Produire la guerre, produire le genre: Des Françaises au travail dans l’Allemagne nationale-socialiste (1940–1945).

Abstract

It is often forgotten that 80,000 French women volunteered to work in Germany during the Second World War. While historians have written extensively about the Service du Travail Obligatoire, voluntary workers have received much less attention. Building on the work of two pioneers in the field, Patrice Arnaud and Helga Bories-Sawala, Camille Fauroux offers us an extensive, nuanced and intriguing picture of a phenomenon obscured for many years by a collective loss of memory. Fauroux, who teaches at the Université de Toulouse 2, prefers to use the term ‘civil workers’ to ‘voluntary workers’. Why? Because, as she shows in detail, after volunteering and freely signing a contract in France, the women—once in Germany—were usually forced to live and work in circumscribed and grim conditions. And from 1942, the Germans unilaterally prolonged contracts until the end of the war. The women became virtual prisoners. Fauroux has mined a range of...