Alsace-Lorraine

Located on France's border with Germany, Alsace- Lorraine encompasses two predominantly Germanspeaking regions (in German, Elsass and Lothringen), which have frequently been disputed between France and Germany. The provinces fell to France in the late 17th century and early 18th, but as a result of France's humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, all of Alsace and the northern portion of Lorraine (mainly Moselle) were annexed to the new German empire, the Second Reich, which emerged as a result of the war. Under German rule, the province was called Reichsland, the inhabitants were given the choice of remaining in the province or leaving for France (45,000 left), and the Second Reich set to work exploiting the rich coal fields of Lorraine, producing coke that fed the fires of Germany's great arms manufacturers. In Lorraine were forged many of the weapons with which World War I would be fought. Germany's defeat in World War I resulted in France's recovery of Alsace and Lorraine, but the fall of France in 1940 meant that once again the territory would be annexed by Germany—this time to the Third Reich. The provinces were designated two Gaue (administrative districts) of the Reich, each governed by a Gaueleiter, or manager, who answered directly to Berlin. In contrast to 1871, the French-speaking minority of Alsace-Lorraine were not asked to choose their nationality. Some 200,000 individuals were summarily evicted from the region and sent into occupied France with only such property as they could carry. Different treatment was given to certain other groups within the two Gaue. Jews and others deemed by the Reich undesirable were deported to Concentration and Extermination Camps, imprisoned, or summarily executed. French soldiers who had been born in the region and who had been made prisoners of war during the Battle of France were, for the most part, conscripted into the Wehrmacht. A significant number of pro-German soldiers thus conscripted were subsequently transferred from the Wehrmacht into the Waffen SS. Most of the rest of the region's inhabitants, though they spoke German, identified more readily with Alsace-Lorraine 51 France and certainly did not embrace Nazism. These individuals were subject to typical iron-fisted Nazi rule, and the resistance was never as active in the former Alsace-Lorraine as in central and southern France. This gave the German overlords a substantially free hand in exploiting the rich coking coal reserves of the region, which, as was the case before World War I, once again fed the furnaces of the German arms industry. After the German surrender in 1945, Alsace-Lorraine reverted to French control, and the region's inhabitants all became, quite automatically, French citizens once again. Further reading: Engler, Richard E. The Final Crisis: Combat in Northern Alsace, January 1945. Bedford, Penn.: Aegis Consulting Group, 1999; Goodfellow, Samuel Huston. Between the Swastika and the Cross of Lorraine: Fascisms in Interwar Alsace. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999; Shaw, Michael. History, People, and Places in Eastern France, Alsace, Lorraine, and the Vosges. Bourne End, U.K: Spurbooks, 1979; Zaloga, Stephen J. Lorraine 1944: Patton vs. Manteuffel. London: Osprey, 2000.