Voices from the Dark Years : the Truth About Occupied France 1940-1945

What was life really like in German-occupied France during the Second World War? Douglas Boyd paints the clearest picture yet, using hitherto unpublished first-person accounts of ordinary men and women who lived through this extraordinary and dangerous time, when a few made fortunes, but most went cold and hungry. Less than 1 per cent of the French was pro-German. It is pure coincidence that the same percentage actively resisted the Germans despite knowing that, if caught, their husbands, wives and children were considered equally culpable under the brutal Teutonic principle of Sippenhaft - guilt by association? Using new, meticulously researched material, Douglas Boyd tells an enthralling and sometimes chilling narrative history of the Occupation, as lived by the French people. It is a record of great heroism and ultimate cruelty. Read it and ask yourself, 'How would I have reacted, living in Occupied France?' The answer may surprise you. Title -- Quote -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Part 1 Defeat and Occupation -- 1 From Sitzkrieg to Blitzkrieg -- 2 Pétain Quells the Panic -- 3 An End to the Killing -- 4 'Trust the German Soldier!' -- 5 Behold the Man! -- 6 The Lie that Was True -- 7 The Number of the Beast -- Part 2 Life, Love and Loot under Pétain's New Order -- 8 Clearing up the mess -- 9 Of Cheese, Plays and Books -- 10 Of Bread and Circuses -- 11 Courage of a Quiet Kind -- 12 Culture and Crops -- 13 Saving the Children -- 14 The Women's Ordeal -- 15 'We Have Learned of the Scenes of Horror ...' -- 16 The Protests Gather Strength -- Part 3 1944 - The Beginning of the End -- 17 Soap and Sabotage -- 18 Casualties in the Great Game -- 19 Happy New Year! -- 20 Dancing in the Dark -- Part 4 The Price of Liberation -- 21 Atrocities on Both Sides -- 22 Murderous Midsummer -- 23 'Hell is the Other People' -- 24 A Carpet of Women's Hair -- 25 Death of a Town -- 26 After the War was Over ... -- Further Reading in English -- Plates -- By the Same Author -- Copyright. The key to getting on with our closest Continental neighbours is to know the truth about what they endured during the German Occupation in the Second World War. Forget the films and television dramas about the Resistance; here is the true picture of the Occupation. This often chilling history, based on previously unpublished accounts by men and women who lived through it, tells how they went cold and hungry while Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier made their fortunes. Whole towns were destroyed and thousands killed by British bombs. Collaboration earned Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval death sentences after the Liberation, whereas French police who sent thousands of women and children to the gas chambers at Auschwitz went unpunished, as did the gendarmes who guarded French concentration camps and handcuffed hostages for the firing squads. Over 70,000 children were fathered by German personnel in France while 1.6 million husbands and lovers languished in POW camps, but if only half the French women whose heads were shaved at the Liberation were accused of ‘horizontal collaboration’, what were the others punished for? And what about the many thousands of French lives saved by two courageous Germans? The clearest picture yet of what life was really like in German-occupied France during World War II, using previously unpublished first-person accounts of ordinary men and women who lived through this extraordinary and dangerous time Using new, meticulously researched material, Douglas Boyd tells an enthralling and sometimes chilling narrative history of the Occupation, as lived by the French people. Less than one per cent of the French people were pro-German. Is it pure coincidence that the same percentage actively resisted the Germans despite knowing that, if caught, their husbands, wives, and children were considered equally culpable under the brutal Teutonic principle of Sippenhaft-guilt by association? It is a record of great heroism and ultimate cruelty. --Provided by publisher