Alsace Quotes

The humiliation of their arms and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine made a sore pull on the endurance of this sensitive people; and their hearts are still hot, not so much against Germany as against the Empire. 

We finally drove the Germans back and we entered the Alsace-Lorraine region, which is part French and part German.

In Alsace-Lorraine I saw Pope stick his leg out from behind a tree to get a million-dollar wound so he’d be sent home; only a heavy round came in and took his leg off. He survived and went home with one leg missing. Another

We’ve already visited Alsace. Twice.” “Yes, but I did not tell you all there is to know of it.” “I can hardly wait to hear more,” he said with no enthusiasm. Cinderella

He may have liked many other things, but we know for certain only that he liked a sweet summer breeze, stars shining softly above, memories (made of This), his mother's rosary and her posary, an old-fashioned melody, broken hearts, baby shoes, a garden of love made just for two, moments passing into hours, pretty hubbahubba babies, the roses of Picardy, the moment when the band started playing, a little home for two, gleaming candlelight, beautiful Alsace-Lorraine, heavens above, and smiles that make you happy.

The fruit alone inspired him. In the heat of summer there were mirabelles from Alsace: small and golden cherries, speckled with red. And Reine Claude from Moissac, sweet thin-skinned plums the color of lettuce touched with gold. In August, green hazelnuts and then green walnuts, delicate, milky and fresh. And of course, for just a moment in early fall, pêches de vigne, a rare subtle peach so remarkable that a shipment was often priced at a year's wages. And right before winter, Chasselas de Moissac grapes: small, pearlescent, and so graceful that they grow in Baroque clusters, as if part of a Caravaggio still life.

Oscar Wilde, was an Irish poet, brilliant wit and dramatist who was imprisoned for two years for ‘indecency’ and ruined as a result. Oscar uttered his last words in Room 16 of the Hôtel d’Alsace in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on Friday, November 30th, 1900. The wittiest man of his epoch was said to have quipped, ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us must go.’ Sadly, Oscar lost the ‘duel’ and died shortly afterwards.

At 7:30 A.M. on Wednesday, January 31, a U.S. Army weapons carrier clanked up to a gray farmhouse with orange shutters outside Ste.-Marie-aux-Mines, an Alsatian town long celebrated for mineralogy, fifteen miles northwest of Colmar. A scrawny, handcuffed twenty-four-year-old private from Michigan named Eddie D. Slovik stepped from the rear bay, escorted by four MPs. A Vosges snowstorm had delayed their journey from Paris through the Saverne Gap, and Private Slovik was late for his own execution. No task gripped Eisenhower with more urgency than clearing the Colmar Pocket to expel the enemy from Alsace and shore up the Allied right wing. But first, a dozen riflemen were to discharge a single, vengeful volley in the high-walled garden of 86 Rue du Général Bourgeois.

