France's 'Kraut bastards' cursed and forgotten

By CATHERINE FIELD

As France prepares to host one of the grandest commemorations celebrating the victory over Nazi Germany, an unsavoury chapter of its World War II history has been laid bare: the treatment of thousands of children born of French mothers and German soldiers during the Nazi occupation.

A new book, Enfants Maudits (Cursed Children), has documented harrowing accounts of blighted lives, of children shamed by local officials, shunned by their neighbours, mocked by their schoolmates and shunted from foster families to orphanages, of mothers scurrying from village to village, desperate not to be caught by the mobs who searched for scapegoats for their own wartime deeds.

In their adulthood, some of these children would attempt suicide. Others have seethed all their lives in a pit of resentment for the way they had been forced to shoulder their nation's shame.

In the months and years after its liberation in June 1944, France was a place of turbulence. Its people were penniless and many, far from being the resistance heroes they preferred to paint themselves, were former collaborators, spiritually crippled by the way they gave help, directly or indirectly, to the Nazi occupiers.

Such was the poisonous cauldron into which these children were tossed. These infants were born not of rape nor prostitution, but of relationships, sometimes of convenience and often of love, between German soldiers - "les Boches" (the Krauts) - and young Frenchwomen.

Daniel Rouxel has vivid memories of the post-war wounds. He was born in 1943 and brought up in Normandy. One Sunday morning, several years after the war ended, the church congregation gathered in the town square to listen to announcements.

The mayor's assistant gathered the young Daniel beside him, and addressed the crowd. "Does anyone know the difference between the son of a Boche and a swallow?" asked the official. There was silence. "A swallow has her babies in France and when she goes she takes them with her. The Boche, they leave them behind."

Daniel ran off, hid under a bridge for a night and just cried, he recalls. "I needed to love, and love was what everyone refused me."

Gerard Perioux endured his childhood in the northwestern region of Brittany. He has no memories of his father, a sailor with the German Navy, but clutches to his heart the image of an absent but loving dad.

"I told myself that even though he was an enemy, he was first and foremost a father. Yes, he was a German, but he carried me in his arms. For me, this gesture was the proof that I was not just some orphan."

For another child, Henriette, her hankering for a connection, however vague, with her German parent would only grow. The girl would often seek out groups of German tourists and in faltering German say, "Mein Vater ist deutsch" [My father is German].

Michelle, born in 1941, was barely 5 when her foster mother began forcing her to write lines: "Je suis une fille de Boche" (I am the daughter of a Kraut). When eventually she was adopted, her new parents recalled her arriving with pages and pages of paper, all filled with this phrase.

Few of the children ever saw their birth fathers. Some soldiers died in the fighting that accompanied the Allied landings and subsequent liberation. Others were consumed in the hell which was the Eastern Front.

Yet even if there was no German man in the household, the child's lineage could never be kept secret, especially in small towns and villages.

"Any child whose father was absent and who had blond hair and blue eyes was an easy target for speculation," said Rene Richard, an educational psychologist and friend since school days of Daniel Rouxel.

Exactly how many of these war children were born is unknown. The authors of Enfants Maudits - Jean-Paul Picaper, a long-time correspondent in Berlin for Le Figaro, and Ludwig Norz, an archivist at the Germany military records, also in Berlin - suspect that as many as 200,000 were born between 1940 and 1944.

Some are likely to consider this figure extraordinarily high but they base it on the growing number of applications for information to the archives by French citizens.

Lifting the veil on the lives of these women and their close relationships with German soldiers has revealed another uncomfortable fact: German troops, far from being fought and resisted at every step, were readily accepted into French society.

They were attractive because they had money, access to food and consumer goods, and many were polite and cultured, far from being the brutes of stereotype.

"Being posted in France was always regarded as the easiest part of the war for German troops," German historian Wilfried Rogasch told the Herald. "After France surrendered [in June 1940] and there was a puppet regime, the soldiers had a wonderful time going to good restaurants and enjoying the cultural life. It was quite different from what was going on along the Eastern Front."

Enfants Maudits is the first book to document the punishment visited on France's children for the sake of their German fathers. But just as is intriguing is how the book has fallen flat.

It has drawn no media fanfare and sales are rock-bottom. In contrast, the second volume of the memoirs of Charles de Gaulle's son has pride of place on bestseller lists across France, propelled by huge coverage in the newspapers and weekly news magazines.

"It is because it is too embarrassing and painful for the French," says Robert Gildea, professor of Modern French History at Oxford University and author of a book on France during the occupation, Marianne in Chains.

"They have digested the Holocaust and they can blame that on Vichy. But they haven't answered the subsequent questions which follow on from that - the part France played in rounding up Jews, how they reacted to the deportations, and their role in earlier measures to throw the Jews out of work and take their businesses."

Other episodes of France's wartime history have been dragged into the daylight, giving a far less flattering impression compared with the legend promoted by de Gaulle of a nation that rose as one against the Germans. Yet none of these episodes has dealt directly with the traumatic settling of scores that went on.

In 1992, Klaus Barbie, the former head of the Gestapo in Lyon, was put on trial for ordering the deportation of Jewish children to Auschwitz. It was only in 1997 that the former Prefect of Bordeaux, Maurice Papon, was tried for the deportation from France of 2000 Jews.

These trials and the rapprochement between Paris and Berlin have provided many French people with the means for dealing politically with the past, but dealing with the emotional complexities of occupation is traumatic.

The social wounds inflicted by the daily compromises of having to survive under German occupation are harder to deal with. The pain is felt through the generations, and even now the response is denial.

"Basically the French are still wedded to the idea of the resistance," says Gildea, "and follow what de Gaulle said in 1944, that only a handful of wretches did the wrong thing and everyone else was a good Frenchman."