Looking for Lacombe, Lucien in Southwestern France

Some observers of Louis Malle’s controversial film, Lacombe, Lucien (1974), have acknowledged that they had met young men very much like Lucien in occupied France: young men whose weapons gave them a taste for power, the will to be important, and access to pleasure and money.[1] The departmental archives of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques in Pau are certainly no substitute for having first-hand experience of real-life Lucien Lacombe in the 1940s. Nevertheless, the trial dossiers of teenaged informers provide a lens through which to examine the factors that motivated those young men during the occupation, their family circumstances, political backgrounds, and their relationships with “interested agents of persuasion,” including parents, peers, collaborationists, and the occupiers. Although trial dossiers provide only fragmentary evidence of human choices and wartime behaviors, they are nevertheless a rich, ethnographic resource with which to test some of the conclusions historians have drawn about real-life rank and file youths who aided the Germans or who actively supported Hitler’s regime.

Interdisciplinary in approach, this article casts new light on teenagers who helped the enemy in World War II and on their treatment by both the postwar judicial system and the regional press.[2] It focuses on two teenagers who lived in the Béarnais capital of Pau: Johan de Chappotin and Henri Lasserre.[3] Chappotin proudly wore a Waffen-SS uniform and regarded his friend Lasserre as his “first lieutenant.” Lasserre was one of the teenagers largely responsible for a German massacre in July 1944. How did these two youths respond to the war, to the conditions in which they found themselves, to their parents, and to other “interested agents of persuasion”?[4] The experiences of Chappotin and Lasserre provide an ethnographic and historical basis for further critical reflections on the film, Lacombe, Lucien, and its semi-fictional anti-hero, the disaffected seventeen year-old Lucien.

As Paul Jankowski has pointed out, accident – a punctured bicycle tire – explains the situation in which Lucien ends up aiding the enemy in occupied France.[5] Early in the film, a local resistance leader rejects the young peasant’s request to join the maquis, because Lucien is too young, too wild, and too uncommitted to the cause. When Lucien’s bicycle has a flat tire, the bored youth finds himself outside the headquarters of local collaborationists, who quickly offer him an escape from his dreary hospital job, as well as easy access to alcohol, sex, money, and, above all, to power as a police allemande. Lucien Lacombe has no ideological commitment either to the resistance or to collaborationism. His response to wartime conditions is, nevertheless, extremely complex and ambiguous.[6] He works for the German police, for example, yet forces himself upon a cultivated Jewish teenager whose family he ultimately seeks to protect.

Unlike Lucien Lacombe, both Chappotin and Lasserre came from upper middle class families. The political leanings and connections of the two families, however, differed considerably. The Chappotins were committed Germanophiles. Born in France in 1927, Johan de Chappotin spent twelve years in Germany with his parents before the war. The family spoke German fluently. His father was an engineer and French army officer who became a POW in 1940. Soon after the Armistice, Johan and his mother moved to Pau, where Mme de Chappotin frequently entertained Nazi officers in her house.[7] Rumors spread that her fourth child had been fathered by one of them. Like her estranged husband in Germany, she was “violently anti-Semitic” and “firmly believed in a German victory.” Mme de Chappotin actively belonged to the collaborationist organization, Groupe Collaboration, and supported its militant, openly political youth movement, the Jeunes de l’Europe Nouvelle, for which her son Johan distributed propaganda.[8] By June 1941, Johan’s father was working for Georges Scapini, Vichy’s “ambassador” responsible for French POWs in Germany. Meanwhile, Mme de Chappotin corresponded (in quite familiar terms) with the national leader and co-founder of the Jeunes de l’Europe Nouvelle, Jacques Schweizer, who had supported Franco-German reconciliation before the war and had become acquainted with Otto Abetz, Hitler’s “ambassador” in France during the occupation.[9]

