Living with the Enemy German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the Western Pyrenees, 1940–1948

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.

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 liberation; 4. The purge, the judiciary, and the court of justice; Part II. The Narratives and the Trials: 5. A black market bicycle vendor; 6. A teenaged informer and the tragedy of Portet; 7. A pro-German Basque farmer; 8. The changing face of the enemy; 9. A town hall secretary and a Vichy police commissioner; 10. Friendship with a Nazi officer; 11. A Basque double agent and a Nazi officer; 12. A teenaged volunteer in the Waffen-SS; 13. Sex, vengeance, and duplicity: the strange case of Dr Vérité; Part III. Conclusions.

Sandra Ott is an Oxford-educated anthropologist, and she has done research in the Basque Country for forty years. Speaking Basque, French and Spanish, she acquired minor fame among artisan cheese-makers for the chapter on 'The cheese analogy of conception' in her first book The Circle of Mountains: A Basque Shepherding Community (1981). Other works include the ethnographic film The Basques of Santazi with Granada Television for 'Disappearing Worlds', and War, Judgment and Memory in the Basque Borderlands, 1914–1945 (2008).