In the way they acted, the British civilians who apprehended downed Luftwaffe pilots generally answered to the characteristics of a “People’s War” – that is, a war that was democratic in its recruitment and liberal in its methods. These collective behaviors, which offer a positive image of the morale and political morality of the British people of the time, dovetail with what was until the 1970s the dominant historical analysis. In contrast to French historiography on the France of 1940, which has been almost universally negative from the 1940s to the present, British historiography prior to the 1970s presented a favorable image of wartime English society. Starting in that decade, as we shall see, it became divided over the question of whether the “People’s War” was myth or reality.

Nazism is a form of racism. If one adopts this point of view, which is not always a matter of universal assent, talk of the “living space” to be conquered and the “social harmony” to be achieved by the “community of the Volk” are merely its corollaries. These are services due the Volk, the people-race of supreme essence. In the 1930s, colonial and social ambitions helped lure imperialist “nationalists” and “socialists” de ressentiment into the Nazi camp. But it was Race that supplied the foundation of the regime that came into being in 1933 and Race that offered the “Aryans” a path to such unprecedented promotion in the social and international order alike. This redemption by way of Race goes a long way to explaining the attraction of Nazism. This is not the place to seek out the reasons for the success of Nazi racism in Germany. By comparatively charting the development of eugenics in Europe and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, Isabel Heinemann has demonstrated the specificity of the German case. Nowhere else was such a diversified, brutal and ultimately murderous array of eugenicist practices so systematically implemented.1 For Heinemann, this is proof of the “extremely racist” character of German society in this period. To assess and understand the various aspects of this specificity as well as their genesis, proliferation and ultimate disappearance, other comparative-historical studies would be useful. But the fact is that the racism of extermination for Jews and the racism of radical exclusion for blacks were both hugely popular in Nazi Germany. To promote lynching, propaganda deftly played upon these popular undercurrents.

The aim of this book is to show the extent of civilian involvement in the war. The vantage point I have chosen – a belligerent in the conflict, whether friend or enemy, suddenly arriving among civilians – sheds light on the autonomy of civilians and the ways they took up the fight. In these situations, they appear as direct actors in the war rather than mere subjects of a “Home Front” under strain and beset by mourning, shortages, gender relations and class conflict. This book restores to civilians their concern for a certain common good writ large – that is, for their (imagined) overall community. It seeks to re-politicize war as an interaction between the individual and his or her ideal overarching community, whether national or even international.

Drawing upon a field analysis – that of the concrete spatial framework in which evasion-assistance actions arose – we have seen how, despite many setbacks, a collective local dynamic rapidly expanded, gradually giving rise to a national-level resistance network. The study of the repression has shed light on the warlike and thus political dimension of these actions of inter-Allied clandestine solidarity. Another way to bring out the political commitment underlying these apparently humanitarian acts is to change scale and take into account the moral, material and national context that accompanied these collective behaviors and that on the face of it should have hampered their development. Evasion assistance did not develop in a peaceful and neutral universe but rather against a backdrop of destruction and mourning caused by Allied bombings and in opposition to a media sphere fully committed to the anti-Allied cause. A paradoxical situation, in short, one that reveals the helpers’ social autonomy vis-à-vis the French and German authorities.

Studying the lynching of Allied airmen in Germany raises questions of fact and interpretation alike. For, in attempting to establish the facts, one must rely on an indirect source: the war crimes trials brought by the Allies after the war. When conducted by an occupying power, such a posteriori investigations necessarily meet with more or less obvious resistance on the part of the newly occupied perpetrators. Interpreting these events, moreover, is made more difficult by the chronological conjunction of two main factors: from below, a violent popular reaction to the intensification of bombing and, from above, a policy of inciting murder against downed airmen. It is thus necessary to separate spontaneous anger from voluntary compliance with Nazi incitement and reveal their respective contributions to inducing men and women to take action. Provided that it was not the interaction of these two factors that provoked aggression.

The time has come to address the political dimension of lynch mobs. Were the mobs that attacked defenseless prisoners expressing legitimate (berechtigte Empörung) or extreme (äusserste empörte) indignation, as was claimed in the administrative documents that encouraged or approvingly took note of the assaults? Were they driven by anger (Wut), fury (Zorn), rage (rasende Wut) or even hate and fury (in seinem Hass und in seinem Zorn), as Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, maintained?1 One must not neglect the scale of destruction visited upon Germany. Over the duration of the war, Germany lost six times as many inhabitants as Britain or France, with a population between 1.5 and 2 times as large.2 Once a certain threshold was crossed, a social mathematics proportionally linking the number of deaths under the bombs to a degree of violence may have been set in motion. But this mechanism demands closer study. Until now, there has been no effort to scrutinize the shift from anger to violence against the subaltern agents of destruction. The handful of books and articles that consider the fate of airmen in Germany and Austria present this link as obvious. It is here, however, that any discussion must begin.

The local nature of much Resistance activity helped sustain it. From its emergence to its regeneration following destruction by the occupier, aid-based resistance resembled a perpetual motion machine. Others have already recounted the escape network experience. In addition to the handful of memoirs written by their participants, a large number of accounts by former fugitives have been published in Great Britain and the United States – so many true stories of adventure and occasionally love unfurling across the length and breadth of France. In this chapter, however, I shall seek to shed light on the first two phases of aid supplied on the ground. These consist of the first moments following the downing of an Allied aircraft or the escape of an Allied serviceman and the weeks that immediately followed, during which efforts were made to locate go-betweens who might escort fugitives to Spain and, from there, Gibraltar and England. Located upstream of escape networks and fully dependent on the willingness of local people who enjoyed no other source of support, these two phases of assistance ensured that pro-Allied energy was a renewable resource. The third phase of aid – which was also the most difficult to attain for those concerned – consisted in the establishment of organized networks requiring money, permanent agents and relay points to the border. This is why, though the Allies recognized 34,000 helpers, only 2,000 escape network agents were interviewed after the war by the French secret service.

Armed citizens attempted to resist the invasion by apprehending downed enemy airmen. Their story, however, is largely unknown and extremely difficult to study. Not only was the phenomenon in question very short-lived but, in cases in which an airman was apprehended in brutal fashion, efforts were immediately made to conceal it for fear of reprisal on the part of the occupying power. The far more traumatic nature of the events that were to follow under the Occupation only further contributed to burying this memory. What we know about the behavior of civilians during these few days or weeks thus for the most part comes to us from the archives of the victorious power, particularly those of its military tribunals. The document that follows, which comes from a French source, is an exception. It offers an alternative, on-the-ground perspective on the sequence of events.

The moment is freighted with history and politics: that is the lesson one draws from studying the myriad and most often fleeting microsocial encounters that took place in Europe during the Second World War. In addition to the little facts it reveals that, by virtue of their recurrence, constitute social phenomena, comparative history trains a spotlight on national groupings, redefines the lines dividing friend from enemy and also clarifies certain relations of transnational friendship. What factors animated the Duponts, Smiths and Schmidts of wartime Europe such that they adopted behaviors that were at once so homogeneous and/or specific at the national level and so contrasting from one country to the next? Ground-level analysis demonstrates that France’s “strange defeat” in 1940 may have concealed an insurrection nipped in the bud; that the British “People’s War” was more than a myth; that the French Resistance was a nationwide movement, a portion of which – that represented by the helpers – was in direct contact with Allied personnel; and that, in Germany, the “community of the people-race” was indeed a social reality and the driving force of collective violence.