'For Their Own Good': Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939-1945

By Julia S. Torrie

The early twentieth-century advent of aerial bombing made successful evacuations essential to any war effort, but ordinary people resented them deeply. Based on extensive archival research in Germany and France, this is the first broad, comparative study of civilian evacuations in Germany and France during World War II. The evidence uncovered exposes the complexities of an assumed monolithic and all-powerful Nazi state by showing that citizens' objections to evacuations, which were rooted in family concerns, forced changes in policy. Drawing attention to the interaction between the Germans and French throughout World War II, this book shows how policies in each country were shaped by events in the other. A truly cross-national comparison in a field dominated by accounts of one country or the other, this book provides a unique historical context for addressing current concerns about the impact of air raids and military occupations on civilians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781845458164

Julia S. Torrie

Julia S. Torrie completed her PhD at Harvard University and has taught European History at St. Thomas University in Canada since 2002.

Book preview

FOR THEIR OWN GOOD

FOR THEIR OWN GOOD

Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France,

1939–1945

JULIA S. TORRIE

berghahn

NEW YORK • OXFORD

www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2010 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

©2010, 2014 Julia S. Torrie

First paperback edition published in 2014

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages

for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book

may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or

mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information

storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,

without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Torrie, Julia S., 1973–

    For their own good : civilian evacuations in Germany and France, 1939–1945 /

Julia S. Torrie.

            p. cm.

         Includes bibliographical references and index.

         ISBN 978-1-84545-725-9 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-390-1 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-1-84545-816-4 (ebook)

    1. World War, 1939–1945—Evacuation of civilians—Germany. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Evacuation of civilians—France. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations. 4. Bombing, Aerial—Social aspects—Germany—History—20th century. 5. Bombing, Aerial—Social aspects—France—History—20th century. 6. Germany—History—1933–1945. 7. France—History—German occupation, 1940–1945. I. Title.

    D809.G3T67 2010

    940.53’16—dc22

2009025426

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper

ISBN: 978-1-78238-390-1 paperback

ISBN: 978-1-84545-816-4 ebook

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1.    PREPARING FOR AIR WAR

CHAPTER 2.    ORDER OR CHAOS?

CHAPTER 3.    ORGANIZING EVACUATIONS

CHAPTER 4.    OUR STAY GIVES US NO PLEASURE

CHAPTER 5.    IF ONLY FAMILY UNITY CAN BE MAINTAINED

CHAPTER 6.    ON THE BASIS OF SELECTION

CHAPTER 7.    RESPONDING TO CHAOS

CHAPTER 8.    EVACUATION’S AFTERMATH

Notes

Note on Sources

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

1.1.  Germany Threatened by Enemy Aircraft

2.1.  German Soldiers Feed French Civilians

4.1.  With Open Arms!

4.2.  From the City to the Land

5.1.  Gauleiter Hofmann in Baden

7.1.  Evacuation Plan for Greater Cherbourg (25 Nov. 1943)

TABLES

3.1.  Projected Participants, Berlin and Hamburg KLV (27 Sept. 1940)

3.2.  Designated German Reception Areas (19 Apr. 1943)

3.3.  Designated French Reception Areas (4 Feb. 1943)

ABBREVIATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have received assistance on this project from many quarters. Above all, I would like to thank Charles Maier, David Blackbourn, and Susan Pedersen. All three have been unfailingly patient, critical, and encouraging as this work evolved from the original proposal into this book.

Generous funding from various sources made the project possible. In particular, fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada supported a year and a half of archival research in France and Germany. This research was supplemented by shorter trips funded by the Krupp Foundation and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. The Center for European Studies also gave me ten months of financial support to finish writing. Since then, St. Thomas University has helped me attend several international conferences and given me release time from teaching to revise my work.

I am grateful to the staff of the archives and libraries I visited in France and Germany, particularly for help in gaining access to restricted material. Without the kindness of individuals too numerous to name, important documents would have escaped my notice.

