Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Alsace: Trotsky Had It Right
You may not be interested in war, but war Is interested in you, Leon Trotsky wrote. A documentary about France and Alsace during and after World War II makes his point.
“We have come back for good and all. Hence forward you are and ever will be French,” Marshall Joffre proclaimed to the Alsatians who greeted him in 1914. As the French army marched into Alsace in the first days of World War 1, its opening attack against German forces in the Great War, Joffre spoke from the heart. Stripped from France by a victorious Germany following their six-month war in 1870-1871, the return of Alsace after four decades clearly animated the Marshall. “I bring you,” he said, “France’s maternal embrace.”
Joffre offered his welcome back to the motherland that September day in Thann, a 14th Century town at the foot of the Vosges Mountains a few miles west of the Rhine. Warmed as the audience may have been by the Marshall’s sentiment, at the beginning of yet another war and only a few miles from the battleground at Mulhausen where the French had struggled to drive out the German forces days before, some might have wondered if the oratory was premature.
The skeptics, of course, would have been right. When Joffre spoke Alsace already had changed hands three time in the preceding half century. It would do so twice more in the next 30 years. That past as well as Joffre’s revanchist rhetoric is worth remembering as Vladimir Putin proclaims his invasion of Ukraine as a fight for Russia’s historical frontiers. It’s a lesson not only about war’s congenital causes but also the human toll it exacts long after the guns fall silent and the armies are gone.
A French documentary by Nicholas Lévy-Beff presents the lesson in fascinating as well as moving detail. “Against our Will, the Forgotten of History” (Malgré Nous, les Oubliés de l'Histoire) recounts the experiences during World War Two and afterward of four men from Alsace and Moselle. They are the film’s narrators as well as its subjects. The four recount not only how their lives were forever changed because of their region’s unsettled past but also the story of a country conflicted over their—and France’s—fate.
“Against Our Will” begins and ends with a controversial war crimes trial in 1953 at Bordeaux where the tribunal sought to bring justice to the perpetrators of the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. Days after the Allies’ Normandy landings in June 1944, a Nazi SS division that included 13 conscripted Alsatians raised the village, murdering 640 French men, women and children. Lévy-Beff recounts not only the trial’s drama, but also through four lives, the fraught choices and consequences that faced the thousands of Alsatians forced into the German ranks.
Their story opens with the fall of France in 1940. The surrender produced partition; Nazi Germany occupied three-fifths of the country while the remainder in the south and east fell to the newly created Vichy regime. Within weeks Hitler’s Reich annexed Alsace and Moselle uncontested by Vichy’s collaborationist leaders. Administered by Nazi Party functionaries, Nazification promptly followed. French disappeared from signage, schoolrooms, and street conversation. New curricula, newspapers, and mandatory membership in Nazi organizations—from the Hitler Youth to the Reichsarbeitsdienst, the paramilitary labor corps—took their place.
Nazification wasn’t all. With the Wehrmacht’s losses on the Eastern Front mounting, Hitler’s military leaders turned to Alsace and Moselle for manpower. Between 1942-1944, 130,000 men from 14-34 years old were forced to enlist. By some estimates as many as 40,000 evaded the call-up by fleeing to the occupied zone. Others resisted and were executed. For the draftees who complied but contemplated desertion, the Germans made clear that Sippenhaftung applied. Their families would pay for the crime with arrest and deportation East.
For the vast majority of Alsatians and Mosellans in Wehrmacht uniforms, the war became the Eastern Front. By 1945, a third of them who had been sent East were lost in combat; an estimated 30,000 died and 10,000 disappeared. As for the French taken prisoner during the war or at its end, Soviet commanders concentrated the POWs at Tambov, a camp south of Moscow. Estimates vary but between 5000-10,000 died there because of its horrible conditions before the remainder were repatriated following the German surrender. The last returned from the gulag in 1955.
Through its four survivors, Against Our Will makes clear there is no simple way to tell their story. The malgré-nous returned to a welcome but also recriminations. They bore their own resentments as well, not least against a French government that did little to bring the last of them home. Criticized by some, many rejected any notion of guilt, but nonetheless felt compelled to remain silent, betrayed, abandoned and misunderstood. The result, as one scholar put it, was an “absurd destiny,” a turning point in their lives robbed of meaning.
For the malgré-nous the verdict of the Bordeaux tribunal in 1953 projected the contradictory reactions to their fate in Alsace nation-wide. Lengthy sentences for the 13 forced conscripts in the SS division that massacred the villagers of Oradour produced outcries in Alsace and Moselle. Protests followed, prompting President De Gaulle to grant amnesty to the thirteen. Not surprisingly, De Gaulle’s decision antagonized Limousin, Oradour’s surrounding region, prolonging political frictions with Alsace for years.
But the stories of the four malgré-nous who narrate Against our Will aren’t about high politics, or even the complicated history of France’s eastern frontier. They’re a tale of war’s indelible effects on those it touches and why they never disappear. The parallels to contemplate aren’t hard to draw: 14,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia and yet to be returned; 9 million Iraqis uprooted by war in-country, or in limbo as refugees; 88,500 Afghans settled in the United States since the US military withdrawal out of an estimated six million displaced internally or abroad.
Lévy-Beff said something else of his four subjects and narrators in 2015. “These men have given me a beautiful lesson in courage. At 17 years old, they faced a non-choice, confronted a terrible violence. And they succeeded in reconstructing their lives.” In that, Against Our Will is a lesson in hope as well.