1This issue of the Cahiers Sirice is a collective work on the theme of borders during the Second World War. It offers a selection of articles issued from the contributions proposed at the international conference Frontières. Circulations, vie quotidienne, illégalités, which took place on February 24, 2018 at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and brought together researchers from universities in France and elsewhere. The choice of this topic came about when three young researchers working in France, the United States, and Quebec met and found they each in their own way advocate a “reading” of the Second World War that articulates different scales, from microhistory to transnational and imperial dynamics, and from the short term of the event to its “longue durée,” or long term, incorporating the post-war years.

2Since the formation of European states under the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the border has been first and foremost an object of geographical preoccupations in connection with strategic and geostrategic motivations. [2] The question is first treated in the works of geographers of the French and German schools two centuries later, from the late nineteenth century to the first third of the twentieth century. [3] The French school saw in the drawing of borders a linear political construction dictated on the one hand by the meeting of two competing states and on the other by physical geography. In the latter case, a state was delimited by one or more natural elements such as mountain ranges or rivers. On the French side, this reading had the merit of justifying the idea that the true eastern border should extend at least to the Rhine, which should not be underestimated in terms of the international relations of the era. On the other hand, Friedrich Ratzel and the German school considered the border a transitory construct, marking an interlude between two phases of expansion. In this reading, the border does not have to remain fixed and indelible in time and space; it corresponds in fact to a precise moment revealing the degree of development of a people and the expansion of their culture. This idea would later find its way to the thinkers of the Third Reich.

3Since then, however, these notions have been widely questioned by scholars: borders are no longer thought to be dictated by nature or by the presence of a people developing endogamously within them. Many recent works have reached this conclusion after typological analyses. They point out that the significance of the border was first and foremost political and that it was ultimately this factor that dictated its delineation. These studies have largely developed since the 1970s alongside the affirmation of geopolitics thanks to the work of Yves Lacoste and the creation of the journal Hérodote in 1976. Moreover, these studies should be understood in the rival contexts of the building of the European Union and the construction of the Berlin Wall. [4] The analysis of borders thus becomes inseparable from the study of the state geopolitics.

4Here we wish to contribute to a historical analysis of the border, taking as a framework Nazi-occupied Europe from the Nazis’ invasion of Poland in 1939 to the collapse of Nazism in 1945, as well as the issues arising directly from the war in the period immediately after it. The border, both a geographical object and an administrative demarcation, plays several roles in the particular context of the 1939–1945 period. First, there are the old borders between states which encourage the development of illegal and clandestine activities. In this case, the border is a synonym for hope, namely for the refugees who left their countries to escape arrest and the violence of the occupiers, as well as for the Allied aviators who fell and were then rescued and evacuated from the territory thanks to an escape network. The border also stands for a relationship with time, turned towards the future and towards alterity because it is open to the circulation of ideas. Other borders symbolize coercion, such as those that burst into everyday French life after the defeat in May–June 1940 with the division of the national territory into seven different zones. The imposition of borders at that time meant disarray for the local population. As in the example of the dividing line between the occupied zone and the so-called “free” zone studied by Éric Alary, [5] these borders were experienced as wounds and gashes both in the domain of the lived space and in the perception and the practices of the territory.

5Our approach is part of an important trend in the historiography of the Second World War. The monographic approach by territory, most often French territory, by gender, social or professional categories, or by official or clandestine organizations and institutions, is more and more giving way to comparative studies that include a transnational dimension. One of the best collective overviews on the subject, the Dictionnaire historique de la Résistance, edited by François Marcot, includes discrete articles and entries linked only by short summaries.

6In 2016, however, a collective work was published, edited by Alya Aglan and Robert Frank, which reconsidered the Second World War from the standpoint of the concept of “guerre-monde”, [6] an expression that originated in Fernand Braudel’s work. This book proposed to take note of the fact that, in contrast to the first conflict of 1914–1918, that of 1939–1945 became globalized in the sense that it spread to the whole world, and that “this process of globalization has modified the categories of space and time; that it finally was [...] a world in itself”. [7] Breaking with the Franco- or Eurocentric approach, the book considered the conflict in a global and planetary way, through transversal themes that restored African, Asian, and even South American theaters to their full significance. In Alya Aglan’s article on “resistance”, the movement has lost its capital “R” in order to better reflect its diversity both in France and in Europe, thereby expanding on an article she had published a few years before. Aglan signed an article on the “resistance” phenomenon—a “resistance” that lost its capital letter “R” to showcase its diversity, not just in France, but in Europe, [8] thereby extending an article she had published a few years before. [9] This is an interpretation that Olivier Wieviorka pursued in 2017 in his own study on the subject. [10] However, in none of these works are problems related to the border developed. Although the relations between the different actors in the conflict and the different fronts are clarified, the border dynamics themselves are not explored.

