The Reich’s military defeats in 1943 coincided with a sharp increase in resistance activity in France, sparked primarily by Germany’s decision to draft hundreds of thousands of French citizens to work as forced labor in its industrial war effort. Initially, Pierre Laval had called on the French to volunteer, but when few responded, he issued an order requiring all Frenchmen between the ages of eighteen and fifty and all unmarried women between twenty-one and thirty-five to give two years of service to German war work.
