Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the Western Pyrenees, 19401948 [Hardcover]

This book reconstructs the trials and tribulations of the colorful individuals accused of collaboration with the Germans in southwestern France.This is a compelling study of human folly, vengeance, opportunism and betrayal during the German occupation of the French Basque Country and B?arn. Based on extensive fieldwork and a close reading of trial dossiers, Ott focuses on ordinary people who formed relationships with Germans during 19404 and were later accused of 'collaboration'.This is a compelling study of human folly, vengeance, opportunism and betrayal during the German occupation of the French Basque Country and B?arn. Based on extensive fieldwork and a close reading of trial dossiers, Ott focuses on ordinary people who formed relationships with Germans during 19404 and were later accused of 'collaboration'.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 B?arnais 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.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 liberatl“‰