THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY: The offspring of German soldiers and French women born during the occupation were cruelly shunned
When Jean-Jacques Delorme was growing up in Lisieux in Normandy in the 1940s, schoolmates called him a "bastard" or "son of a Boche" – a slur word for German. He didn't really know what it meant, but it made him feel like an outcast.
Life had been different from the outset. After his birth in October 1944 it had been his grandmother who cared for him until he was five years old. But it was only decades later that he learnt why his mother was absent at that time: she had been sentenced to one year in prison, for so-called collaboration horizontale. She had also been given five years of dégradation nationale – essentially, a loss of certain rights – for her crime of indignité nationale, sleeping with the enemy.
Mr Delorme was not alone. He is one of 200,000 children who grew up in France the offspring of German soldiers who occupied the country during the war. After the war ended, supposed collaborators were executed, while women who had been "collaborating horizontally" had their hair shaved, were paraded through jeering crowds and jailed. Mr Delorme's mother was one of those "shaven women".
Mr Delorme faced silence and secrecy when he tried to find out who his father was. His suspicions had first been raised when he was 12 years old. "My sister was born and my mother gave me the livre de famille – or 'family book' – to register her birth," he remembers. "I noticed a note in the margin by my name, saying I was illegitimate by my father.
"My mother had married when I was four, and I had taken her husband's name as he officially recognised me as his son. I asked my mother, but she wouldn't tell me. Nobody would tell me. I sensed I was different from my brothers and sisters, so I asked my mother again when I was 17. She was enraged, and walked out slamming the door behind her."
It was only when he was 21, had completed his military service and gone to work in Paris that Mr Delorme found the truth out about who his real father was. "I asked my grandmother. She pulled out an envelope, yellowed with age, from her wardrobe. 'Your mother asked me to destroy its contents, but I didn't in case you ever wanted to know,' she told me. I opened the envelope and there were a good number of photos of my mother with a German soldier."
Then his mother, who had been a kitchen servant during the occupation, finally revealed his birth father's name: Hans Hoffmann. >>> Geneviève Roberts in Paris | Sunday, March 07, 2010