As the project developed, a number of people gave me suggestions for further reading, hints on rough drafts, and moral support. Robert Gellately has encouraged and inspired me since my undergraduate years. More recently, Roger Chickering, Sarah Fishman, Peter Fritzsche, Marcus Funck, Susan Grayzel, Ulrich Herbert, Patrice Higonnet, Robert Moeller, Adelheid von Saldern, Nathan Stoltzfus, and Dominique Veillon have made valuable suggestions on different segments of the project. While in Berlin in 1999, I was able to join a Doktoranden Kolloquium at the Zentrum für Vergleichende Geschichte Europas at the Free University, under the supervision of Christoph Conrad. I would like to thank him and Gunilla Budde for helping to arrange my participation in the colloquium. On this side of the Atlantic, I am indebted to the members of the European History Graduate Workshop at Harvard’s Center for European Studies, particularly Rebecca Bennette, Eric Kurlander, and David Meskill, who read and commented on drafts of two chapters. The insightful comments of the participants in the Seventh Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, helped me turn a short paper into the Witten case study below. Other sections of the work have benefited from the wide-ranging knowledge of anonymous reviewers, panel participants, and commentators. In the last few years, my generous colleagues in the History Department at St. Thomas University have, often without knowing it, contributed expertise from their diverse fields to segments of the manuscript. My efficient research assistant Armin Musterle helped arrange permission to reproduce various images used in the work.

The encouragement and support of many friends has been important. The Brinkmann family, in particular, has been kind and hospitable to me over many years. I am deeply grateful to my parents Amelia and James Torrie, my sister Catherine, Frédéric, Eloïse, and the rest of my family, all of whom have contributed in countless ways to the completion of this work.

INTRODUCTION

War everywhere necessitates interventions into the personal freedom of the individual in favour of the community.

—Nazi Party representative in Düsseldorf, 1942¹

I can still keep my children wherever I want to. After all, they’re still my children.

—German citizen’s anonymous comment,

recorded by the Sicherheitsdienst, 1943²

What Are Civilian Evacuations? At their most basic, they are wartime measures that save lives by removing non-combatants from vulnerable areas. Although they are essentially positive endeavours with a laudable goal, they challenge nations’ transportation and accommodation capacities, and require governments to intrude into the lives of millions of civilians. In many ways, evacuations are huge social welfare programs, for governments must convince people to leave their homes, transfer them to safer areas, and look after their financial, physical, and psychological well-being. Those involved in evacuations dislike them, because they banish unhappy city-dwellers to rural backwaters, provoke homesickness and unease, and turn one segment of the population into the unwelcome long-term guests of another. Most unsettlingly, evacuations divide families, sending children and mothers away to the countryside while other family members stay home to work. Societies at war must make choices: who will be evacuated, and where? How long will the transfers last, and how often will displaced individuals be able to visit their homes? Will popular preferences be allowed to determine any part of the process? Evacuations balance delicately on the borders between state paternalism, coercion, and public tolerance.

Against a backdrop of war and occupation, evacuations offer a new forum to explore the interplay of Germany and France. These measures draw attention to the negotiated, improvised quality of the German occupation, an ongoing process that played itself out in the context of prewar relations and longer-term trends. Evacuations in both countries show how civilians and governments interacted over policies that seemed necessary, yet were unwelcome and difficult to impose. Popular opposition to population transfers, which was rooted in family concerns, highlights the importance of the family as a source of noncompliance in authoritarian regimes. Evacuees’ refusal to toe the line limited the authorities’ exercise of power. Evacuations remained marked by the regimes sponsoring them, and though they appeared to be open to all French and German citizens, only well-behaved members of the national community were included. German and French war relief relied directly on the oppression of those who, like Jews, asocials, or the mentally ill, were not considered worthy of the state’s assistance. Evacuations became a privilege, not a right.