In March 1943, at age sixteen, Johan de Chappotin dropped out of school and became an informer for the German security service (Sicherheitsdienst) in Pau.[10] As the post-liberation press later put it, the teenager “preferred the company of German officers and collaborationists to that of his professors.”[11] He joined the Jeunes de l’Europe Nouvelle in the summer of 1943, and recruited some of his teenaged friends to the group, including fifteen year-old Henri Lasserre.[12] However, in October 1943, following a violent argument with the head of the Groupe Collaboration, Chappotin was expelled from the JEN and, urged by his mother, joined the Waffen-SS.[13] In April 1944, Chappotin wrote to his mother from Germany: “I have given your letter to Schweizer, I have been received like a king. No hypocrisy here. Things are going better than ever for me.”[14]

On two occasions in the spring of 1944, Johan de Chappotin spent a few weeks in Pau, where he proudly showed off his Waffen-SS uniform. Shortly before the liberation in August 1944, the youth rejoined his unit in Germany and went on to fight in northern Italy.[15] In January 1945, Chappotin’s case came before the court of justice in Pau. For the second time since October 1944, the government prosecutor called for a minor to be subjected to capital punishment, a sanction permitted by the Law of 27 July 1942 in the treatment of minors.[16] The court found Chappotin guilty of treason and sentenced him to death in absentia.[17]

In January 1947, French police arrested the youth in the British zone of North Rhine-Westphalia.[18] Chappotin appeared before the court in Pau in February. The regional press described the scene:

Playing upon the issue of minority, his defense attorney intervened: “This supposed bandit, whom the press has dubbed the ogre of Béarn, is only a child. Look at his baby face.” In response, the “baby-faced” teenager “laughed aloud and looked up at the ceiling, shaking his head, as though he pitied his distinguished attorney. Perhaps (the reporter observed) he reckoned that the lawyer assigned to his case really didn’t know him at all.” His attorney then tried to highlight the disastrous power that agents of persuasion had exercised over the teenager during the war. “They all deserve a good spanking!” the attorney added. Chappotin once again broke out laughing. In his concluding remarks, the “exhausted and defeated” defense attorney told the courtroom that even if his pleading had perhaps not been terribly persuasive, he had at least succeeded in giving the accused and the audience a good laugh.

Unlike the prosecutor in Chappotin’s first trial in absentia, the prosecutor in the second trial chose not to seek the death penalty, given the minority of the accused at the time of criminal conduct.[20] The court found the teenager guilty of treason and determined that the defense plea relating to his wartime status as a minor did not benefit the accused in any way.[21] When the court sentenced Chappotin to twenty years in prison with national degradation for life, applause broke out.[22] The nineteen year-old youth heard the verdict with the same haughty offhandedness that he had maintained throughout the trial.[23] In March 1948, in response to a plea for grace, the President of the French Fourth Republic, Vincent Auriol, reduced his sentence to twelve years.[24] The government remitted his sentence in October 1948, when, in keeping with his longstanding anti-communist sentiments, Chappotin volunteered to serve France in the Indo-China war. In January 1951, he received amnesty following the application of French law granting the first pardons for crimes committed during the occupation.[25]

In Marcel Ophüls’s well-known documentary, Le Chagrin et la Pitié (1971), the interview with Christian de la Mazière brought to light that Frenchmen had indeed voluntarily fought as members of the Waffen-SS during World War II. As Henry Rousso and Philippe Carrard have both pointed out, such men “had not acted out of venality or moral or intellectual turpitude, as some stereotype of the collaborationist has it; they had become involved out of political and ideological conviction – to defend on the battlefield the cause that for them was the correct one.”[26] In the case of Johan de Chappotin, numerous agents of persuasion had shaped his political and ideological convictions: his Germanophile parents, senior-ranking collaborationists and Nazis at both regional and national levels in France, and twelve years in Germany. In terms of class, politico-ideological commitment, wartime family circumstances, and overall experience of the world, Chappotin cut a very different figure from Lucien Lacombe. Although both youths behaved arrogantly and clearly enjoyed the power and advantages that association with the occupiers brought, Chappotin was (unlike Lucien) a well-to-do teenaged rebel with cause, ideologically committed to Hitler’s New Europe and to an anti-communist campaign.

