Contenu du sommaire : Les Français et les Françaises en Allemagne pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Travail forcé, captivité, répression

Compiling the history of the Compulsory Labour Service from its beginnings to today
The Compulsory Labour Service was a turning point in the history of Occupied France, but for long it has been inadequately studied. Some accounts, however, were produced during the Occupation and in the immediate post-war years; they showed the successive phases in the process of manpower requisitioning, providing valuable statistics. Since the Sixties and Seventies, several studies of the Compulsory Labour Service have been carried out on a departmental or regional level, but each territory has its own particularities. Overall accounts of the Service came out later. Patrice Arnaud was the first to write a general account of the life of the French civilian workers in the whole of Germany, analyzing every corner of their experience. Our own thesis, now published, provides the first scientific synthesis of all the political, economic and social issues related to the Compulsory Labour Service, from its beginnings to the time of remembrance, and including public perceptions.

The prisoner of war in French and German historiography: studying the Second World War. Since the 2000s, the historiography of the World Wars has undergone a profound renewal in the study of their period and dynamics. This article proposes a reflection on the evolution of the writing of the history of the Second World War from the perspective of wartime captivity, by comparing two books written twenty years apart: one on French prisoners of war in Germany from 1940 to 1945; the other on German prisoners of war in France from 1944 to 1948. Based on the historian's relationship to his object of research and the constitution of the corpus, this article underlines how the change between generations shows the transnational dimension of captivity as a historical watershed that intersects both wartime mobilization and postwar demobilization.

Recollections of a girlfriend in captivity: French women workers and prisoners of war in Berlin between 1940 and 1945This article examines the relations between French prisoners of war and French women workers in Germany during the Second World War. First, the idea that such relations never existed dates from the return of the French POWs in 1945. Second, judicial records kept in Berlin uncover these relations and prove that they were not exceptional. Finally, we examine the personal archives of a prisoner of war who escaped from Germany with the help of French women workers.

A Frenchman in Germany: Police Superintendent Louit, from Gestapo prisons to the French Repatriation Committee (1942-1945)Of the approximately 100,000 French citizens present in Berlin at the time of the fall of the Third Reich in April 1945, Christian Louit (1899-1977) had undergone an experience outside the common run. As a police superintendent arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Berlin, he was interrogated on various political cases and spent more than two years in prison. He narrowly escaped death and was miraculously released at the beginning of 1945. In April, with a group of French people, he set up a “Repatriation Committee” which replaced, as part of an unusual transfer of powers, the Vichy delegation in Berlin. The discovery of Christian Louit's private papers sheds new light about the French in the Reich capital on the eve of their repatriation to France.

From captivity to forced labour? The case of Jewish prisoners of war
At the end od summer 1939, 5 million French soldiers are mobilized, 1,800,000 are taken prisoner. Among them, between 10,000 and 15,000 Jews are sent into the service of the Reich economy inside Germany. Protected by the Geneva Convention, they escape the fate of their fellow-Jews. Alongside the deportees, those sent as forced labour, and the colonial troops, the case of the Jewish prisoners of war shows that the French captives are not to be classified as a uniform set of victims.

Mortality in Germany and the after-effects of Compulsory Work Service (STO): an example from the Orne departmentAs early as 1945, the mortality rate of forced labourers and the after-effects experienced by repatriated workers fueled the memory of the victims of Compulsory Work Service. They formed the basis of the arguments used by activists of the National Federation of Deported Labourers in their fight for the recognition of the status “Deported for Work”. Based on an analysis of a group of forced labourers from the department of Orne, our micro-historical approach replaces their narrative in a national perspective: it will allow us to question the characteristics of mortality in Germany and the effects of forced labour, in the short term as well as in the long term, on the bodies and minds of the former forced workers.

The testimonies of the workers required in Germany (1944-2018)Based on judicial archives kept in Berlin, this article shows that relations between Frenchwomen who volunteered to work in Germany and French prisoners of war did indeed exist in the form of contact, of help rendered, of friendship and sometimes of amorous liaison. These facts, now revealed, call in question the veracity of those prisoners who, at the time of their return in 1945, claimed that they were careful throughout their captivity to avoid contact with these women. Beyond that, the disclosure of this aspect in the recollections of these captive troops throws further light on how the past has been misrepresented.

In the traces of captivity and forced labour in Germany. Discovering them, preserving them, giving them voice: an unfinished taskFrom murals in the port of Bremen to the controversial project of setting up a brothel on the site of a former camp, from Sandbostel's Stalag XB to the Valentine Bunker Memorial, we have samples of the traces left by the prisoners of war, the concentration camp deportees and the civilian workers, together with their evolution since Patrice Arnaud first visited these sites in 1995. These allows us to show certain characteristics of working on memory in Germany; in particular, its tardiness, its citizen origins and the objections that have often had to be overcome.

A symbol of women's imvolvement in the Great War: Becassine
The collection of comics about Bécassine's character (published in a magazine and in albums) reveals the evolution of mentalities, society and morals on both sides in the First World War. However, this popular figure, out of place in large cities, and sometimes quite naive, found herself among the social debris, both of the bourgeoisies and of the working class. Bécassine even took direct part in forms of quasi-mobilized work or found herself involved in adventures close to military life. Enough elements could be drawn to fill five albums, providing an academic case study largely focused on the socio-mental rupture imposed by war on many strata of society.