Civilian evacuations began in late August 1939, just before World War II. French and German border populations were removed from their homes to make room for troop movements, limit exposure to enemy fire, and avoid occupation. Children and their mothers also left vulnerable cities in the interior. Preemptive evacuations continued throughout the war, although from the summer of 1943, population transfers in the wake of air raids became more important than those occurring in advance.

Despite ongoing efforts to organize and direct evacuees, the improvised character of evacuations came to the fore as time went on. In France in 1940 and 1944, and Germany from mid 1944 onward, organized evacuations broke down completely as civilians fled before an advancing battle front. The massive, chaotic aspects of these events distinguished them from other evacuations, but at the same time they shared many characteristics of more orderly population transfers. All three types of evacuations—preemptive, reactive, and emergency—are considered here.

Evacuations continued as long as the fighting did, ending in 1944 in France and 1945 in Germany. The war’s end left many evacuees far from home, with some unable to return to their native cities before several years had passed. The present study focuses on Germany and France during World War II, but also considers the prewar discourse on evacuation and, briefly, the postwar fate of evacuees.

The German government estimated that nearly 9 million citizens had been evacuated by the state or had evacuated themselves as of 11 January 1945. This figure did not include special children’s programs that added at least another 2 million to the total. It also left out displacements between early January 1945 and the end of the war in Europe, in May. The true number of German evacuees was therefore probably upwards of 12 million. A year earlier, in January 1944, French authorities had counted about 1 million evacuees in France, although by August 1944, after battle had again swept through the country, there were as many as 2 million displaced individuals of all kinds. In 1940, as a result of the German Blitzkrieg advance, France had temporarily been swamped by at least 7 million displaced persons.³ Evacuations affected many millions of civilians in these two countries alone and were an integral, if little studied, part of the war experience.

This book focuses on evacuations in two countries for several reasons. First, air war itself paid little attention to national boundaries, and since France was occupied by Germany for most of World War II, French evacuations cannot be elucidated without reference to Germany. At the same time, experiences in France helped shape measures inside the Reich. Before the war, policies in each country were molded by the perceived threat of the other. Later, during the occupation, German officials viewed the two areas as parts of one whole. National differences continued to influence evacuations in each country, but neither case can be fully understood without the other. The parallel development of evacuations in these two places sheds light on authoritarian states and their interactions with citizens, on the German occupation of France, and more broadly on Franco-German relations.

In the interwar period, theorists in Germany and France began to consider how to respond to the air raids that would surely be a major part of the next international conflict. The French favoured evacuations to safeguard civilians’ lives, but Germans rejected these measures as cowardly flight. Instead, they preferred to fortify cities with shelters and flak guns, while strengthening urbanites’ resolve through civil defense training.⁴ In the years prior to World War II, civil defense policy came to be defined in national terms, and evacuations became the French response to an airborne threat, while the German alternative was to stand fast in the cities.

The tendency to use the other country as a foil for one’s own attitudes continued during the war. When both nations began large-scale civilian evacuations, the prewar juxtaposition of evacuating France and non-evacuating Germany no longer applied. Germans sought a new model to explain the fact that the Reich also had started evacuating. Those who had witnessed the disorderly mass flight of civilians as Reich armies advanced into Belgium and France now identified individualism as the primary cause. Emphasizing the chaotic and individualistic aspects of the ill-fated French exodus, the Germans defended their own programs as foresighted, orderly, and rooted in the good of the community—thus, fundamentally different from the French.

A secondary result of this new opposition was to raise the stakes of German evacuations, making it imperative that they actually be orderly and that the whole community participate in making them so. This, in turn, helps explain why popular opposition to evacuation measures, which skyrocketed from 1943, was treated as a great affront by the regime. Disobeying evacuation orders was a sign of individualism, a flaw that would lead to French chaos, and ultimately, defeat.

