed (he had from 1931 to 1939 been Venerable of the Renan lodge of the Grand Orient de France, but had since parted company with Freemasonry).
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What does that mean “for being a collaborator with the Vichy regime?” He was a French actor, producer, film and theatre director, screenwriter and journalist. He acted in films, he produced films, he directed films and theatre productions, and he was a scriptwriter and journalist that wrote articles. So he was killed for one of these. “Occult Forces” appears to be one his most famous (or infamous) works that was not anti-German, so without further information I think the evidence points to this film as being what caused him to be executed. They might not have liked other films he made or articles he wrote also, but I don’t know what they would be.
I think the word “collaborator” is a ridiculous statement. When you live in an occupied country (like Iraq today), you “collaborate” or you are killed for being what they call a “terrorist” today, but what the Germans called “partisans” during WW II. “Free French” and “partisans” did not collaborate with occupation forces – they attacked and killed them and as a result they were attacked and killed.
I do not believe life in France under German occupation was that bad. If they had behaved the way the partisans in the east did against German forces, I think France would have looked something like Poland did at the end of the war.
And Paris would have looked like Warsaw or Berlin.
I have no idea what it means because there was NOTHING else I found about him on the internet.
Collaborating may have meant as you suggest, producing movies, writings, etc for the Vichy regime but it may have also meant turning in partisans, being responsible for people being arrested, even executed.
That kind of collaboration was not exactly looked upon kindly by the French after the war, no matter how bearable the German occupation might have been compared to others. People still got executed under the Vichy regime. There was also the French unquenchable hatred for the German occupiers –les Boches, les Fritz, les Schleuh
My point is collaborator can almost mean anything. It would be like executing someone for being a communist sympathizer during the McCarthy era or an anti-semite. Without further definition it could mean almost anything. I believe if he had “turned someone in” or something like that and there was knowledge of it, that would be mentioned.
I believe he was executed for making this film and perhaps things he wrote, for the simple reason that there is no mention of him “turning in partisans, being responsible for people being arrested, even executed”. If a French woman had a relationship with a German soldier, that was enough to shave her head bald, humiliate and parade her through the street and perhaps even kill her when the war was over.
That was the atmosphere when the war ended.
“collaborator can almost mean anything”
That’s what I said.
“I believe if he had “turned someone in” or something like that and there was knowledge of it, that would be mentioned.”
Possible. Also possible that he was buried in silence later to avoid getting people curious about his film. In fact. without the internet and youtube we would not have known about it.
“If a French woman had a relationship with a German soldier, that was enough to shave her head bald, humiliate and parade her through the street and perhaps even kill her when the war was over.”
True
There were many French that supported the National Socialist Germany because the French endured Jewry quest for power dating back to the French Revolution. Like Germany Jewry in France were a problem and the rising tide of Communism in Europe with their take over of Italy and Germany and France after WWI is why the NS Germany was welcomed.