Daniel Rouxel’s childhood was marked by his grandmother, who beat him and shut him in the hen coop; by his priest, who refused him Communion; and by the scorn and insults of his teacher.
A little blond boy, he was a pariah in the small French village where he grew up, and it was through the playground taunts of his classmates that he discovered why. “Fils de Boche!” they shouted, which translates loosely as “Son of Jerry!”
In occupied France during the Second World War, Mr Rouxel was the fruit of a love affair between a young Breton woman and the handsome German officer who stopped to help her to put her bicycle chain back on. His crime was to have served as an unwelcome reminder of a fact that everyone wanted to forget: that relations between French citizens and Hitler’s occupying army had often been close.
Detested by his neighbours, he was an embarrassment to the authorities, who airbrushed his parentage out of history with a birth certificate that described him as the child of “father unknown”.This month, the truth was restored. After a long campaign, Mr Rouxel, 66, won formal recognition of his origins, after an agreement between the French and German governments. In a ceremony at the German Consulate in Paris that left him in tears, officials certified that he was the son of Lieutenant Otto Ammon and awarded him a German passport.
“For the first time in my life, I officially have a dad,” he told The Times, in an interview at his small flat on the outskirts of Le Mans, northern France. “You can’t imagine how much it means to me. I’ve finally got the second half of my identity.”
At least 200,000 children are believed to have been fathered by German soldiers in France during the war, and about 300 have submitted a claim for dual Franco-German nationality. “It’s not so much the passport which is important as having the right to use your father’s name, like anyone else,” said Mr Rouxel, who has owned a bar in France for decades. “It will not wipe out the childhood wounds, but it will enable us to have a little peace of mind in our old age.”
Born in April 1943, he spent his first four years with foster parents, receiving weekend visits from his mother and his father, before his death from shrapnel wounds inflicted in a British bombing raid in 1945.
The suffering began when he was placed with his maternal grandmother in Mégrit, a village in Brittany “where everyone knew everything about everyone else”.
“I just wasn’t accepted,” he said. “Even to my grandmother, I was the fils de Boche. She refused to let me kiss her and sent me to sleep with the hens. And she’d beat me with her wooden stick. I think she just wanted to show to the rest of the population that she didn’t approve of me and of what my mother had done.”
No one approved. Parents told their children not to play with or speak to him. The priest singled him out as the only child in his age group unable to take Communion. The head of his primary school reminded the class that he was a Boche as he kicked him in the backside with a wooden shoe.
“I can understand all the feelings after the occupation ended, but I was just a child and you don’t take revenge on a child,” said Mr Rouxel.
The worst humiliation was inflicted by the deputy mayor of Mégrit one Sunday when Mr Rouxel was 6. “He was standing on a granite stone giving a speech when he called me up beside him and said, ‘What’s the difference between a swallow and a Jerry? The swallow takes its babies when it leaves France. The Jerry leaves his behind’.
“People clapped and I was left with only my tears and my shame. I ran away and spent the night under a bridge. The next morning I tried to drown myself but it didn’t work.”
Unable to cope with the opprobrium, his mother remained distant, offering little support or comfort. However, in Unterweissach, near Stuttgart, in southern Germany, his relatives were trying to trace the boy whose existence had been revealed by his father in a letter shortly before his death. “I was 12 when they made contact with my mother and invited me to see them in Germany. There I discovered all the affection and niceness which I had never known in France.”
The spitting image of Lieutenant Ammon, Mr Rouxel was given a welcome that inspired his fight to be officially recognised as his father’s son.
A black-and-white photograph of his father, in German army uniform, stands on his living room sideboard. Next to it are the French and German flags and a newspaper cutting relating Mr Rouxel’s fury when a TV presenter described him as the child of a Nazi.
“My father wasn’t a Nazi,” he said. “He was a cultivated man conscripted into the Wehrmacht who fell in love with a French woman.”
Sleeping with the enemy
— An estimated 200,000 children were born in France to German fathers between 1941 and 1945
— Organisations such as Amicale Nationale des Enfants de la Guerre and Coeurs sans Frontières aim to gain recognition for French “war children” and reunite them with relatives
— At least 10,000 children were born to German soldiers and local mothers in the Netherlands
— In Norway, German soldiers were encouraged to initiate relationships with local women, who were considered to be “racially pure” by the Nazis. The progeny of these unions were called Lebensborn (fount of life) and received preferential access to healthcare and rations. After liberation, these children suffered persecution from other Norwegians and in recent years have won compensation from the Government
— The Abba singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad’s father is a Norwegian war child, fathered by a German sergeant stationed in Norway. In 1945, she fled to Sweden with her mother and grandmother to avoid their being branded collaborators
— German soldiers were not alone in fathering children abroad — between 1945 and 1955, more than 100,000 children were born to single German mothers and occupying Allied soldier fathers
Source: Times database
search the web
Custom Search