The fact that policymakers in Germany and France interpreted evacuations through the mirror of their European neighbour makes it crucial to examine these nations in tandem. More concretely, evacuation policies in Germany and France draw attention to the complicated process of imitation, negotiation, manipulation, and subtle or less subtle pressure that defined relations between the two countries during the war, and especially during the occupation of France. Sources about evacuation show how French and Germans interacted over what was essentially a positive policy with a humanitarian goal, unlike the deportation of the Jews, or the compulsory labour service, which usually have attracted historians’ scrutiny.

In order to explore these issues more deeply, I focus on one region of each country. In Germany, heavy bombing over densely crowded urban centers made evacuations an especially pressing concern in the Rhine-Ruhr industrial area. In France, Norman cities with German military installations, such as Le Havre, Cherbourg, and Caen, were targeted by the Allies as early as 1940. The bombing of Normandy continued throughout the war, only to escalate before the Allied Landings in 1944. Belying the comparatively limited extent of actual air war damage in France, large-scale preemptive evacuations of danger zones occurred, especially along the Atlantic and Channel coasts. These prophylactic measures, together with the destruction associated with the Allied Landings, make Normandy the best illustration of the French situation.

It is worth noting that the Rhine-Ruhr and Normandy are not intended to be typical cases; rather, severe bombing in both places starkly exposed evacuations’ dilemmas. Policymaking tended to be driven by events in these regions, which had ripple effects beyond. More generally, the German and French situations discussed in this book were far from identical. Some 22 percent of Allied bombs were destined for targets in France, and the total number of civilian victims was about a fifth of that of Germany—wartime bombing killed 67,078 French civilians, while 305,000 Germans lost their lives in the same fashion. The British, for their part, lost 60,595 civilians to German bombs, slightly less than the French total.⁵ Though this work retains elements of a classic comparison of similarities and differences, it is primarily what Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka have called a relationship study. The links between French and German civilian evacuations are the main focus as is the interplay of the two nations’ policies.⁶

Given the danger, and the nature of their regimes, one might have expected that German and French leaders would have had no trouble enforcing whatever evacuation policies they chose. In fact, there were strict limits on what they could demand. Careful negotiation took place between the requirements of the state and the needs of ordinary people, and official plans sometimes had to be altered in response to public protest. Successful evacuations were essential to the war effort, but a poor welcome in the reception areas, uncomfortable conditions, and homesickness made many people wish they had never left their native cities. Especially from the summer of 1943, unhappy evacuees returned from the reception areas without official permission. The authorities in both Germany and France opposed these returns with draconian measures, going so far as to deny ration cards to so-called wild returnees (wilde Rückkehrer).

Left with little other recourse, civilians used family-based claims to protest government policies. Long-term evacuations threatened family ties, and citizens drew attention to the contradiction between Nazi rhetoric, which prized the family, and rigid evacuations that failed to take families into account. Family-based protest in Germany peaked in October 1943, when some 300 residents of Witten, in the Ruhrgebiet, demonstrated publicly against the denial of ration cards to wild returnees. The Witten citizens, and others who returned from the reception areas without permission, compelled the authorities to alter evacuation policies to make them more moderate and family-sensitive.

Victoria de Grazia has shown that family concerns frequently underlay popular protest in Mussolini’s Italy. Because the regime placed such a high value on the family, questioning government family policies cast doubt on the regime’s ability to interpret what families really wanted, and at the same time, on its very right to rule. De Grazia uses the term oppositional familism to describe the attitudes that fed this kind of protest.⁷ A similar phenomenon was at work in Germany, where family-based opposition to evacuation measures tested the legitimacy of the regime.

Perhaps paradoxically, although evacuations in occupied France were more often compulsory than in Germany, and although French civilians returned home without permission fairly regularly, no open anti-evacuation demonstration like the one at Witten took place. Fear of reprisals may have held some French civilians back, but since hundreds of public demonstrations, mainly against food policy and the compulsory labour service, did occur during the German occupation, an alternate explanation for the lack of French anti-evacuation protests must be sought.⁸

In part, frustrations over evacuation policy were less volatile in France because fewer people moved away from home and because evacuations tended to be shorter in duration. When there were disagreements over evacuation, notably between the population and the occupation forces, the French government usually interceded, acting as a buffer to absorb tension and negotiate compromises. This buffering role headed off widespread popular opposition to evacuation measures.