We are all poor; but there is a difference between what Mrs. Spark intends by speaking of 'slender means', and what Stevens called our poverty or Sartre our need, besoin. The poet finds his brief, fortuitous concords, it is true: not merely 'what will suffice,' but 'the freshness of transformation,' the 'reality of decreation,' the 'gaiety of language.' The novelist accepts need, the difficulty of relating one's fictions to what one knows about the nature of reality, as his donnée. It is because no one has said more about this situation, or given such an idea of its complexity, that I want to devote most of this talk to Sartre and the most relevant of his novels, La Nausée. As things go now it isn't of course very modern; Robbe-Grillet treats it with amused reverence as a valuable antique. But it will still serve for my purposes. This book is doubtless very well known to you; I can't undertake to tell you much about it, especially as it has often been regarded as standing in an unusually close relation to a body of philosophy which I am incompetent to expound. Perhaps you will be charitable if I explain that I shall be using it and other works of Sartre merely as examples. What I have to do is simply to show that La Nausée represents, in the work of one extremely important and representative figure, a kind of crisis in the relation between fiction and reality, the tension or dissonance between paradigmatic form and contingent reality. That the mood of Sartre has sometimes been appropriate to the modern demythologized apocalypse is something I shall take for granted; his is a philosophy of crisis, but his world has no beginning and no end. The absurd dishonesty of all prefabricated patterns is cardinal to his beliefs; to cover reality over with eidetic images--illusions persisting from past acts of perception, as some abnormal children 'see' the page or object that is no longer before them --to do this is to sink into mauvaise foi. This expression covers all comfortable denials of the undeniable--freedom --by myths of necessity, nature, or things as they are. Are all the paradigms of fiction eidetic? Is the unavoidable, insidious, comfortable enemy of all novelists mauvaise foi? Sartre has recently, in his first instalment of autobiography, talked with extraordinary vivacity about the roleplaying of his youth, of the falsities imposed upon him by the fictive power of words. At the beginning of the Great War he began a novel about a French private who captured the Kaiser, defeated him in single combat, and so ended the war and recovered Alsace. But everything went wrong. The Kaiser, hissed by the poilus, no match for the superbly fit Private Perrin, spat upon and insulted, became 'somehow heroic.' Worse still, the peace, which should instantly have followed in the real world if this fiction had a genuine correspondence with reality, failed to occur. 'I very nearly renounced literature,' says Sartre. Roquentin, in a subtler but basically similar situation, has the same reaction. Later Sartre would find again that the hero, however assiduously you use the pitchfork, will recur, and that gaps, less gross perhaps, between fiction and reality will open in the most close-knit pattern of words. Again, the young Sartre would sometimes, when most identified with his friends at the lycée, feel himself to be 'freed at last from the sin of existing'--this is also an expression of Roquentin's, but Roquentin says it feels like being a character in a novel. How can novels, by telling lies, convert existence into being? We see Roquentin waver between the horror of contingency and the fiction of aventures. In Les Mots Sartre very engagingly tells us that he was Roquentin, certainly, but that he was Sartre also, 'the elect, the chronicler of hells' to whom the whole novel of which he now speaks so derisively was a sort of aventure, though what was represented within it was 'the unjustified, brackish existence of my fellow-creatures.

Most of the cadets accepted an invitation to attend a reception at the Venezuelan Naval Academy in La Guaira. Don Silke and I had other ideas and figured on getting a cab to the capital city of Caracas. The ride would take about a half hour, if the car did not overheat going over the mountain pass on the newly constructed highway. The capital city had an elevation of 7,083 feet and we were at sea level. As we stepped off the gangway, I noticed two stunningly beautiful girls standing on the concrete dock looking at the ship. Neither of us could figure out why the girls were there. Perhaps they were tourists, but I would find out. Approaching them, I asked if we could help, but soon discovered that they didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak what seemed to be French. It could have led to an impasse but my knowledge of German saved the day. It turned out that both girls were from France and one of them came from the Alsace Province and spoke German. They were both quite bubbly and we soon found out that they were dancers with the Folies Bergère, on tour to South America. From what I understood, they would be performing in Caracas that night and could get us free tickets. It all sounded great except that we had to be back aboard by 10:00 p.m., since the ship would be leaving first thing in the morning. Rats! You win some and you lose some, but at least we were with them for now. Don and I offered to take them aboard for lunch. It all seemed exciting for them to board a ship with so many single men. Ooh là là. The girls attracted a lot of attention and the ship’s photographer couldn’t stop taking pictures. The rest of our classmates couldn’t believe what they saw and of course thought that we were luckier than we really were. For us, the illusion had to be enough and fortunately the lunch served that day was reasonably good.

