The story of Lisette and Johann is in some ways emblematic of the myriad ways French women and German men colluded over the period of occupation merely in order to survive, and the unhappiness that usually followed. That their relatives, even in the twenty-first century, have denied permission for their real names to be used is an indication of the sensitivity still aroused by stories such as theirs. They did not have any children together but, according to some estimates, as many as 200,000 children were born to French mothers fathered by German soldiers during the Second World War. Most never knew their full identity, and, if they did, were ashamed of their German parentage. It was only in the twenty-first century that some started to apply for German citizenship and search for their German fathers before it was too late, which it often was. Fabrice Virgili, author of the most recent study of Franco-German babies, believes there were probably 100,000 of them and that most will have been brought up not only in shame by their mothers alone but never knowing who their father was, ‘as in the vast majority of cases these “amours de guerre” ended with the Liberation’.
There were still occasional trials before the decade was out, such as that of Jacques Desoubrie, alias Jean Masson, among others, the traitor and double agent who betrayed Denise Dufournier and was responsible for the capture of as many as 168 Allied airmen. He was arrested in Germany where he had fled soon after the end of the war, swiftly tried and executed in December 1949. And Otto Abetz, Hitler’s Ambassador to France, the young man who won his position largely because he was such an admirer of France, was sentenced in 1949 to twenty years’ imprisonment for war crimes, in particular for his role in arranging the deportation of French Jews to be gassed. Abetz was released in 1954, but he and his wife Suzanne were killed four years later in a road accident in Germany, which some believe was an assassination organized by former members of the French Resistance. It’s not clear what motivated Jacqueline Bouvier to visit Dachau, where she went at Christmas 1949 with one of her friends, not accompanied by her hostess, Comtesse de Renty. Yet perhaps her decision had something to do with the de Renty family conviction of the need for rapprochement between the two age-old enemies. Claude and her mother, unusually for surviving deportees, had already visited Germany in 1946, taking advantage of a cousin working in the army who invited them. Germaine de Renty believed, in spite of everything she had suffered, in the premise of the Marshall Plan that ‘we needed to recover alongside Germany with the help of America. My mother always said that’s what has to be done. The German people suffered too. Even in Ravensbrück there were German women who suffered.’ At all events, Dachau in 1949 was not yet a museum, nor even a memorial, with parts still in use as a camp for Czech refugees and its future a matter of controversy.
How posterity would memorialize the war years was becoming a critical issue. As the 1950s loomed it was clear that the atmosphere was radically shifting. Picasso’s Dove, still today the international peace logo, first appeared on posters for the communist-sponsored Peace Congress in Paris in 1949, and remained the iconic symbol of hope and peace in the Cold War years to follow. Yet peace – what so many of those who had engaged in the war now craved above all else as they raised young families – was far from a certainty as the Cold War took hold. Some Americans blamed the French for not repelling the communists in their midst, while many French people criticized Americans as imperialistic.
Even if active fighting was in abeyance, the battle for reputations in 1949 was far from over. As Julia Child and Emma Smith both noticed, there were a few marble plaques now being erected around the city commemorating brave resisters at the spot where they had fallen. But reputations can change over a long period, and in 1857 the publication of Charles Baudelaire’s highly erotic poems about decadent women in Paris, Les Fleurs du mal, had been greeted with shock and outrage. Baudelaire as well as his publisher were prosecuted under the regime of the Second Empire as an outrage aux bonnes moeurs – ‘an insult to public decency’. Six poems from the work were suppressed and the pair were fined 300 francs. Now, in 1949, the ban on their publication was lifted and Les Fleurs du mal was finally published in France, in full, for the first time.
A miniature opera scene designed by Christian Bérard from the ambitious Petit Théatre de la Mode exhibition, which used 170 child-size dolls made of wire armatures with porcelain heads, dressed in clothes made by the great Parisian fashion houses and intended to reassert the dominance of French couture immediately the war was over.
Repatriation of women prisoners in Paris, April 1945. Many of those who survived Ravensbrück were barely able to walk and required months of medical treatment.
A former prisoner receiving treatment at the H?tel Lutetia, transformed from its days as Abwehr headquarters to repatriation centre, where many women spent hours hoping to find deported family members.
Demonstration in Paris on 1 May 1945 – seven days before the Second World War was celebrated – for women survivors of Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Mauthausen.
Parisiennes celebrate the end of the war by wearing dresses representing the four Allied flags (Great Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union). Colourized later.
Parisian women casting their vote for municipal elections on 13 May 1945. However, the first national election in which women in France were able to vote was not until November 1946.
Two SOE agents posthumously awarded the George Cross: Noor Inayat Khan, the part-Indian, part-American children’s writer raised in Paris who was murdered in Dachau; and Violette Szabo, killed at Ravensbrück.
Trial of former actress Corinne Luchaire on 4 June 1946. She was sentenced to ten years of dégradation nationale for what the presiding judge termed collaboration horizontale.