A crowd gathered outside a Lyon courthouse to witness the trial of Klaus Barbie in 1987. Photo: Bertram Gordon
Coming of age during the 1960s, when so many people I knew at school and later at work were on the political Left, I became fascinated by “the other side,” those on the political Right, a subject of interest today because of the rise of more right-wing governments around the world. My interest led me to focus on the political Right in France during the Second World War, the collaborationists, who supported Nazi Germany during their 1940-44 occupation of France. One contact in France helped me build a network of interviewees and I was able to meet and interview some three dozen veterans of the French collaboration during several stays in France in the 1970s. The result was my book Collaborationism in France during the Second World War, published by Cornell University Press in 1980.
Several of my interviewees told me that they were happy to discuss their wartime experiences with me because they believed that their stories would become more believable if told by an American too young to have been involved in the war, however, no one ever said later that my published book was in any way pro-collaborationist.
I was treated civilly, even warmly, by all my interviewees. Without exception, they received me cordially, answered my questions, and allowed me – most of the time – to take notes. Not one expressed remorse at having supported the Nazis during the Occupation. All had insisted that their motives had been purely patriotic, to help France find a place in Hitler’s New Order, to fight Communism, and for many, to combat what they argued was the excessive power of “the Jews” in France. A former member of one of the pro-collaboration political parties made his feelings graphically clear by wearing his old party blue shirt during my interview with him in 1974! The closest I heard to a regret was from one interviewee, who had headed a collaborationist youth group during the Occupation. The lesson learned, he said, was not to back the losing side during a war.
As the former Secretary General of one of the pro-collaboration parties in Paris stated in a 1973 interview, “one had to get one's hands dirty to save Frenchmen. We made mistakes but we were all honest patriots.” He pointed to the large reception for Marshal Philippe Pétain, the Head of the Vichy government, during a visit to Paris in 1944 and added that there were two reasons for collaboration: to protect French people and to assure France a place in Europe if Germany won the war. The first reason was good, he argued in retrospect, but the second was mistaken.
My own reactions during the interviews were mixed. On the one hand, I was happy with the feeling that I would be able to write my book, which, presumably, would help in my own academic career. On the other, however, a question that haunted me then, and still does now, especially with the emergence of so many regimes around the world with leaders who bear political similarities to my interviewees, is how people, so seemingly pleasant and humane in their private behavior, could back and enforce the kinds of governments and policies that they did. My interviewees in general seemed like ordinary human beings rather than the kinds of evil monsters one might assume.
While doing the interviews, often in people’s homes or nearby cafés, I focused on my questions, prepared in advance, and otherwise said as little as possible but encouraged my respondents to talk. Not all my questions were satisfactorily answered but I was treated kindly by virtually all my interviewees and years later still struggle to reconcile their behavior toward me with their wartime actions. As sensitive topics were discussed in the interviews, I did not use recording devices of any kind, partly to put the respondents at ease and partly because I did not trust my own technical ability to operate them. Instead, I took extensive notes, writing down as much as possible of what the respondents said. Immediately after each interview I would go either to a nearby café or my room in Paris where I would transcribe my notes to make certain that I could re-read them subsequently and that they were fully clear and comprehensive.
I was continually aware that someone might ask about my own political opinions, which were diametrically opposed to theirs. Fortunately for my project, no one ever did. In contrast, I remember an invitation from a friend teaching in a Paris secondary school who invited me to hear the late Lucie Aubrac, a major figure in the French Resistance, talk to his class in 1996. The three of us later went for dinner in a local restaurant and I can clearly recall the feeling of relief and, indeed, joy, meeting with a person active during the war from whom I did not need to hide my own sentiments.
Always interested in trying to learn about the thinking and behavior of the pro-collaboration personalities, I continued to do occasional interviews even after my book was published. I recall a visit during the summer of 1987 to a veteran of the French division of the Waffen-SS, who had fought against the Russians during the war. The Waffen-SS had been the combat units of the Nazi-SS and had accepted foreign volunteers during the war. My interviewee continued, as did virtually all my contacts, to support the Nazi cause. While at his apartment in eastern Paris it began to rain heavily. As I was dressed for sunny summer weather, when it was time to leave, he insisted on accompanying me with raingear and an umbrella to the metro. I still find it difficult to reconcile how seemingly caring people could lend themselves to the kinds of cruelty perpetrated during the Holocaust, as well as other murderous events in human history.
As Christopher R. Browning notes in his book Ordinary Men: Police Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, published in 1992, the question is not why evil men did evil but why good men did evil.
Bertram Gordon is professor emeritus of history at Mills College. He is also an OLLI member, faculty member and volunteer. His most recent book War Tourism: Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage grew from his discovery of German-language tourism magazines published for German soldiers during their Second World War occupation of France. He can be reached at bmgordon@berkeley.edu.