The most important reason for the French population’s comparatively calm acceptance of evacuation measures, however, was that even under the occupation, French policies took families more into account than German. An albeit sometimes overdrawn distinction between a German emphasis on community and a French emphasis on the family played itself out through the war and occupation, helping to smooth over French civilians’ dislike of evacuation measures.⁹ Evacuations highlight the power of family-based grievances as a source of opposition in authoritarian states and underline the importance of family concerns in the ongoing dialogue between individuals and government.

On the surface, evacuations appeared to be universally available to endangered French or German citizens. In fact, the humanitarian thrust of the measures was deeply marred by the exclusion of many individuals living in Hitler’s Europe. Evacuation policies overlapped with, and indeed were closely connected to, the racialist and eugenicist programs of the Third Reich. Jews and others who did not belong to the Volksgemeinschaft were not evacuated, and each space this left on trains to rural areas allowed another person, who was a member of the national community, to be borne away to safety. In addition to Jews and other race enemies, neither the mentally ill, nor so-called asocials were considered for evacuation. Any person whose behaviour in the reception areas aroused suspicions of immorality or criminality was sent home.

There were additional connections between war relief measures and the oppression of those outside the national community. The apartments of deported Jews in France and Germany became housing for bombed-out families. Spoliated furniture was not only shipped across Europe to furnish the offices of the Wehrmacht in the East, but also redistributed locally to bomb victims.¹⁰ Psychiatric patients were moved out of urban hospitals so that these facilities could be converted to emergency medical use. By evacuating only desirable members of the national community, German, and to a lesser but still considerable extent, French authorities, effectively made Allied aerial bombardments serve their own racialist and eugenicist ends.

To date, civilian evacuations have been studied mainly in a democratic context, one country at a time. In Britain, Richard Titmuss long ago opened the subject to scholarly scrutiny, but evacuations remain under-researched elsewhere.¹¹ Recent works on the German situation by Gerhard Kock, Michael Krause, and Gregory Schroeder are signs of a growing interest in the field. Kock’s study of the Kinderlandverschickung (KLV), a program specifically for children, argues that the goals of German children’s evacuations lay as much in the indoctrination and formation of young Nazis as in the preservation of their lives. Krause, for his part, identifies the evacuees as a population pressure group, and, focusing on their demands after the end of the war, places them in the context of other temporarily homeless groups, like the refugees of the former German territories in Eastern Europe. Gregory Schroeder likewise examines the postwar period, highlighting arguments evacuees employed in order to speed their return home.¹² Beyond these authors, however, research on Germany is limited to small-scale local studies that do not consider the broader implications of civilian evacuations.¹³

In France, where air war is rarely discussed, historians have focused on the so-called population exodus as the Germans advanced in 1940, or described the travails of citizens evacuated and later exiled from occupied Alsace-Lorraine. The Liberation is another carefully chronicled moment of the war in France, and local histories typically mention civilians’ accompanying displacements. Comprehensive works on German occupation and life on the Home Front sometimes refer to evacuations in passing, but none of these studies analytically treat them as a separate subject.¹⁴

The present work speaks to three specific areas of the vast historiography of war and authoritarianism. First, exploring evacuations contributes to our understanding of the civilian experience of total war, and air war specifically. Second, evacuation measures help elucidate the interaction between ordinary people and authoritarian governments in wartime, as well as the twin issues of popular consent and opposition. Finally, these measures can be used as a lens to bring the German occupation of France into better focus, emphasizing the ground-level interaction of French and German authorities, and bringing Germany back into a historiography that tends to downplay the conqueror’s side of the occupation.

