The Vicissitudes of Purge Justice: An Ethnographic Approach to the Trials of Collaborators, France 1944-1946

FAIN: FT-56590-09

Sandra Jean Ott
University of Nevada, Reno (Reno, NV 89557-0001)

The proposed work seeks to assess the justice of judgments made in post-Liberation trials in the borderlands of the Basque Country and Bearn during 1944-1946. I will analyze the backgrounds of the judges, prosecutors, jury members and witnesses; the internal political conflicts between communists and their opponents; and public reactions to the trials in the local press. I will conduct archival research on Germans involved as trial witnesses and will develop further the conceptual, interdisciplinary framework of a book project. The most serious acts of collaboration included treason, espionage and threats to the external security of the nation; and the trial dossiers contain a wealth of information about the people involved in the purge process. These documents raise important questions about human dignity and degradation, the morality of capital punishment, the appropriate exercise of mercy, and the questionable justice of judgments made during the often politicized purge trials.

Associated Products

The Enemy as Insider: German POWs as Trial Witnesses in the Basses-Pyrenees, 1944-1946 (Book Section)
Title: The Enemy as Insider: German POWs as Trial Witnesses in the Basses-Pyrenees, 1944-1946
Author: Sandra Ott
Editor: Sandra Ott
Abstract: The chapter provides a preliminary analysis of evidence given by German prisoners of war in the court of justice in Pau during the trials of suspected collaborators. I explore the ways in which the post-liberation authorities assessed and utilized that evidence, and how German POWs created positions of power for themselves both during and after the Occupation.
Year: 2011
Publisher: Center for Basque Studies
Book Title: War, Exile, Justice, and Everyday Life, 1936-1946
ISBN: 978-1-935709

Looking for Lacombe, Lucien in Southwestern France (Article)
Title: Looking for Lacombe, Lucien in Southwestern France
Author: Sandra Ott
Abstract: Some observers of Louis Malle's controversial film, Lacombe, Lucien (1974), have acknowledged that they met young men very much like Lucien in occupied France: young men whose weapons gave them a taste for power, the will to be important, and access to pleasure and money. The trial dossiers of teenaged informers provide a lens through which to examine the factors that motivated those young men during the occupation, their family circumstances, political backgrounds and their relationships with "interested agents of persuasion," including parents, peers, collaborationists, and the occupiers. This article casts new light on teenagers who helped the Germans during World War II and on their treatment by the postwar judicial system and the regional press.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://wsfh/proceedings
Access Model: open
Format: Journal
Format: Other
Periodical Title: The Proceedings of the Western Society for French History
Publisher: The Western Society for French History

Undesirable Pen Pals, Unthinkable House Guests: Representations of Franco-German Friendships in a Post-Liberation Trial Dossier and Suite Francais (Article)
Title: Undesirable Pen Pals, Unthinkable House Guests: Representations of Franco-German Friendships in a Post-Liberation Trial Dossier and Suite Francais
Author: Sandra Ott
Abstract: This article explores representations of Franco-German friendship through two complementary lenses: through the post-liberation trial dossier of a female collaborationist in southwestern France, and through Dolce, the second part of Irene Nemirovsky's compelling novel, Suite Francaise. My primary aim is to illuminate and contrast the roles that historical and fictional narratives play in our interpretations and understanding of Franco-German relations during the Occupation.
Year: 2014
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: French Politics, Culture and Society
Publisher: Berghahn Journals

Living with the Enemy in the Western Pyrenees: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice, 1940-1948 (Book)
Title: Living with the Enemy in the Western Pyrenees: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice, 1940-1948
Author: Sandra Ott
Abstract: This book makes a lively contribution to questions of collaboration and resistance, to daily life in the German-occupied western Pyrenees and to the post-liberation purge. The author takes an ethnographic and ethno-historical approach to wartime and postwar archives and reconstructs the richness of social life in the tradition of LeRoy Ladurie's classic work, Montaillou. The post-liberation trial dossiers of suspected collaborators contain tales of human folly, vengeance, ambiguity and betrayal. Set in the French Basque Country and Bearn, the book first provides the geographical, cultural, socio-political and historical context for understanding the nine narratives that follow. The narratives trace the wartime and post-liberation experiences of ordinary yet colorful individuals who became involved with the occupiers for a wide variety of reasons: among others, to settle scores; to satisfy egotistical desires; to gain access to power, money, material rewards and protection; for sexual and gastronomic pleasure; for love; for friendships that were usually ambiguous, sometimes intimate, almost always utilitarian, at times driven by fear and desperation; and, in a few rare cases, for ideological reasons. The narratives also reveal the role played by German prisoners of war in the post-liberation court of justice.
Year: 2017
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No

The Enemy as Insider: German POWs as Trial Witnesses in the Basses-Pyrenees, 1944-1946 (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Enemy as Insider: German POWs as Trial Witnesses in the Basses-Pyrenees, 1944-1946
Author: Sandra Ott
Abstract: As happened elsewhere in France magistrates and jurors in the court of justice in Pau sometimes delivered disproportionate judgments during the post-liberation trials of suspected collaborators. As other studies of this period have shown, the initial slowness with which the court operated frustrated both the authorities and the local population, many of whom resented the leniency accorded to well-known collaborators in their communities. Yet the search for truth and justice in Pau was rather unusual in several respects: on numerous occasions the authorities interrogated German prisoners of war and their former interpreters in an attempt to identify "the bad French." The court of justice often gave considerable weight to their testimonies. Rather than becoming invisible as POWs, such Germans paradoxically became "insiders" by playing their part in the trial process.
Date: 04/15/2010
Conference Name: War, Exile, Justice and Everyday Life, 1936-1946

