French President Emmanuel Macron marked on Saturday the 80th anniversary of Free French troops liberating the eastern city of Strasbourg from Nazi occupation and called for overlooked victims of World War II to be honoured.
The president reviewed troops and attended a military ceremony at the Broglie Square in central Strasbourg, bowing before a monument to General Philippe Leclerc who led Free French troops into the city on November 23, 1944.
“When we knew the flag was up on the cathedral, we had reached our objective — freedom, freeing Alsace,” said Roger Le Neures, a 101-year-old veteran of the fight present at the ceremony.
France’s colours flew from the cathedral’s spire during the ceremony in homage to the city’s liberators.
Macron was also to visit Natzweiler-Struthof, around 60km west of Strasbourg, the only concentration camp built by the Nazis on French soil. Around 17,000 of the 50,000 people interned at Struthof and its satellite camps died or disappeared.
The president highlighted the fate of tens of thousands of Alsatian men forcibly enlisted into the German army.
“These children of Alsace... were captured, dressed in a uniform they loathed in the service of a cause that made them slaves, instruments of a crime that killed them too, and threatened with reprisals if they attempted to flee,” he said.
The conscripts’ “tragedy must be named, recognised and taught”, Macron added.
Alsace had been fought over for decades by the neighbours and was annexed by Germany following France’s defeat in 1940.
The forced conscription is “something that’s always been misunderstood”, said 99-year-old Jean-Marie Hostert, a surviving member of the group known as “Malgre-nous” (“against our will”).
“We didn’t want to go” to fight for Germany, added Hostert, speaking during the Strasbourg commemorations in Strasbourg.
Some have tied the “Malgre-nous” group to the 1944 massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, one of the worst mass killings of civilians by the Nazis in western Europe.
“Following the war, people wanted to highlight the memory of heroes, resistance fighters, everything that could bind France together again,” said historian Christophe Woehrle.
“In that whole story, the ‘Malgre-nous’ are a bit of a stain. It’s not glorious. It’s not something you can build a national memory from,” he added. Macron announced that scholar and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch, tortured and executed by the Gestapo in 1944, would be reinterred in the Pantheon — the Paris monument to France’s greatest citizens.
Bloch would be honoured “for his work, his teaching and his courage,” the president said, calling him a “man of the Enlightenment in the army of the shadows” — the nickname for the French Resistance.
Born into a Jewish family, decorated First World War veteran Bloch revolutionised his field of medieval history by bringing in ideas from sociology, geography, psychology and economics.