The civilian war experience usually has been defined by how urban adult citizens dealt with the traumas of war, but evacuations also draw attention to children’s experiences. For civilians, especially children, transfer to another region of their country for months, or even years, constituted a significant wartime hardship. In addition, evacuation documents shed light on rural life in wartime and the complex urban-rural encounter of evacuees and their hosts.¹⁵

Allied air raids and their impact on civilians play a central role in renewed debates about Germans as perpetrators and victims. These debates, which are connected to larger questions about war and memory, typically focus on aerial bombardment itself, leaving evacuations to the periphery.¹⁶ Yet evacuations were longer lasting, and defined civilians’ war experience as much, if not more, than the air raids themselves. These measures, which play such a central role in British memories of wartime, are almost absent from the public record in Germany and France.

In France, debates about perpetrators and victims are not linked to air war, but rather to the larger issue of collaboration versus resistance during the occupation. The present study highlights the importance of evacuations for these discussions, not only because the measures were an integral part of the war experience, but also because they emphasize the persistent overlap between the categories of victim and perpetrator. Evacuees were both war victims and at the same time, as outlined above, consenting beneficiaries of state policies that oppressed those not considered to be part of the national community.

Civilians’ reactions to evacuation are strong indicators of wartime morale, which itself was related to the degree of popular consent for the domestic and foreign policies of the government.¹⁷ The issue of consent, not only during the war, but also at peace, has long been one of the most compelling questions about the Third Reich. While some scholars have stressed the roles of terror and ideological conformity in limiting popular opposition to the regime, others, such as Ian Kershaw, have emphasized the importance of propaganda and the cult of the Führer in bolstering consent. Without supporting Daniel Goldhagen’s extreme formulation that Germans were Hitler’s willing executioners, historians such as Robert Gellately have highlighted the breadth of grassroots support, especially for the negative and repressive policies of the Nazi regime.¹⁸

Like mass employment schemes, or marriage bonuses, evacuations helped maximize citizens’ approval for the regime and masked the authorities’ less attractive policies. Evacuations gave civilians the impression that the government was looking after their welfare and became a vehicle for integrating ordinary people into the national community. At the same time, these population transfers gave the authorities an entré into normal families, families that might otherwise have remained relatively sheltered from the state’s intrusions. This state presence, along with the mutual surveillance of hosts and evacuees, encouraged conformity with the policies of the regime.

The consent-bolstering function of mass organizations like the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Workers’ Front) or the Légion Française des Combattants (French Veterans’ Legion) is well-recognized, but historians have paid less attention to the integrative role of charitable organizations, which played a crucial part in tying the population to the government, especially in wartime. Although much of the assistance evacuees received came from the state, para-governmental charitable organizations were also instrumental. In Germany, the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (NSV) assisted destitute and traumatized evacuees. In France, the Secours National and the Comité Ouvrier de Secours Immédiat (C.O.S.I.) stepped in. These groups, positioned between ordinary people and the state, provided assistance while also supporting the government and helping to demonstrate its concern for people’s well-being. Their programs to boost morale and consent among a particularly sensitive portion of the population, evacuees, were essential to the Axis war effort.¹⁹

Evacuations thus allow us to explore questions about consent, dissent, and opposition, which, for all that they have been asked before in other contexts, remain pertinent to our understanding of the citizen’s role in authoritarian states. Kershaw’s work on the Bavarian crucifix campaign and Nathan Stoltzfus’ on the Rosenstrasse protest show how popular noncompliance sometimes hampered the Nazi regime’s exercise of power.²⁰ Evacuees who protested at Witten in 1943 probably ran a lesser risk than the women of the Rosenstrasse, but their action was another example of the limited dissent or opposition known in Germany as "Resistenz, to distinguish it from the more formal, premeditated Widerstand. These terms remain contested, but I have followed Ian Kershaw’s suggestion that, in English, opposition may be used to describe actions not directed against Nazism as a system and at times deriving from individuals or groups at least partially sympathetic towards the regime and its ideology."²¹ Chapter five discusses in greater detail the extent to which the evacuees’ protest at Witten actually threatened Hitler’s regime. At the very least, evacuees’ refusal to go along with the regime’s plans forced a significant re-evaluation of evacuation policies. Even if the evacuees did not see their opposition as a political act, the regime interpreted it as such, for the leaders understood that unpopular evacuation measures might have a devastating effect on morale.²²

