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Full Description
In post-liberation France, the French courts judged the cases of more than one hundred thousand people accused of aiding and abetting the enemy during the Second World War. In this fascinating book, Sandra Ott uncovers the hidden history of collaboration in the Pyrenean borderlands of the Basques and the Béarnais in southwestern France through nine stories of human folly, uncertainty, ambiguity, ambivalence, desire, vengeance, duplicity, greed, self-interest, opportunism and betrayal. Covering both the occupation and liberation periods, she reveals how the book's characters became involved with the occupiers for a variety of reasons, ranging from a desire to settle scores and to gain access to power, money and material rewards, to love, friendship, fear and desperation. These wartime lives and subsequent postwar reckonings provide us with a new lens through which to understand human behavior under the difficult conditions of occupation, and the subsequent search for retribution and justice.
Contents
Introduction; Part I. The Context: 1. Pyrenean borderlands: setting and cultures; 2. World wars, civil war, and German occupation; 3. Violence and the process of liberation; 4. The purge, the judiciary, and the court of justice; Part II. The Narratives and the Trials: 5. A black market bicycle vendor; 6. A teenaged informer and the tragedy of Portet; 7. A pro-German Basque farmer; 8. The changing face of the enemy; 9. A town hall secretary and a Vichy police commissioner; 10. Friendship with a Nazi officer; 11. A Basque double agent and a Nazi officer; 12. A teenaged volunteer in the Waffen-SS; 13. Sex, vengeance, and duplicity: the strange case of Dr Vérité; Part III. Conclusions.