I enjoy talking politics and debating social issues, but I've discovered that unless I want to be sent to a colony for social lepers, I better keep some of my made-in-Singapore opinions to myself. Freedom of expression may be sacred here, yet I can't help but feel that if you trangress the limits of what the French deem ideologically acceptable, the only person you'll be expressing your opinions to will be yourself. Or the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen or some old lady in Alsace who lives in a forest and breeds Rottweilers. The alternative to self-censorship is social exclusion, which may be less draconian than imprisonment, but the net effect is pretty much the same. (p. 152)

Monsieur Alfred Backert, a resident of Bischoffsheim, lived near the village center. He recalled the war years in Alsace-Lorraine and remembered the women from Mannheim who were sent to Bischoffsheim, ostensibly for their safety by the Nazi Regime. He later served in the French army and was stationed in Germany for a number of years. Frau Heinchen, the elderly woman with her dog, who talked to me on the windy hillside overlooking Überlingen on Sunday afternoon, December 1, 2002. She recalled the Polish and Russian prisoners, whom she called Cossacks, and vividly remembered the hanging of the Russian soldier, described in this book. According to her, it was the farmer’s wife Clarissa who was raped by the Russian soldier and later, bore his child. She remembered the lager (warehouse) that was used to house the prisoners, saying that it was located on a field near the municipal hospital. She also told us the location of where the one room schoolhouse had been. For the limited time that we talked, she glowed and became twenty-one years young again.

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables was required reading in Korean schools, as was Alphonse Daudet’s short story, “La Dernière Classe,” for both my parents’ and my generation. Set in the Alsace in 1870 or 1871, around the time of the Franco-Prussian war, Daudet’s story features a schoolteacher, Monsieur Hamel, who announces that it is to be his last day teaching, because all the French staff are to be replaced by Germans. His last lesson of the class is to impress on them the beauty of the French language. He tells the class, at great personal risk, that as long as you keep your language, you will never be a slave.

During a rabies scare in 1885, Pasteur concocted a treatment and gave the untested drug to a nine-year-old boy, Joseph Meister, who had been bitten by a grocer’s dog. Three weeks later, Meister had almost fully recovered. Pasteur’s legend received considerable help by the fact that Meister hailed from Alsace, a region controlled by Germany but claimed by France. The tricolor declared a victory for French science and for Pasteur who had beaten the German, Robert Koch, who had like Pasteur been working on vaccines. As a grown man, Joseph Meister took a job as a guard at the Institut Pasteur after Pasteur’s death. When German troops entered Paris in 1940, they swarmed the institute’s grounds and ordered that Pasteur’s crypt be opened. Meister likely had been one of several men who defended the crypt against the Wehrmacht and prevented its defilement. Shortly after, Meister inexplicably shot himself through the head. Even this act became part of Pasteur’s celebrity.

for instance areas such as the underground 'joint-interaction' bases of Neuschwabenland, Antarctica; Pine Gap, Australia; Alsace-Lorraine Mts. area of France-Germany; and

The Albert Boxler Riesling, not from Germany, but from Alsace, one of the high-end pours at twenty-six dollars a glass. And I was drinking it. Nicky had served it to me. To thank me. I rolled it through my mouth the way Simone had taught me, pursing my lips and cupping my tongue and almost making an inward whistle. I thought it would be sweet. I thought I tasted honey, or something like peaches. But then it was so dry it felt like someone had pierced me.