In France, because many (though by no means all) evacuations were ordered by the Germans, evacuees’ low-level opposition may seem to fit directly and unproblematically under the rubric of resistance.²³ In fact, however, French opposition to German-ordered evacuations arose from a basic sense of outrage that citizens were being asked to leave their homes and was no more formal than that of German citizens. There have been efforts to make a kind of "Resistenz versus Widerstand distinction in France, as in Germany, yet even when French authors write of what they have called resistance-movement (François Marcot) or peri-resistance (Michel Boivin and Jean Quellien), they often take it to be dependent on, and conditioned by, the real" resistance of the major movements. Disorganized, apparently random, and popular noncompliance tends not to be studied on its own terms in France.²⁴

The issues of consent and opposition, on a national scale, are inevitably associated with the study of military occupations. In France, historians have generally asked questions that are less about individuals’ consent for, or opposition to, the Vichy regime per se, than they are about the degree to which France as a nation consented to, and collaborated with, German rule. Robert Paxton, by insisting that the years 1940 to 1944 should not be treated as an aberration, but rather, were intimately linked to the broader history of France, demonstrated that the occupation was more than just an unwelcome imposition and that many French welcomed Hitler’s promise of renewal. Paxton’s work examines Franco-German interaction primarily on the level of government and diplomacy, but other scholars have since drawn more attention to ground-level French responses to the occupation and to the Vichy regime itself. In the 1990s, a new emphasis on women’s attitudes toward the regime helped to round out the picture of French society during the occupation.²⁵

Philippe Burrin has suggested, however, that the departure from pre-Paxtonian interpretations, which viewed France as the victim of German domination, toward the study of Vichy on its own terms, has tended to minimize the role of the Germans in occupied France. In the past, Burrin writes, the German presence tended to block our view of the horizon. Today, Germany appears as a faint shadow in the background, while Vichy occupies center stage.²⁶ The present work brings Germany back into the picture, placing occupied France in the larger context of Hitler’s Europe and French-German interaction both before and after the war. It draws attention to the ground-level interplay of French and Germans, highlighting the dynamic, negotiated quality of the occupation, something both parties were making up as they went along.²⁷

In the text, I have used the words evacuee and evacuation to refer to civilian transfers that took place in France and Germany during World War II. The term evacuee is preferable to refugee for several reasons. Evacuation emphasizes that people were deliberately displaced, as part of a conscious government policy. Becoming a refugee, on the other hand, implies that an accidental confluence of events led individuals to flee. Refugees, moreover, tend to have crossed a national border, whereas evacuees are displaced within their own country. The boundaries of usage between the words remain fluid, however, and it is often difficult, in practice, to distinguish between the two categories. Not all evacuations were planned, for aerial bombing and land invasion led to both preemptive measures and spontaneous flight. Not all evacuees remained within their country of origin, for some Germans were evacuated as far afield as the Netherlands or Hungary, and in 1940, Belgians as well as French civilians fled southwest through France as the Germans advanced. In some cases, therefore, the terminology may be interchangeable; but, for simplicity’s sake, I have used evacuation and evacuee throughout.

A clear distinction between the two words is further complicated by the challenges of translating primary sources into English. The word réfugié is used commonly in French documents to refer to individuals who would be better described as "évacués," for they stayed within the country and were removed from vulnerable cities as a result of conscious government policies. French bodies, like the national and departmental bureaus responsible for evacuees, Directions des Réfugiés, bear titles reflecting this usage, which I have retained.