His friend Lasserre chose a very different wartime path. Lasserre was the son of a Vichy appeal court judge.[27] In 1943, at age fifteen, Lasserre became the ringleader of teenaged delinquents who spent their days drinking in the cafés of Pau, robbing civilians and picking fights.[28] “Always spick and span” in appearance and out of control, Lasserre ostentatiously spent money he had received from the German police or had stolen from his hapless victims. During 1943-1944, Lasserre “lived like royalty” and allegedly “emulated Al Capone.”[29] When apprehended by the Vichy police for theft, the youth reportedly sneered at them: “I’ll be free in less than twenty minutes. Just let me call the Villa St. Albert (headquarters of the German SD in Pau).” Initially, his “friends” among the German police ignored such appeals for help, owing to his delinquent behavior.[30]

In December 1943, the German police arrested Lasserre on suspicion of damaging the office of Groupe Collaboration. Lasserre denied wrongdoing and was released, perhaps owing to the influence of his father, an ardent Pétainist.[31] The teenager then began to offer information to the head of the SD, Otto Doberschütz, who took little interest in him. Doberschütz’s Swiss interpreter, Karl Hochstrasser, reckoned that Lasserre’s desire to act as an informer stemmed solely from his wish to impress fellow gang members by gaining proximity to high-ranking Nazis. Doberschütz dismissed the information Lasserre offered as low-grade and possibly fabricated.[32]

In mid-May the SD transferred Doberschütz to Nancy owing to dereliction of duty.[33] Lasserre increasingly sought the attention of Hochstrasser in his own attempts to be an “agent of persuasion.” One day in June 1944, the youth asked Hochstrasser for a revolver, owing to the numerous death threats he had received. Lasserre then gave information about local resisters to the new head of the SD, Bauer. [34] In July, Hochstrasser and Bauer saw Lasserre chatting to another teenager on the terrace of a café. The youth had just come from the village of Portet and told Lasserre that the maquis controlled the entire community. Lasserre eagerly told Hochstrasser and Bauer the news and provided them with a map of Portet, identifying households that sheltered maquisards. Lasserre refused payment, saying that his parents were quite wealthy enough to support his material needs. The massive German raid on Portet took place that same night.[35] The circumstances, behaviors and decisions that led to the tragedy were complicated, as the following account reveals.

On 20 June 1944, some two hundred young maquisards moved into Portet. They belonged to the Resistance Organization of the Army (ORA), which had its roots in the Armistice Army. Although substantial German troops were based in Pau and nearby Mont-de-Marsan, resisters circulated openly in the streets, wearing brassards on their sleeves.[36] Proud to have “soldiers” in their midst, the community of 260 inhabitants warmly welcomed the young resisters.[37] At the end of June, the regional head of ORA ordered the Portet commander, Milleret, to withdraw from the village. An intelligence report indicated that the Germans planned to launch a major attack. On the eve of the maquis’ departure on 2 July, Milleret was yet again warned about the increasingly dangerous circumstances.[38] According to one eyewitness, a teenaged stranger, “arrogant and well-dressed,” approached an elderly Portet woman as she tended her geraniums. He said to her “point blank: Madame, tomorrow Portet will be destroyed.”[39] In a nearby hamlet, a local teenager ostentatiously sauntered down the main street, dressed in his Waffen-SS uniform, and stood at the entrance of the church. As parents of local resisters filed out of Mass, the youth reprimanded them for supporting the “terrorists,” warning that a German reprisal was imminent. Hearing of the incident, Milleret dispatched a commando to intercept the youth and authorized his men to execute and to bury the teenager in Portet – actions that Milleret later deeply regretted.[40]

During the night of 3 July 1944, another commando of resisters set off to ambush a German column rumored to be heading toward the village from the north. As dawn approached, however, the resisters heard machine gun fire and explosions coming from Portet. Plumes of smoke filled the sky.[41] One thousand SS and Wehrmacht soldiers had encircled the village.[42] The troops searched and pillaged houses, burning down nine of them and incinerating three civilians. They set barns on fire, killing livestock within. By the end of the day, many German soldiers were too drunk to drive their vehicles back to Pau. “Your village will be another Oradour!” they told the terrified citizens whom they had rounded up in the main square.[43] Fourteen resisters, six civilians, and ten SS men died during combat.[44] The Germans took a further forty-seven maquisards hostage and executed them near Pau on 6 July. According to Hochstrasser, an SS commander had ordered these executions as a reprisal for the killing and mutilation of the SS officers by the Portet maquis on that tragic day.[45]