7Yet borders stand out as a major element of the Second World War. Rarely before had they attained such a political or cultural importance. The Nazi reading of the border issue, for instance, is eminently paradoxical. On the one hand, the Nazis envisioned the conquered territories in Europe as an immense monoracial block, the theater of a newfound Germanness, admittedly following what Johann Chapoutot called a “war of races”, [11] which was to lead to the elimination of Jews, the mentally handicapped, Roma, and all the parasitic bodies threatening Aryan biological purity. It is an understatement to say that the question was of concern to Nazi jurists [12] as well as Schutzstaffel (SS) intellectuals. [13] On the other hand, after Nazi victories, the conquered territories were often divided into zones of occupation, and new borders, imposed by the winner, appeared on the map. The case of France is well known. After the victory over the French army and the armistice of Rethondes on June 22, 1940, the Nazis divided the territory into no fewer than seven zones with different characteristics and different occupation regimes. For strategic reasons, the departments of Nord-Pas-de-Calais were attached to the military command of Brussels. A demarcation line separated a so-called “free” zone under the administration of the Vichy regime, which immediately embarked on a policy of collaboration, and a northern zone occupied by the German army. Between the latter zone and the attached area, a buffer zone called the “Prohibited Zone” or “Northeast Line” reached to Switzerland. In the East, a “reserved zone” was supposed to accommodate the German colonists while Alsace-Moselle was annexed directly to the Third Reich and thus placed under the authority of two Gauleiter. Finally, in the South, there was an Italian occupation zone, some territories between 1940–1942 and several departments after the German invasion of the “free” zone. Here, the objective was the submission and political oppression of a vanquished enemy. Although some of these borders have been previously studied, [14] they have never been the object of a comparative study.

8France is not an isolated case. Poland was also dismembered. The decrees signed by Hitler on 8 and 12 October 1939 annexed to the Third Reich 94,000 m² of land and about 22 million inhabitants. These were primarily the territories lost by Germany under the articles of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919—the Danzig corridor, West Prussia and Upper Silesia—but also large parts of territory from the formerly Russian parts of Poland: the city of Łódź and the district of Zichenau, on the road between Königsberg and Warsaw, which was attached to the Gau East Prussia. The USSR, which had attacked Poland from the east, granted itself sovereignty over the territories east of the Narew, Bug, and San rivers. The only exceptions were the Vilnius region, which was ceded to Lithuania, and the Suwałki region, annexed by Nazi Germany, in accordance with the German-Soviet Pact of August 1939 supplemented by an agreement of the 28th of September of the same year. What remained of the territory was administered by a “General Government of the occupied Polish territories” which sat in Krakow under the authority of the Reichsleiter Hans Frank. This time, it was not just a matter of installing political oppression and control, but a step toward the racial and soon to be genocidal Nazi cleansing operation. Christopher Browning notes that Poland

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“was destined to become a ‘laboratory’ where the Nazis could engage in experiments of racial imperialism and try to give concrete content to various ideological slogans such as Lebensraum (vital space), Volkstumskamps (ethnic or racial combat), Flurbereinigung (radical purification) and Endlösung der Judenfrage (final solution to the Jewish question)” [15].

10The borders thus had a double purpose in Nazi ideology: to serve the oppression of conquered territories, particularly in the West, and the systematic policy of racial extermination, particularly in the East. They were seen as ways to categorize populations and cut them off from each other.

11Thus, the study of borders within a Europe that had fallen under Nazi law is an important subject. We propose to articulate this study around three major issues which, while not exhaustive, cover a wide range of questions. Within this vast subject, three areas of study proved paramount: cross-border circulation, daily life, and the different forms of illegality that borders generate. The latter may or may not be dependent on a resistance organization, and includes all forms of transgressions against the legal framework and the order established by the occupying force. This collected issue brings together seven contributions that jointly explore these major lines of reflection. What were the impacts of new or old borders on the daily lives of the local populations? Were these borders zones of exclusion or did they allow movements and exchanges of all kinds to develop between populations, even between resistance organizations that fought for a common goal? Did the shared realities occasionally lead to an erasure of the national distinction and, by extension, of the notion of border in the eyes of the people of the time?

12The demarcation line exposed by Éric Alary in his key work [16] is central to the three articles that open this issue. The dividing line that separated France during the Nazi occupation of part of the metropolitan territory is first analyzed by Julien Bouchet, whose study of the border experience around Moulins-sur-Allier exemplifies its porosity. Taking, in the author’s words, a geographical and sensitive approach to the border, the article makes use of invaluable testimonies and other documents from the departmental archives to highlight the infrastructures of control that the Germans set up to oversee the populations’ movements (guard posts, laissez-passer, evolution of rules of passage), and especially the multiple transgressions of the border. Despite strict control, ingenious civilian rescue operations, in particular those that helped threatened Jewish populations, illustrate an important facet of civil resistance around this newly imposed border.

