5 - “The War Is Over for Us”

Summary

Roughly 1.8 million French soldiers were taken prisoner in May–June 1940, which certainly spoke to a severe morale crisis in the French army. The large number of POWs brought generational shame on France. POWs also became a way for Berlin to control Vichy’s behavior, by dangling the prospect of release in return for French collaboration in Germany’s war aims. Although they viewed themselves as “victims of the debacle,” POWs were expelled from French wartime memory because they failed to qualify for the heroic Resistance motif of the Liberation. On the contrary, they symbolized France’s greatest defeat and hence personified France’s crisis of national and masculine identity. They had proven “inadequate in some way” because they had allowed themselves be captured, while 95 percent had failed to escape. Collaboration and solidarity of the camps discouraged escape attempts, while the Germans freed French POWs only when it was in their interest to do so.But also, they were shunned because they became “Vichy’s adored children” and so discredited along with collaboration. Nevertheless, the Germans were shocked in 1945 by the bitterness of the French for the alleged poor treatment of French POWs and laborers in Germany, because in their view the French in many instances had settled comfortably into local life, often substituting for absent German men, to the point that, in German eyes at least, French POWs came to be seen as the war’s “spoiled children.” The humiliation of POW status transferred to the French nation, as a national disgrace to be redeemed by the myth of the Resistance.