Finding Lacombe, Lucien: The Trial of Teenaged Mouchards in Pau (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Finding Lacombe, Lucien: The Trial of Teenaged Mouchards in Pau
Author: Sandra Ott
Abstract: This paper explores the wartime experiences of a teenager in Pau whose lack of ideological commitment, taste for weapons and power and arrogant behavior mirror, in some respects, the semi-fictional character in Louis Malle's controversial film (1974).
Date: 11/10/2011
Conference Name: 39th annual conference of the Western Society for French History, Reed College/Portland State

Scandals, Tensions and Courtroom Drama: What Made the Press in the Pyrenean Borderlands, 1944-1947 (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Scandals, Tensions and Courtroom Drama: What Made the Press in the Pyrenean Borderlands, 1944-1947
Author: Sandra Ott
Abstract: This paper formed part of a round-table discussion about postwar France: ownerless art, looted books, lost homes, visions of gender and what made the news in liberated France.
Date: 03/22/2012
Conference Name: 58th annual conference of the Society for French Historical Studies, USC, Los Angeles

The Hotel Continental: An Extraordinary Tale of Circulating Jews, Germans, Collaborationists and Resistants in Pau (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Hotel Continental: An Extraordinary Tale of Circulating Jews, Germans, Collaborationists and Resistants in Pau
Author: Sandra Ott
Abstract: This paper tells the extraordinary tale of complicity between a French couple and the German officer who requisitioned part of their elegant hotel during the Occupation. The couple obtained false ID papers and provided rooms and jobs for hundreds of Jews seeking passage to Spain across the Pyrenees. The Jews posed as tourists in the hotel and, when employed by the hotel, served German soldiers who remained ignorant of their true identities.
Date: 10/24/2013
Conference Name: 41st annual conference of the Western Society for French History, Atlanta, Georgia State

Pyrenean Passeurs and Black Marketeers: Lessons in Morality and Immorality (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Pyrenean Passeurs and Black Marketeers: Lessons in Morality and Immorality
Author: Sandra Ott
Abstract: This paper explores the wartime and postwar experiences of four men who operated as clandestine guides in the western Pyrenees during the German occupation. Two were classified as "bad guides" owing to their immoral behavior: they often took large sums of money from the Jews who hired them to take them across the Pyrenees into Spain and alerted the Germans about their forthcoming clandestine passage in return for payment. The other two passeurs were the epitome of moral rectitude as they performed their highly dangerous tasks in saving the lives of Jews, Allied pilots and French evaders of obligatory work service in Germany.
Date: 04/24/2014
Conference Name: 60 annual conference of the Society for French Historical Studies, Montreal, University of Quebec

German Intellectual Interest in the Basques (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: German Intellectual Interest in the Basques
Author: Sandra Ott
Abstract: This paper traces German intellectual interest in the Basques to the writings of Humboldt, through the 19th and early 20th centuries. German universities established chairs in Basque Studies and created numerous journals that dealt with the Basque language and Basque notions of racial purity. During the Great War, German academics used Basque prisoners of war as a resource for collecting Basque folktales and folksongs. During the interwar years several prominent Nazi jurists visited the French Basque Country to promote Basque-German relations.
Date: 11/15/2014
Conference Name: 42nd annual conference of the Western Society for French History, San Antonio, Rice University

Too Harsh, Too lenient: The Magistrature in 20th Century France (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Too Harsh, Too lenient: The Magistrature in 20th Century France
Author: Sandra Ott
Abstract: This paper explores the structure and functioning of the court of justice in Pau during the post-liberation period (1944-1948) and traces the inconsistent path of justice that led to sharp criticism in the press and among the local population as suspected collaborators came to trial. Consistent jurisprudence was impossible to achieve.
Date: 04/18/2015
Conference Name: 61 annual conference of the Society for French Historical Studies, Colorado Spring, Colorado College

Double Think in Occupied and Liberated France: A Test case from the Western Pyrenees (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Double Think in Occupied and Liberated France: A Test case from the Western Pyrenees
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Abstract: This paper draws upon George Orwell's notion of "doublethink" and Pierre Laborie's concept of double-think to analyze the wartime behaviors of a Basque passeur who played a double game as an informer for the Germans and a guide for "enemies of the Reich" and an exiled Spanish Republican who followed the same path.
Date: 03/04/2016
Conference Name: 62nd annual confewrence of the Society for French Historical Studies, Nashville, Vanderbilt

War, Exile, Justice and Everyday Life, 1936-1946 (Book)
Title: War, Exile, Justice and Everyday Life, 1936-1946
Editor: Sandra Ott
Abstract: This interdisciplinary collection of essays focuses on one of the most turbulent decades in contemporary world history---1936 to 1946---a period during which, in part of Western Europe alone, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World war, the German occupation of France, Nazism, and fascism displaced millions of people. Throughout these tumultuous times, people fled from invading armies and tyrannical regimes, were evacuated in the wake of aerial bombardments, and sought refuge from persecution and both the threat and the reality of extermination. Several themes run throughout the collection: displacement, dispossession, disillusionment, pre- and postwar divisiveness, and disconnection between propaganda and the reality of everyday life.
Year: 2011
Publisher: Center for Basque Studies
Type: Multi-author monograph
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 978-1-935709
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Living With the Enemy German Occupation, Collaboratiion and Justice in the Western Pyrenees, 1940-1948 (Book)
Title: Living With the Enemy German Occupation, Collaboratiion and Justice in the Western Pyrenees, 1940-1948
Author: Sandra Ott
Abstract: 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.
Year: 2017
Publisher: University Printing House
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781107178205
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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