Soon after the Portet massacre, Lasserre tried to give Hochstrasser a motorcycle “as a gift,” which the Swiss interpreter refused. Hochstrasser later astutely observed that the teenager wanted to use the proffered gift as a means of obliging the Swiss to give a gift in return.[46] Lasserre wanted that “gift” to be Hochstrasser’s intervention with the German or Vichy authorities whenever the teenager got into trouble. A few days later, Vichy police called Hochstrasser. Lasserre had been arrested for armed robbery and wanted to speak to the Swiss interpreter. Hochstrasser refused to do so, on the grounds that he and the German police “did not assist thieves.” [47]

Representatives of the Departmental Liberation Committee arrested Lasserre on 22 August 1944, the same day that the principal collaborationists left Pau in a caravan protected by the Wehrmacht. Not a member of that exclusive group, the teenager remained on the margins and now found himself in serious trouble. A newspaper article about Lasserre described him as “la petite crapule Gestapette” (“a little Gestapo-wannabe crook”) with a voluminous police dossier.[48]

In December 1944, the court of justice brought Lasserre to trial.[49] The courtroom was packed. A prominent attorney from Bordeaux defended the troubled youth. The prosecutor accused Lasserre of denouncing Jews to the Germans and of passing intelligence to the enemy. Both Hochstrasser (in absentia) and a court witness claimed that Lasserre had denounced the Portet maquis to Bauer. When questioned about his membership in the JEN, Lasserre replied in a tremulous voice, “I was so young then.” The judge pressed him: “Chappotin offered to pay you 35,000 francs to drive a truckload of weapons to the maquis in a plot to capture its leader. You got information about the Portet resisters from a young friend and told Hochstrasser, didn’t you?” Lasserre denied all of the accusations. His attorney objected to Hochstrasser’s absence and challenged the credence given to the interpreter’s written testimony in the proceedings: “A former employee of the Gestapo is now the principal accuser of a French citizen!” the Bordeaux lawyer pointed out in exasperation. [50] The court sentenced Lasserre to twenty years in a corrective colony for young criminals.[51] Owing to Lasserre’s age, the court regarded his father “as civilly responsible for (Lasserre’s) actions” and fined the father 1,654 francs.[52]

Soon after reading Chappotin’s trial dossier in 2004, I met an elderly Basque woman, Odette, whose brother, Robert, had been killed by the Germans in the Portet raid. Odette had kept post-liberation newspaper clippings about Chappotin’s death sentence in absentia and a newspaper account of Lasserre’s trial in 1944. Soon after Christmas in 2004, she expressed an urgent desire to see me. Odette showed me into her warm kitchen: “I don’t know why I have made these scrapbooks for you,” she mused, “because I really don’t know you all that well. But I trust you in a way that I don’t trust people here.” One scrapbook contained photos and letters from a brother who had been tortured by the Nazis and had died as a result. The other scrapbook concerned Robert. “He was only twenty-one years old when he died,” she observed, admiring a photo of Robert in uniform.

Her anguish over Robert’s death remained acute until her own passing in 2010, at the age of ninety.