Mais il faut le voir à table comme il la regarde quand elle brille, ses yeux d'animal subjugué. D'où vient-elle donc cette créature ? Pr les mots dans sa bouche, ces idées qui lui passent par la cervelle, son insatisfaction tout le temps, son intraitable enthousiasme, ce désir d'aller voir ailleurs, de marquer les distances, cet élan qui frise l'injure parfois? Ou va-t-elle chercher tout ça ? Alors, quand leur fille a besoin de sous pour un voyage de classe ou acheter des livres, Mireille et Jean ne rechignent pas. Ils raquent. Ils font ce qu'il faut. C'est leur terrible métier de parents, donner à cette gamine les moyens de son évasion. On a si peu de raison de se réjouir dans ces endroits qui n’ont ni la mère ni la Tour Eiffel, ou dieu est mort comme partout où la soirée s’achèvent à 20 heures en semaine et dans les talus le week-end Car elle et Jeannot savent qu'ils ne peuvent plus grand-chose pour elle. Ils font comme si, mais ils ne sont plus en mesure de faire des choix à sa place. Ils en sont réduits ça, faire confiance, croiser les doigts, espérer quils l'ont élevée comme il faut et que ça suffira. L'adolescence est un assassinat prémédité de longue date et le cadavre de leur famille telle qu'elle fut git déjà sur le bord du chemin. Il faut désormais réinventer des rôles, admettre des distances nouvelles, composer avec les monstruosités et les ruades. Le corps est encore chaud. Il tressaille. Mais ce qui existait, l'enfance et ses tendresses évidentes, le règne indiscuté des adultes et la gamine pile au centre, le cocon et la ouate, les vacances à La Grande-Motte et les dimanches entre soi, tout cela vient de crever. On n'y reviendra plus. Et puis il aimait bien aller à l'hôtel, dont elle réglait toujours la note. Il appréciait la simplicité des surfaces, le souci ergonome partout, la distance minime entre le lit et la douche, l'extrême propreté des serviettes de bain, le sol neutre et le téléviseur suspendu, les gobelets sous plastique, le cliquetis précis de l'huisserie quand la porte se refermait lourdement sur eux, le code wifi précisé sur un petit carton à côté de la bouilloire, tout ce confort limité mais invariable. À ses yeux, ces chambres interchangeables n'avaient rien d'anonyme. Il y retrouvait au contraire un territoire ami, elle se disait ouais, les mecs de son espèce n'ont pas de répit, soumis au travail, paumés dans leurs familles recomposées, sans même assez de thune pour se faire plaisir, devenus les cons du monde entier, avec leur goût du foot, des grosses bagnoles et des gros culs. Après des siècles de règne relatif, ces pauvres types semblaient bien gênés aux entournures tout à coup dans ce monde qu'ils avaient jadis cru taillé à leur mesure. Leur nombre ne faisait rien à l'affaire. Ils se sentaient acculés, passés de mode, foncièrement inadéquats, insultés par l'époque. Des hommes élevés comme des hommes, basiques et fêlés, une survivance au fond. Toute la journée il dirigeait 20 personnes, gérait des centaines de milliers d'euros, alors quand il fallait rentrer à la maison et demander cent fois à Mouche de ranger ses chaussettes, il se sentait un peu sous employé. Effectivement. Ils burent un pinot noir d'Alsace qui les dérida et, dans la chaleur temporaire d'une veille d'enterrement, se retrouvèrent. - T'aurais pu venir plus tôt, dit Gérard, après avoir mis les assiettes dans le lave-vaisselle. Julien, qui avait un peu trop bu, se contenta d'un mouvement vague, sa tête dodelinant d'une épaule à l'autre. C'était une concession bien suffisante et le père ne poussa pas plus loin son avantage. Pour motiver son petit frère, Julien a l'idée d'un entraînement spécial, qui débute par un lavage de cerveau en règle. Au programme, Rocky, Les Chariots de feu, Karaté Kid, et La Castagne, tout y passe. À chaque fois, c'est plus ou moins la même chose : des acteurs torse nu et des séquences d'entraînement qui transforment de parfaits losers en machines à gagner.

I understand all your difficulties with American public opinion and Congress, but events are moving downward at a pace where they will pass beyond the control of American public opinion when at last it is ripened. Have you considered what offers Hitler may choose to make to France? He may say: “Surrender the Fleet intact and I will leave you Alsace-Lorraine,” or alternatively: “If you do not give me your ships I will destroy your towns.” I am personally convinced that America will in the end go to all lengths, but this moment is supremely critical for France. A declaration that the United States will if necessary enter the war might save France. Failing that, in a few days French resistance may have crumpled and we shall be left alone.

