Contemporary European History (2019), 28, 31944–341 doi:10.1017/S0960777318000462 ARTICLE Vichy in Baden-Baden – The Personnel of the French Occupation in Germany after 1945 Julia Wambach* Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin, Germany *
[email protected] This article examines the contested presence of Vichy administrators in high positions of the French administration of occupied Germany after the Second World War. In occupied Germany, where many of Pétain’s officials pursued their careers, resisters and collaborators negotiated their new positions in the wake of the German occupation of France. Key to understanding this settlement are the notions of expertise and merit as well as the role of the inherited French social order untouched by the collaboration. ‘The French administration in Germany is full of survivors of Vichy’, ran the headline of the French communist newspaper Ce Soir on 16 November 1945.1 Part of a longer reportage entitled ‘The failure of Baden-Baden’, this article was far from the only one that uncovered the peculiar situation of the personnel in the capital of the French occupation zone in Germany in autumn 1945. Indeed, all major left-wing newspapers in France were outraged by the surprisingly large number of former Vichy officials employed in French-occupied Germany: Combat, Le Monde, Front National, Temps Présent, Nouvelles de France, Ordre and Résistance all discussed the topic over the course of the first three weeks of November 1945.2 Most of the articles were travelogues by journalists who had visited the zone and informed their readers back home about the simi- larities between the two spa towns: Vichy, the capital of Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist French State, and Baden-Baden, the capital of the French zone of occupation in Germany.3 The jour- nalists picked up nicknames for the capital of the French zone circulating in the city itself and shared them with their readers in France.