Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the Western Pyrenees, 1940–1948

Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the Western Pyrenees, 1940–1948
ISBN-10
1316834085
ISBN-13
9781316834084
Series
Living with the Enemy
Category
History
Language
English
Published
2017-06-26
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Author
Sandra Ott

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.

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