13Diane Galbaud mobilizes microhistory to study the case of Lucie Chevalley-Sabatier, who crossed the line of demarcation many times during the war. Because of her role within an association that received Vichy’s approval, Lucie Chevalley-Sabatier managed to obtain an “ausweis,” a traffic permit between the two zones of metropolitan France, which she used to transfer funds for Jewish, British, and American associations from one area to another. She also crossed the symbolic border between legality and illegality by leading a clandestine operation to hide and rescue more than 500 Jews while retaining her functions within the Vichy-approved association. This contribution by Diane Galbaud reveals an act of civil resistance by a woman in the social work environment, a too-little studied phenomenon.

14The “zone côtière interdite” or coastal prohibited zone in occupied France does not enjoy the same notoriety as the demarcation line in French memory, even if the first survived longer than the second. Lars Hellwinkel traces the genesis of this border that stretched from the border with Spain to that with Belgium. The French coastline was a major strategic element for the Wehrmacht and this article explains the measures and tools that the Germans employed to control it. Basing his study on German and French press releases, and on the German military command and Vichy prefects’ reports, Lars Hellwinkel finally shows that intent to control did not always have the desired result, very often due to the lack of manpower.

15The French overview concludes with Sara Legrandjacques’s text addressing the upheavals the Second World War brought to Indochinese students studying in metropolitan France. The study of the intra-imperial border is particularly interesting since the years 1940–1945 created a break between a period of circulations and the post-war decolonization context. The archives of the SLOTFOM [17] in Aix-en-Provence show the greatly increased difficulty with which populations as well as money and goods circulated between Indochina and the metropolis, and even the complete interruption of the communications at a certain point in the war. The division of the metropolitan territory finally encouraged several Indochinese students to try to cross the demarcation line, often in the hope of continuing their studies in the so-called “free” zone.

16Following Mussolini and Hitler’s actions in the Balkans in April 1941, many resistance movements were formed within the various territories. Franziska Anna Zaugg looks in particular at the actors of the Sandžak and Kosovo regions who, around the blurred border that distinguished them, were confronted with the same Second World War issues, from opposition to fascism to the local civil war. Franziska Anna Zaugg reverses the rigid idea of the border that delimited these two zones and reveals the important flow of population across this border and especially the fundamentally multi-national and transnational nature of the fight against the Nazis in the Balkans.

17In Istria, a region around the fuzzy and disputed border between Italy and Yugoslavia, a civil war that afflicted the territory beyond 1945 was also beginning to emerge. To shed light on this evolution, Valentina Vardabasso analyzes the factors that transformed a world war—interstate by nature—into a civil war on a specific territory. If tens of thousands of Italian communists supported Tito, other Italians claimed the Italianness of Istria. Faced with this reorganization of alliances, the borders were erased. Valentina Vardabasso explains, however, that new walls were erected at the end of the war when, on the one hand, Trieste became the limit of the “iron curtain,” and on the other hand, the opposition between Italians and Tito deteriorated after the German surrender.

18Elysa McConnell’s article completes the analysis of the dispute over the Italian–Yugoslav border as she studies the Allied investigations into the atrocities committed there by Yugoslav troops during the “forty-day Yugoslav Occupation” of 1945. Elysa McConnell uses the British Foreign Office correspondence and testimonies to show that if an effort was indeed made by the allies to clarify the situation after the fact, the main objective of the investigation was to silence any further—current or future—discussion of these events, while at the same time ensuring that the Yugoslav and communist claims on the territory were discredited. She thus highlights the post-1945 geopolitical, territorial, national, human, and memorial issues around this border.

19We wish to thank the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and more particularly the SIRICE research unit for the invaluable help and support granted to this project. We are also indebted to the Université Paris IV and the Fondation de la France Libre for the financial assistance they have granted us. We would also like to thank the Cahiers Sirice for agreeing to publish this collective work, and especially Virginie Durand for her precious trust and for guiding us so well throughout this adventure. We are grateful to all the members of the scientific committee: Alya Aglan, Claire Andrieu, Éric Bussière, Philip Cooke (who offered his generous support for the articles in English), Patrick Farges, Barbara Lambauer, Sébastien Laurent and Enzo Traverso for gifting us with their expertise, and more importantly, their time, which we know is valuable. We would like especially to thank Alya Aglan. We were fortunate to benefit from her availability, her rigorous benevolence, her advice, as well as her excellent writing for the conclusions of this issue. We also thank Josette Mateesco, Sandrine Maras and Gisèle Borie for their help with the organization of the event. Finally, this project owes a lot to Mélanie Leneveu and Florence Prévost-Grégoire, who know how indebted we are to them.