Lena remembered something she’d learned in school about that part of France. ‘Is that Alsace-Lorraine? Isn’t that disputed territory or something?’ Malachy nodded. ‘It was originally French, then the Germans annexed it in the 1870s. The French got it back after the Great War, then the Germans invaded in 1939 and took it back again, and with the fall of the Nazis, it became French again. My father’s family are French, so are Phillippe Decker's, but it’s a complicated place, it seems. I wasn’t ever there, but I could imagine it would be a place with lots of bad feelings, given their history. Decker certainly embodies that anyway.

the bad years, as most of Alsace did. We have paid it back but

And that night of July 6, 1885, they made the first injection of the weakened microbes of hydrophobia into a human being. Then, day after day, the boy Meister went without a hitch through his fourteen injections—which were only slight pricks of the hypodermic needle into his skin…. And the boy went home to Alsace and never had a sign of that dreadful disease. (179–80)

As with millions of others, Adeline Perry and her two young daughters endured the horrors of the Second World War in NAZI Germany. Following her death and armed with her manuscript, Captain Hank Bracker and his wife Ursula, Adeline’s youngest daughter, followed in Adeline’s footsteps to better understand the ordeal she experienced. Realizing that this book was the only way that her story could be preserved, Captain Hank took on the task of recording it. Ursula’s brother-in-law and stepsister, Peter Klett and his wife Jutta drove them to many of the places described in this book including Bischoffsheim, Strasbourg and Rosheim, in what was known as Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen during World War II and which is now recognized as the administrative territory of Alsace-Moselle, France. He found the still existing bunker in Feudenheim and talked to people in Mannheim, Überlingen and Bischoffsheim who still remembered some of the details of the incidents in this book. Ursula’s sister Brigitte wrote her own manuscripts which helped fill in some previously unknown facts. “Suppressed I Rise” is an insight into how individual people’s lives were adversely affected by the insane acts of one man and the country he decimated.

Captain Hank Bracker, author of the multi-award winning book, “The Exciting Story of Cuba” presents “Suppressed I Rise.” This is the true story of Adeline Perry’s struggle to protect and raise her two daughters in foreign, war-torn, Nazi Germany. With her husband stationed in Paris, she is left to fend for herself in a hostile environment that she hardly understands but bravely faces. It recounts the harrowing story of the devastating daily bombings of Mannheim and her experiences confined in a crowded air-raid shelter with a dying woman and four children. Being abused by ruthless Nazis, she fled. This graphic book takes you from the Alsace region on the French border through Germany to Überlingen on the Bodensee near the Swiss frontier. It is a “riveting read” for anyone interested in a personal account of World War II, as seen from the perspective of a refugee caught inside the Third Reich.

The Hugel story, in many ways, is the story of Alsace. “My grandfather had to change his nationality four times,” Johnny’s brother André said. Grandfather Emile was born in 1869. He was born French, but two years later, in 1871, Alsace was taken over by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, and he became German. The end of World War I in 1918 made him French again. In 1940, when Alsace was annexed, he was forced to become German.

The first camp to be discovered in the west was the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in Alsace, which the French army entered on 23 November 1944. Natzweiler-Struthof was one of the principal Nacht und Nebel camps – those institutions that were designed to make suspected Resistance fighters disappear into the ‘night and fog’. Here the French discovered a small gas chamber, where prisoners were hung by their wrists from hooks while Zyklon-B gas was pumped into the room. Many of the victims were destined for the autopsy tables of Strasbourg University, where Dr August Hirt had amassed a collection of Jewish skeletons in order to prove the inferiority of the Jewish race through anatomical study. Others, mostly Gypsies brought here from Auschwitz, were subjected to medical experiments within the camp.21

On September 28, 1870, after heavy bombardment, during the Siege of Strasbourg, the French were forced to surrender the heavily fortified fortress. The Municipal Library housed in the Dominican church, with its unique collection of medieval manuscripts, rare Renaissance books and historical artifacts were destroyed by fire, as were many other Gothic buildings in the city center. Of the population of 150,000 people, over 600 were left dead and 3,200 were wounded and left without shelter. Strasbourg was surrendered to the Prussian General August von Werder and thus became part of the German Empire. In 1919, following the Treaty of Versailles, the city was returned to France in accordance with U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points." With this many Germans left Strasbourg and went back to Germany. It wasn’t until in June of 1940 during World War II and after the Fall of France, that Alsace was annexed by Germany again. The final Liberation of Strasbourg took place on 23 November 1944, thus returning the Alsace district to France.

