Right down to the liberation in 1944 the French milice, a paramilitary body of ’some 45,000 toughs and fascist fanatics ready to shoot it out with the maquis‚, was busy in arms against resisters, in the name of ‚public order‘. Over 8,000 Jews were deported from Vichy France to German concentration camps, by the French police, in the early autumn of 1942, and Vichy and Gestapo authorities cooperated in tracking down clandestine wireless sets.
—M.R.D. Foot, Resistance, (London: Biteback Publishing Ltd, 2016), 101. Here Foot is quoting Robert Paxton.