The cases of Henri Lasserre and Johan de Chappotin challenge the misperception that young people responded to their wartime conditions naïvely and apolitically. Lasserre was a juvenile delinquent – arrogant, spoiled, with access to family wealth as well as to ill-gotten cash – who joined a collaborationist youth organization, but who seems to have lacked the intense ideological commitment of his friend Chappotin. Like Lucien Lacombe, Lasserre was opportunistic, immature, and volatile in temperament. Like Lacombe, Lasserre had a craving for power and wanted to be an “insider,” a highly fluid social position in occupied and postwar France. While Lacombe sought social proximity to both collaborationists and a Jewish family, the Hornes, Lasserre sought “insider” status within a circle of Nazi officers and their Swiss interpreter, Hochstrasser, by trying to become an agent of persuasion as their informer. In the postwar trials of collaborators and collaborationists, Hochstrasser and numerous German POWs often played prominent roles as witnesses for the prosecution. Ironically, in doing so they became “insiders” in the postwar search for truth and justice. Like young Lasserre, they too tried to be agents of persuasion in their often lengthy testimonies about those who had helped them and Hitler’s cause.

Like Lucien Lacombe, Lasserre and Chappotin committed adult crimes as minors, but the fates of these semi-fictional and real-life characters were very different. At the end of Malle’s film, we learn that resisters arrested and summarily executed Lacombe in 1944. By contrast, Chappotin and Lasserre both survived the post-liberation purge. Lasserre received quite light punishment (detention for a short duration in a corrective colony for minors) in keeping with the Law of 27 July 1942, which sought to reduce repressive treatment of minors in the justice system.[54] By contrast, Chappotin first received a death sentence in absentia (1945), then a twenty-year prison sentence (1947), but was released in 1948 to fight against communism in Indo-China. The French government’s decision to allow a convicted collaborationist to do so came at a divisive time in France, when the war in Southeast Asia was increasingly disputed and former communist ministers remained permanently opposed to the government they had left in May 1947.[55]

With Odette in mind, I continue to look for “Lucien Lacombes” in the departmental archives of Pau. Thus far, I have examined the trial dossiers of six teenagers, all of whom had some contact with collaborationist movements, primarily through family members.[56] Further ethnographic research in the archives and further analysis of judiciary outcomes may illuminate more fully the varied experiences of teenagers who helped Germany in wartime France, how they responded to their wartime conditions and to family members, and how the postwar courts assessed their choices and behaviors.

Notes

1. Paul Jankowski, “In Defense of Fiction: Resistance, Collaboration, and Lacombe, Lucien,” Journal of Modern History 63 (1991): 470.

2. I wish to thank the Scholarly and Creative Activities Grant program at the University of Nevada, Reno (College of Liberal Arts) for having generously funded the archival research upon which this article is based. I also thank Shannon Fogg for her very insightful comments on the first draft of this article.

3. In order to preserve anonymity and to protect the privacy of individuals, I have changed their names.

4. See Sarah Fishman, The Battle for Children: World War II, Youth Crime, and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), especially chapter 4.

5. See Jankowski, “In Defense of Fiction,” 461, on public criticism of Lucien’s lack of ideological commitment and peasant origins.

6. See Leah D. Hewitt, “Salubrious Scandals/Effective Provocations: Identity Politics Surrounding Lacombe Lucien,” South Central Review 13:3 (2000), 74.

7. Dossier of J.C., file 30W6, Departmental archives of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques (hereafter AD, P-A).

8. Bertram M. Gordon, Collaborationism in France during the Second World War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 235.

9. Ibid., 236. Information about Mme de Chappotin is taken from documents relating to the court of justice and the chambre civique in Pau, dossier of Y.C. arrested October 15, 1944, file 30W125, AD, P-A. She appeared before the chambre civique in November 1945, but no sentence is recorded in the dossier.

10. Testimony by J.C. to the magistrate in Pau, 2 February 1947, file 30W6, AD, P-A.

11. La IVième République, 12 February 1947.

12. J.C. Main testimony to the court of justice, dossier of J.C., file 30W6, AD, P-A. See also Gordon, Collaborationism, Chapter 8, “Parlor Collaborators: The Groupe Collaboration,” 230-43.

13. Front page headlines quoting J.C. in court, La IVième République, 14 February 1947.

14. File relating to the court of justice and the chambre civique in Pau, dossier of Y.C., file 30W125, AD, P-A.

15. La IVième République, 12 February 1947, announcing that J.C. will appear before the court of justice in Pau. The article includes a photo of Chappotin in his Waffen-SS uniform.

