German occupation of north-east France during World War I
The current departments of Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin, and Moselle, which were part of the German Reich from 1871 until their return to France at the end of the war in November 1918, are not included among the occupied territories.The northern part of the valley of the Meuse River (including Givet and Fumay) was attached to the General Government of Belgium; the district of Briey was placed under German civil authority until December 1916, and was then subject to the military governor of Metz.The population of this area greatly decreased during this period due to both the excessive mortality relative to births as well as deportations and voluntary migration to unoccupied France.[3] For the whole of the occupied territory, the statistics of the Food Committee of the North of France indicate 2,235,467 inhabitants in 1915, but only 1,663,340 as of June 30, 1918; the decrease over the entire period beginning in the autumn of 1914 was even higher.Germany itself, due to the British naval blockade of her ports, suffered from a lack of food and refused to support the populations of the occupied territories.[9] Famine loomed in the fall of 1914 and the question of food supplies was the main concern for the authorities in seeking aid from neutral countries.As in Belgium, the German authorities were interested in this aid, which avoided hunger riots and made it possible to continue levies on local agricultural production.Its administrative headquarters were in Brussels, and its executive committee chaired by Louis Guérin, a member of the Chamber of Commerce of Lille, at the Prefecture of the Nord département.In Lille, the per capita daily rations fell to 1300 calories in 1917, then rose to 1400 in 1918[20] (intake in normal periods is on average of the order of 2800, a state of undernourishment is reached at below 2000).At first, some German soldiers and officers helped civilians, which was officially prohibited; but even this source of supply dried up from 1917 on, when the army itself began suffering from a shortage.[22] Malnutrition led to epidemics of typhoid in late 1915-early 1916, bacillary dysentery, increased deaths from tuberculosis and contributed to the general excess mortality.[24] Atrocities were committed by the German troops on their entry into France in August and September 1914, which included the destruction of buildings and executions in retaliation for alleged resistance.Thus, upon their arrival in Lille, the Germans took 19 hostages, the Mayor, the Prefect, the Bishop, and 8 municipal councilors, who were summoned daily to the Kommandantur and forced to report every 6 days to the Citadel.Responding to the request of the municipalities, the French government granted loans through complex financial circuits to the major cities of the region.[14] The closure of textile factories, the largest employer in the Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing agglomeration, and metallurgical industries, caused a high rate of unemployment.This last confiscation particularly traumatized a starving population, including many patients, who were already deprived of heating and now of bedding, with the use of straw as a replacement being prohibited as well.Workers were assigned to various jobs such as washing uniforms, earthworks, unloading wagons, and, just as France required for German prisoners, digging trenches and installing barbed wire, in violation of the Hague Conventions, which prohibited the employment of civilians for the war effort against their homeland.The deportations of April 1916, which might be described as round-ups, affected 9,300 people in Lille and 4,399 in Tourcoing; in total 20,000 in the area, in the proportion of three women for every man.Indeed, unlike the cities suffering from massive unemployment following the closure of factories, agriculture lacked manpower due to the departure of the mobilized men.[33] The Germans evacuated the women, children and old people from their homes towards other parts of France, not to feed them, but to recover lodgings to house their own troops.It also included the most active and risky actions of resistance, such as sabotage of railway tracks, aid to soldiers, organization of escape networks, publishing and distributing the underground press (with low circulation, in the best of cases several hundred, the press was sometimes limited to a few copies; the most notable was the newspaper Patience, which changed its name several times and whose group was dismantled by the Germans in 1916).It also entailed the collection of military intelligence communicated to the allies, activity organized in networks, with the best known being that of Jacquet, Trulin and Louise de Bettignies.Collaboration inspired by intellectual or ideological support was practically non-existent except for correspondents of the propaganda periodical La Gazette des Ardennes.Economic collaboration was more widespread: voluntary or industrial work accepting orders for the army, mayors diverting food intended for civilians for soldiers, etc.During the occupation of 1940–44, acts of resistance multiplied, collaboration was much weaker than in the rest of France, and the Vichy government was very unpopular in the north-east from November 1940.[39] In the interwar years local narratives and studies were published, but subsequently these territories were neglected by the French historiography of the Great War.
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