One Alsatian newspaper, L’Alsace, reports that the total value of his loot is the equivalent of $ 1 billion U.S. In England, BBC News puts the sum at $ 1.4 billion. The New York Times estimates between $ 1.4 and $ 1.9 billion. The largest-circulation paper in Alsace, Les Dernières Nouvelles, says more than $ 2 billion. Museum pieces, most of which have not been sold on the open market, can be difficult to price.

A sailing vessel on the Rhine! My imagination took wings. If, instead of this swiftly flowing river, all of Alsace were a lake, we would have sailing boats and great steamers. Then Basel would be a port; it would be almost as good as living by the sea. Then everything would be different, and we would live in another time and in another world.

Do you come from a family of cooks?" I ask as I rasp the cheese against the prickly grater, trying to distract myself from the familiar smells and sounds. "Kind of. My grandma used to be an amazing cook. Her mother had emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine, so she knew how to make all of these incredible French-German dishes---curly endive salad with bacon dressing, sausages with sauerkraut, green bean stew with potatoes and bacon. When I'd come to visit for lunch, she'd make me radish sandwiches on white bread with salt and butter." "Sounds like the answer is yes, then." "Not exactly. That was my dad's mom. My mom's mom stored cereal and wine in her oven.

The second line of cops was of course CRS, the national riot police, and if you thought the regular police were tough and nasty you don’t want to meet these folks. I swear they must have all been from Corsica or Alsace – a mix of brute strength and cagy wisdom that wasn’t going to let any asshole through without a 21-carat ID and a bulletproof reason to be there. One of them laughed when he saw my DGSE card. “What, you want to give out parking tickets?

Strasbourg in Alsace, on Valentine’s Day 1349. There the municipal authorities held the two thousand Jews living in the city responsible for spreading pestilence by poisoning the wells where Christian citizens drew their water.

She kneeled down, opened the wine fridge, and scanned the shelves, filled with a variety of white wines. Sam began to pull each bottle out and read the labels; all of the wines were products of the dozens of vineyards that dotted northern Michigan, including the two peninsulas that ran north from Traverse City into Grand Traverse Bay. There was a wealth of whites- chardonnays, sauvignon blancs, Rieslings, rosés, and dessert wines. All of these were produced within a few miles of here, Sam thought, a feeling of pride filling her soul. Sam pulled out a pinot gris and stood. A few bottles of red gleamed in the fading day's light: a cab franc, a pinot noir, a merlot. Robust reds were a bit harder to come by in northern Michigan because of the weather and growing season, but Sam was happy to see such a selection. Sam had had the pleasure of meeting famed Italian chef Mario Batali at culinary school, and the two had bonded over Michigan. Batali owned a summer home in Northport, not far from Suttons Bay, and he had been influential early on in touting Michigan's summer produce and fruit, fresh fish, and local farms and wineries. When someone in class had mocked Michigan wines, saying they believed it was too cold to grow grapes, Batali had pointedly reminded them that Michigan was on the forty-fifth parallel, just like Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Alsace. Sam had then added that Lake Michigan acted like a big blanket or air conditioner along the state's coastline, and the effect created perfect temperatures and growing conditions for grapes and, of course, apples, cherries, asparagus, and so much more. Batali had winked at her, and Sam had purchased a pair of orange Crocs not long after in his honor.

Nikolai growled, "The French lost Strasbourg, they lost Alsace, they lost Lorraine, which they pretended was sacred to them because of their saint, though they are deeply infidel. A republican people deserves to lose all, must lose all." "But," objected Laura, "when France lost Strasbourg and Alsace-Lorraine, France wasn't a republican, it was ruled by the Emperor." "No matter," said Nikolai, "the French were a people who once had it in them to make France a republican country, and had it in them to make it one again.

