Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass by Douglas Boyd Read Free Book Online Page A

and work in Germany for money while their children were looked after in specially established residential homes, there was no forcible conscription for females because the Catholic Church refused to sanction this and Pétain could not afford to alienate the French cardinals and bishops who were among his most influential supporters.
    It is estimated that only 785,000 men actually left France under the STO, half of them deserting on their first home leave. 3 Even before British bombs started falling regularly on industrial targets all over the Reich, it was impossible to keep secret that the conditions of work in Germany were far from what had been promised. The French STO conscripts lived in poorly heated dormitories often adjacent to factories which had become strategic targets for the RAF; they worked alongside prisoners and forced labourers from a score of conquered territories with no common language; few German women would have anything to do with sex-hungry foreign men because that was a criminal offence; there was little wine and meals were Eintopf – a single dish of unidentifiable stew instead of the traditional five-course French meal of soup, entrée, meat course, cheese and dessert.
    The summons from the STO arrived couched in elegant officialese:
I have the honour to inform you that the joint Franco-German Commission … has selected you for work with the Todt Organisation (or) to work in Germany. I invite you to present yourself at the German Labour Office on … to learn the date and time of your departure. Failure to comply with this posting is punishable under the provisions of the law.
    On 15 February 1943 men who had reached their eighteenth birthdays in 1940, 1941 and 1942 received their STO call-up papers. However, Resistance tracts posted on walls and blowing along the streets of towns proclaimed that leaving France to go and work in Germany was treachery. Briefly, the communists and the Church were on the same side. On 21 March Cardinal Liénart defied the posters threatening ‘pitiless sanctions’ for those who did not present themselves at the recruitment centres and railway stations to catch their trains by announcing in Lyon that reporting for duty under the STO was not a duty of conscience for Catholics.
    There were some legal alternatives to going to work in Germany. The Todt Organisation, charged with major construction projects like the bombproof submarine pens along the Channel and Atlantic coasts and the Westwall of anti-invasion fortifications that stretched from Norway to the Spanish border, was the biggest single employer in Europe with 2 million workers at its peak, including thousands of locally conscripted French labourers, who were paid a reasonable wage, and 3,000 men recruited as uniformed armed guards for construction sites. Working for it in France gained exemption from STO, as did employment in any French factory working for the Germans, which also paid twice the going rate elsewhere. The STO legislation caused severe rifts between the business community and Vichy because the only factories that could keep their labour forces intact were those fulfilling German orders.
    The national police, Gendarmerie, Milice, fire services, railways and civil defence all offered shelter from the STO, and saw a rush of volunteers. A friend of the author signed up with Le Service de Surveillance des Voies. Wearing a blue-and-white armband, equipped with a torch and whistle and a bilingual Ausweis , he and a friend patrolled the rail tracks near his home town at night, ostensibly to prevent sabotage. In the event, when encountering saboteurs, they asked to be hit a few times in the face and then tied up, as their alibi for doing nothing. 4
    Another legitimate escape from the STO was to find a job with one of the many German organisations in France, so 2,000 young men went to work as fitters on German navy ships in French ports and as armed guards of the port installations. Another 1,982 donned