When Hitler conquered France in 1940, he not only occupied Alsace, but also incorporated it into the German state, making it subject to German laws and outlawing all manifestations of French and Alsatian culture. Worst of all, he conscripted 140,000 young Alsatian men, citizens of France, into the German armies, on pain of reprisals against their families if they attempted to escape. They are known as the "malgré-nous": soldiers against their will.Most of the malgré-nous were sent to the Russian front, where, as one survivor related, they were used as human minesweepers, sent into attack first across the Russian minefields. Forty thousand died and forty thousand have never been accounted for. Some deserted, and were hidden by their families, and others mutilated themselves. Many were taken prisoner and ended up in the Soviet Gulag, in the notorious camp at Tambov, in particular, northeast of Odessa, where they either died or were eventually repatriated in broken health. Having experienced the fascist Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism, the Russians were understandably not very sympathetic to Frenchmen fighting in German uniform, and dragged their feet over sending them back. The last malgré-nous to be released came home in 1955, after ten years in a Siberian camp. Yet the most bitter experience for these soldiers was finding themselves, after so much suffering, treated as traitors by their fellow Frenchmen. A friend, recounting her father's experience as a malgré-nous, said: "The Germans took our children as if they were their own and after all that we were treated by France as the bloody Germans of the east." For nearly sixty years the veterans' association has fought for recognition of these unwilling soldiers of the Reich and for compensation in the form of pensions and invalidity benefits. And still the painful ambiguity endures. Thirteen Alsatian malgré-nous fought with the infamous Waffen SS Das Reich division, which was responsible, on its march to join battle with the Allies in Normandy in 1944, for the terrible massacres in Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane. Put on trial in the 1950s, they were granted amnesty for domestic political reasons. But the request in 1996 for a war veteran's pension by one of these old soldiers caused outrage amongst the survivors of Oradour.
| 