The red day dawned when the tinder was lighted in the Balkans and Austro-Hungary seized a bit which brought her a step nearer to the world's highway; she seized one bit and poised herself for another. Then came that curious chorus of challenges, those leaping suspicions, raking all causes for distrust and rivalry and hatred, but saying little of the real and greatest cause. Each nation felt its deep interests involved. But how? Not, surely, in the death of Ferdinand the Warlike; not, surely, in the old, half-forgotten revanche for Alsace-Lorraine; not even in the neutrality of Belgium. No! But in the possession of land overseas, in the right to colonies, the chance to levy endless tribute on the darker world,—on coolies in China, on starving peasants in India, on black savages in Africa, on dying South Sea Islanders, on Indians of the Amazon—all this and nothing more.

The war was, very obviously, beginning to turn against Germany as the French soldiers gained ground and started to push the retreating Nazi troops in our direction. The news was that if things got worse, the German Army would be pushed over the Vosges Mountains and back into Alsace-Lorraine. We were issued instructions from the local Nazi administration to be prepared to help these retreating soldiers and were expected to billet, feed and, if necessary, nurse those wounded back to health. “Oh my,” I thought. We had so little but it was still more than we had in Mannheim. One village woman told us, “They are our soldiers and we can jolly well care for them.” Adolph agreed with this and told me that it would be my duty to look after any German soldier that was quartered under his roof. I thought that I fully understood what he meant by this! Since I was using the entire upstairs portion of the house, I would have to make room. Looking forward to helping them, I told the girls that we were to be kind to whoever came to us. “Imagine if it was your father.” It seemed the least we could do, and I hoped that I wasn’t expected to go beyond this. Instead of improving, things just got worse. To everyone’s astonishment the school was ordered closed and we were told to attend a meeting in the Village Center. Outside of the center, amidst much commotion, a uniformed Gestapo officer standing on the back of an open truck announced that German troops would be entering our village. Soon Military vehicles and German troops seemed to be everywhere. The Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, marked a critical turning point in the European theater of World War II and we were beginning to feel the effects.

Bodily possession is ... a rare event. More frequent ... is Satan's ownership of the soul by its being in a state of mortal sin!

seemed to have any. Germany, according to Erzberger, was to utilize victory to gain control of the European continent for “all time.” All demands at the peace table were to be based on this premise for which three conditions were necessary: abolition of neutral states at Germany’s borders, the end of England’s “intolerable hegemony” in world affairs, and the breaking up of the Russian colossus. Erzberger envisioned a Confederation of European States analogous to the later Mandates system under the League of Nations. Some states would be under German “guidance”; others, such as Poland and the Baltic group annexed from Russia, would be under German sovereignty for “all time,” with possible representation but no voting power in the Reichstag. Erzberger was not sure which category Belgium would fit into, but in either case Germany was to retain military control over the entire country and over the French coast from Dunkirk down to and including Boulogne and Calais. Germany would also acquire the Briey-Longwy iron basin and Belfort in Upper Alsace which she had failed to take in 1870. She would also take the French and Belgian colonies in Africa. Morocco, curiously enough, was excepted as likely to be too much of a drain on Germany’s strength. No mention was made of England’s colonies, which suggests that Erzberger may have been considering a negotiated settlement with England. In reparations the vanquished nations were to pay at least 10 billion marks for direct war costs, plus enough more to provide veterans’ funds, public housing, gifts to generals and statesmen, and pay off Germany’s entire national debt, thus obviating taxes on the German people for years to come.

In the days after Sedan, Prussian envoys met with the French and demanded a large cash indemnity as well as the cession of Alsace and Lorraine.

Moltke began to tamper with Schlieffen’s plan. Instead of investing 90 percent of the German Army in the French campaign, as required, he began chipping away at it. Russia was mobilizing more swiftly than anticipated; thus he sent 15 percent of the army to defend East Prussia. Moltke did not want the French to retake Alsace-Lorraine; hence another 25 percent of his troops were diverted to that sector. Consequently, only 60 percent of the intended force was thrown against France through Belgium, well below what Schlieffen’s pincer envisioned.