Christian de la Mazière

Christian de la Mazière (born August 22, 1922 in Tunis ; † February 15, 2006 ) was a French journalist and volunteer with the German Waffen SS .

Life

The son of an officer who took part in the Polish-Soviet War in 1920 , became involved after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and served in the army of the Vichy regime until 1942 after the surrender . He then worked for the newspaper Le Pays Libre , an organ of the collaborating party PFNC (Parti français national-collectiviste). Shortly before the arrival of the Allies in Paris and the surrender of General Dietrich von Choltitz , he became involved in the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division (French division "Charlemagne") of the Waffen-SS, in which he - contrary to the information he provided in his memoirs - achieved the degree of SS Rottenführer and not that of an officer. At the end of his life he was the last living soldier in this unit and an important contemporary witness.

Christian de la Mazière was captured by Polish soldiers in Pomerania and extradited first to the Russian and then to the French authorities. To avoid conviction, he pretended to have been a member of the Service du travail obligatoire (STO). However, this attempt at deception was exposed and de la Mazière was sentenced in 1946 as a volunteer with the Waffen SS to five years' imprisonment and the deprivation of his civil rights in France for the next ten years. President Vincent Auriol pardoned him in 1948.

After his release from Clairvaux prison , he pursued various activities. Among other things, he was the artist agent (and temporary partner) of the chanson singers Juliette Gréco and Dalida , wrote for L'Écho de la Presse et de la Publicité and Georges Bérard-Quélin's press agency La correspondance de la Presse, and founded his own public relations agency in 1952 which he had to close after the publication of an autobiographical work Le Rêveur casqué about his experiences and his commitment.

The book, published in 1972, was preceded by the shooting of the 1971, over four-hour documentary Le chagrin et la pitié (German: The house next door - chronicle of a French town during the war ) by the French film director of German origin Marcel Ophüls (* 1927), in which Christian de la Mazière's factual and unvarnished descriptions of his experiences, his convictions and his motivation for collaboration take the main part. The film caused a scandal in France due to the fact that it examined the occupation period for the first time from a different perspective than that of the Resistance and, according to Marcel Ophüls, “questioned the myth of the 'grandeur' of France” , and is now considered the turning point From which the events under the Vichy regime gradually took on more objective forms in the collective consciousness of the French.

The publisher of the Figaro accompanying weekly Figaro Magazine , and the right-wing political newspaper Le Choc du mois employed de la Mazière, which was taken by the closure of his agency's livelihood before in Togo as advisor to the Togolese dictator tasks Gnassingbe Eyadema perceived.

In 2003 he published the continuation of his autobiography under the title Le Rêveur blessé . In it he described the effects of his actions on his later social and professional life.

Autobiographical work

• Le Rêveur casqué , Robert Laffont, Paris 1972, ISBN 2-221-02815-5 .

dt. A dream made of blood and dirt. Neff, Vienna / Berlin 1973, ISBN 3-7014-0092-X .

• Le Rêveur blessé , Editions de Fallois, Paris 2003, ISBN 2-87706-468-9 .

literature

• Jean Tulard : Dictionnaire du cinéma. Les réalisateurs . Robert Laffont, Paris 1982, ISBN 2-221-01028-0 .
• Henry Rousso: Pétain et la fin de la collaboration - Sigmaringen 1944–1945 . Complexe, Brussels 1984, ISBN 2-87027-138-7 .

Web links

• Excerpt from the film Le Chagrin et la pitié

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Le film "n'est anti-gaulliste que dans la mesure où il conteste le mythe de la grandeur française (...)" , Marcel Ophüls, quoted by Jean Tulard in the Dictionnaire du cinéma