'Boche babies' trace German roots

One of the last World War II taboos is being lifted in France.

By Hugh Schofield

March 4, 2009 / BBC News

So-called "Boche babies" - the illegitimate offspring of occupying enemy troops - are speaking openly for the first time about their family secret and hunting for long-lost German fathers.

Spurred by a 2004 investigative book, Enfants Maudits (Accursed Children), and a television documentary that came out at the same time, hundreds of men and women in their 60s have contacted the army archives department in Berlin to find out more about their lost parents.

"Everyone tells the same tale. They say: 'There's a hole in my life. Half of me is missing'," says Jeanine Nivoix-Sevestre, who heads the French National Association of War Children (ANEG).

The association was set up in 2005 following a visit by a small group of "enfants de la guerre" (war children) to the Wehrmacht Information Office for War Losses and Prisoners-of-War (WASt), where some 18 million index cards on World War II German soldiers are stored.

Today, ANEG has 335 members and has helped more than 130 of them locate paternal families in Germany. A handful have even found fathers who are still alive.

In all, it is estimated that as many as 200,000 French children were born to illicit liaisons during the German occupation between May 1940 and December 1944, though the figure is impossible to verify.

'Shocking blow'

Ms Nivoix-Sevestre's own story is typical.

In 1941, her mother was 16 and working in a shop-bar in the Normandy village of Cambes-en-Plaine, when she met a young German soldier called Werner.

Ms Nivoix-Sevestre was born in 1942. Two years later, her mother was killed in the Allied bombardment of Caen.

"My mother's family spurned me because of what had happened, and I was brought up by a foster mother," she says.

"I discovered the truth when I was 13. I asked a friend why my identity card said 'pere inconnu' (father unknown) and he told me my dad was German. It seemed everyone knew in the village except me."

"It was such a shocking blow. I literally was unable to speak for two and a half months. At the time, talk was still full of the horrors committed by the Germans. I was terrified that my own father might have been part responsible," she says.

Over the years Ms Nivoix-Sevestre picked up bits of information about her father.

A girlfriend of her mother remembered his first name and that he was Austrian. She said he was blond, not very tall, and something of an extrovert. He played the harmonica and could walk on his hands.

In 2003, she was among the first to contact the WASt, which then set out to trace soldiers who had been stationed at Cambes-en-Plaine in 1941.

Several were found and some had kept group photographs showing other soldiers. Sadly none fitted the bill. Ms Nivoix-Sevestre is convinced her father died later on the Eastern Front.

Half-brother

More fortunate is Marie-Christine Pingeon, who was born in Paris in 1943 after her mother fell in love with a German working at the navy ministry on the Place de la Concorde.

Willi Schober took the bold step of moving into her flat, which was frowned on by his superiors.

In 1944, Mr Schober had been posted to the port of Saint-Malo when he got news that his baby was ill.

He forged a permit of leave and went to Paris, but he was caught and sent for punishment in Germany. Mother and daughter never saw him again.

"I knew from a young age that my father was German, because my grandmother told me. But my mother never spoke of it. It was a forbidden subject," says Ms Pingeon.

"In 2004, I saw the television programme and got in touch with the WASt."

"There, I learned the truth. My father had been imprisoned and then tried to escape. He was tried again, convicted of desertion and executed."

"In a way it was because of me. In the minutes of the trial, he says that he wanted to come and see his child. You could say I cost him his life."

Ms Pingeon was put in touch with her father's family, who embraced her as one of their own.

She also discovered that she had a half-brother almost exactly her age - her father throughout had a wife in Germany - and the two are now very close.

'Huge surprise'

Eliane Trincal's story is even more heart-warming.

She was in fact born two years after the war ended - her father, Otto, was a German prisoner of war. But she considers herself a war child because she suffered the same victimisation at school.

"They called me a 'dirty boche' and all that. It was a very hard time," she says.

Eliane's mother had fallen in love with the young German POW, who was working on a farm in the Auvergne.

But locals found out and denounced the couple.

Otto was arrested and taken away to another locality, not knowing that his lover was pregnant.

"I often asked my mother who my father was, but she refused to tell me. It was a taboo subject," says Ms Trincal.

"Finally, in 2001, I persuaded her to give me his name. I sent out letters to about 30 people in the Leipzig region who could have been him. Then one day, I got a letter back. It was him!"

Ms Trincal met her father for the first time in 2002, and now sees him regularly.

"It was a huge surprise for him. He had no idea I existed. But he took one look at me and said - 'Well, I can't deny it: you're obviously my daughter!'"

Poignantly, Ms Trincal's mother had written a letter to Otto at his new place of work in 1946. But the farm-owner was under instructions not to pass on any mail.

Nearly 60 years later, Otto still wondered why his lover had failed to contact him.

According to Ms Trincal: "He said that for him the affair was not just a fling. He would have married her if she had come after him."

It is a sign of the enduring sensitivity of such family stories that Ms Trincal refuses to reveal her father's full name and will not permit photographs to be shown.

"It is a beautiful ending, but I regard it as just recompense for the misery I went through as child," she says.

'Law of silence'

For many of the war babies, childhood was indeed a trial.

Memories still rankle of being singled out, teased or maltreated.

In the worst cases, children were made to eat cockroaches or drink their own urine, says Ms Nivoix-Sevestre.

"Oddly enough, it was often the mothers who were the cruellest," she says. "They and their families."

"When you think about it, the mothers may have enjoyed their romantic affair with a German soldier, but what they certainly did not want was a living reminder of it later on," she adds.

On the other hand, Ms Pingeon says she never suffered as a child.

"Partly it was because my father was well-liked in the neighbourhood of Paris where I was born," she says. "I think he had been fed all this propaganda in Germany, and when he came to know my mother and to live among the French, it opened his eyes."

"As a child I knew I had a German father - though of course nothing about him. But I did not seek to hide it. In a way I was proud."

"In that sense I am not typical of the 'enfants de la guerre'. But in another way I am - I always had a very difficult relationship with my mother. She refused to tell me anything about my father. But you cannot build your life on a lie and not expect there to be emotional consequences," she adds.

The complex maternal relationship may explain why it is only now that so many war children are finally coming out with the truth.

"If we kept quiet for so many years, it was really to protect our mothers and also their husbands - our step-fathers. We respected the law of silence," Ms Pingeon says.

"But time has passed. Our parents have died or are very old. It is now that we can talk."