As the French terminology implies, evacuees were viewed in France as a smaller subset of the category of réfugié, which meant any person displaced by war or natural disaster. This was partly because there were a smaller number of true evacuees in France moved by the government, compared to the group of citizens who spontaneously fled endangered areas. It was also a sign of the continuities between early wartime measures meant to help these civilians, and policies already in place, notably to assist refugees of the Spanish Civil War who had been living in France since the 1930s.

In Germany, on the other hand, evacuees were a category unto themselves, but one that rarely was called by its name. Because evacuations were adopted with reluctance by the Nazis, they used a variety of euphemisms to disguise their nature and to imply that German evacuations were different from those taking place elsewhere in Europe. Instead of evakuieren, the regime preferred umquartieren (reaccommodate, quarter elsewhere). This term, as Michael Krause has pointed out, emphasized the temporary, provisional quality of the measures.²⁸ It echoed military vocabulary and was meant to suggest that German evacuations were orderly, deliberate, and well-managed. In late June 1943, the German authorities announced that for consistency’s sake, the noun Umquartierung should replace Evakuierung entirely.²⁹ By this time, Evakuierung had fallen further out of favour because it had come to be used to describe the deportation of the Jews and others to concentration camps.³⁰ Clearly, it seemed inappropriate to use the same word to describe both deportations and the transfer of vulnerable members of the national community to safer areas of the Reich.

This book is organized comparatively throughout. It begins with an exploration of the discourse on civil defense in Germany and France in the interwar period, analyzing how France became a country that favoured evacuations, while Germany opposed them. The first chapter examines the distinction between evacuating France and non-evacuating Germany, and traces the effect of this opposition on planning for air war prior to 1939.

Chapter two explores flawed evacuations on both sides of the Franco-German border in 1939 that were an early sign of the trouble such measures could cause. After a quiet winter, the German spring campaign provoked the flight of millions of civilians through Belgium and France, leaving contemporaries with indelible images of chaos and disorder. The Third Reich’s theorists had claimed that large-scale civilian evacuations would not be necessary in Germany, but when aerial bombing increased there in the early fall of 1940, they too began removing children from major cities. This chapter shows how the Germans used France’s disorderly exodus to justify and explain their change of heart. They replaced the old model of evacuating France and non-evacuating Germany with a juxtaposition of French chaos and German order, thereby endowing evacuations in Germany with such symbolic weight that absolute order had to be maintained throughout the war.

The third chapter outlines the organizational structure of evacuations, describes a typical evacuation, and examines the contributions and interaction of the para-governmental organizations NSV, Secours National, and C.O.S.I. It takes the reader to the end of 1942 and shows how evacuations evolved as aerial bombardments changed. This chapter paints a picture predominantly of successful evacuations.

The following chapter takes up the many problems that evacuations caused. Frosty welcomes in the reception areas, regional and religious differences, homesickness, and the potential threat of moral lapses were problems identified by the authorities and experienced by the evacuees. The fourth chapter considers how French and German regimes tried to respond to these difficulties, which grew to a crisis point by the fall of 1943. It also explores the reactions of the evacuees themselves, ranging from resignation, through dismay and complaint, to disobedience and departure for home.

Evacuees’ reactions are taken up in greater detail in chapter five, which uses two case studies, of Witten (Germany) and Cherbourg (France), to illustrate key aspects of the interaction between civilians and authoritarian states at war. The Witten case study examines a public anti-evacuation demonstration that occurred in that city in October 1943, while the study of Cherbourg analyses French reactions to a German-ordered evacuation of over 70 percent of the population. At Witten, family-based concerns led to open opposition, while Cherbourg’s compulsory evacuations were moderated by greater consideration of the family, and this, combined with the buffering role of the French state, headed off major conflict.

Chapter six details connections between the evacuations of those included as full members of the community