The Marseillaise of an Alsatian Malgré-Nous: The Story of a Frenchman Forced to Be a Soldier of the Wehrmacht in Ukraine

For more than ten years (1993-2005), Léon Laugel, an inexhaustible retiree from Alsace, crisscrossed Ukraine, then a democracy in the making which, having been imprisoned for seventy years in the Communist dictatorship of the Soviet Russia, was eagerly aspiring to become a Western democracy. In his position as a Governor of the Rotary International for Ukraine, he assisted in the establishment of Rotary Clubs there and investigated their most pressing needs by providing medical supplies and many forms of equipment and material for orphanages, schools, universities, hospitals, and universities throughout this vast region. It was indeed a country that he had come to know quite well from the past: He was only nineteen years old when Hitler forcibly incorporated young men from conquered countries into the Wehrmacht and sent them to the Russian Front. Laugel thus became one of the Malgré-Nous (young men from the regions of France incorporated into the Reich and forced to fight in the war for Germany). Resolved as best he could not to willfully collaborate with the Nazi military operations, he deliberately skirted and avoided direct involvement as a combatant on the front lines in Russia and Ukraine through guile and ingenuity by trying to arrange how he would be deployed in action (ultimately he became a dispatch rider who delivered messages and commands to be carried out at the front). A soldier of neither military camp, he was an exceptionally objective eyewitness to both Nazi and Soviet operations and atrocities committed against each other, among themselves, or against the many unfortunate and innocent victims caught between the opposing sides in one of the most violent and murderous phases of the war, when the invaders first penetrated far into Soviet Union and then retreated in panic before the violent onslaught of the Red Army. Aside from the graphic and objective narrative that the text offers of an important period in the history of World War II, the book by Léon and Nicole Laugel provides a valuable and needed addition to commentaries on the varied forms of the French Resistance in response to the larger question of who had resisted the Nazis and precisely how. Unlike the many mostly heroic and paramilitary Resistance chronicles we are used to reading, where active and more open forms are the kinds most featured, Laugel's travel journey offers a different and hitherto unpublicized study centering upon that of those Malgré-Nous Frenchmen forced to serve against their will and used as cannon fodder on the Russian Front.
ASIN: B0BT6YF2PH
VSKU: BVV.B0BT6YF2PH.VG
Condition: Very Good
Author/Artist:Fraser, Theodore P.|Laugel, Léon|Laugel, Nicole|Zwiebel, William L.
Binding: Paperback
Note: Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.
Condition Notes: Book has little sign of wear or use