‘‘Millions of men in Germany and elsewhere have more than one reason to be ashamed”: Franco-German commemorative scripts and the Gurs Camp.

Soo, Gregory (2022) ‘‘Millions of men in Germany and elsewhere have more than one reason to be ashamed”: Franco-German commemorative scripts and the Gurs Camp. In, Ott, Sandra (ed.) Negotiating the Nazi Occupation of France: Gender, Power, and Memory. Reno. University of Nevada Press.

Abstract

On 23 March 1963, a transnational commemoration involving French and German delegations occurred in a rural locality in south-western France. It marked the culmination of repeated attempts to ensure the maintenance and recognition of the cemetery of the former Gurs internment/concentration camp. In 1947, German Jewish former internes visited the camp and raised concerns about the level of neglect. Around the same time, a local French Jewish association constructed a monument in the cemetery in memory of all Jewish deportees and those who perished in the Gurs camp. And yet, the French authorities continued to allow the burial ground to fall into neglect. German authorities from the Baden region and the Jewish consistory at Karlsruhe finally intervened after an impassioned call in 1957 from a German journalist in the paper Badische Volkzeitung. An impressive renovation of the burial grounds occurred that set the scene for annual transnational commemorations at the camp from 1963 onwards. This paper explores these events and the speeches given at the 1963 commemoration within the wider context of West-German and French commemorative narratives of World War II. As well as adding to studies that reject the idea of a ‘myth of silence’ amongst Jews about the Holocaust, this paper demonstrates how the combined effect of the German and French speeches was to frame the Gurs camp as an exemplar of Nazi brutality and French patriotism. In the process, the diversity of the camp’s internees, their voices, and the circumstances of the camp’s creation before the start of World War II remained absent from the commemorative script until the late 1970s.

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