16. See Fishman, The Battle for Children, 207-10.

17. Chappotin was the fifth person to receive the death sentence in that court. See case 39, sentences and amnesties delivered by the court of justice in Pau, file 1257W9, AD, P-A.

18. Dossier of J.C, file 30W6, AD, P-A.

19. La IVième République, 14 February 1947. The following quotations are taken from this newspaper article as well.

20. Catherine Elliott, French Criminal Law (Portland: Willan Publishing, 2001), 121.

21. Case 395, file 1257W14, AD, P-A.

22. Dossier of J.C., file 30W6, AD, P-A.

23. The description and all quotations are taken from the press account of the trial in La IVième République, 14 February 1947.

24. Case 395, list of death penalties sought by the prosecution, 1946-1948, file 1257W14, AD, P-A.

25. Case 395, J.C., Court of appeal in Pau, file 1257W9AD, P-A.

26. Philippe Carrard, The French Who Fought for Hitler: Memories from the Outcasts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1. See also Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 105.

27. Curiously enough, Lasserre’s father does not appear in the postwar file on the judiciary purge. See file 34W9, AD, P-A.

28. Document 17, testimony of Karl Hochstrasser to the police commissioner of the Services de la Surveillance Territoire, no. 60/1, Paris, 14 November 1944, 25, dossier of S.P., file 30W42, AD, P-A.

29. La IVième République, 14 December 1944.

30. Article on “L’Europe Nouvelle” that featured the exploits of young Palois gangsters led by L-B in 44, a short-lived newspaper published by the FFI and the Liberation Committee of the Basses-Pyrénées, 21 August 1944.

31. M. Beguérie, personal communication, in Sohüta, French Basque Country, 6 July 2004.

32. Document 17, testimony of Karl Hochstrasser to the police commissioner of the Services de la Surveillance Territoire, no. 60/1, Paris, 14 November 1944, 25, dossier of S.P., file 30W42, AD, P-A.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid.

36. Louis Poullenot, Basses-Pyrénées, Occupation, Libération 1940-1945 (Biarritz: J&D Editions, 1995), 222. See General M. Céroni, Le corps franc Pommiès, Vol. 2 (Montauban: Dupin, 1984), 343-59, for a detailed military account of the attack.

37. Testimony of Mme Loustau, resident of Portet, in Maxime Malompré and Carole Nicolas, Orage de feu et de sang sur Portet, 3 juillet 1944 (Pau: Éditions Marrimpouey, 2003), 25.

38. Céroni, Le corps franc Pommiès, 346.

39. Testimony of Mme Raymonde Monsempes, Orage, 46.

40. Céroni, Le corps franc Pommiès, 346.

41. Testimony of Albert Sturni, Orage, 61-3.

42. Céroni, Le corps franc Pommiès, 348.

43. Testimony of Albert Castelbielh, Orage, 79-80.

44. Unpublished testimony of A. Malabirade, the former mayor of Portet (no date), given to the author by Mme Odette Huerta, Maule, French Basque Country, August 2004. See also Poullenot, Basses-Pyrénées, 222, 224.

45. Testimony of Hochstrasser.

46. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (Norton: New York, 1967), 31-36.

47. Testimony of Hochstrasser.

48. “The exploits of M. L-B,” La IVième République, 22 August 1944.

49. Given the serious nature of the offenses, the case did not go to the Children’s Court. See Fishman, The Battle for Children, 181-3.

50. “The L Band,” La IVième République, 14 December 1944.

51. “The Informers of Portet,” La IVième République, 15 December 1944.

52. Case 23 on the court’s judgments, file 1259W9, AD, P-A.

53. Odette Huerta, personal communication, 14 December 2004, Maule, French Basque Country.

54. Fishman, The Battle for Children, 184.

55. Rod Kedward, France and the French: A Modern History (Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 2007), 322.

56. In addition to the dossiers of Chappotin and Lasserre, also see also the dossiers of J.P., file 30W47, A.G., file 30W6, J.D., file 30W11, A.D., file 30W11, and L.D., file 30W11, AD, P-A.

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