Germaine Tillion and Resistance to the Vichy Syndrome

Those in charge cannot always prefer "their mother to justice," to the constraints of a fixed objective (aux lois de l'objectif à atteindre). But it is likely that faced with the revelations brought by the report of Dorine [a wartime report to Allied governments on conditions in the camps by a French resister who had been in Ravensbrück and escaped], they said in the offices: "It's a crazy woman. She is raving about persecution, a Frenchwoman haunted by the Jardin des Supplices."

Olga Wormser-Migot¹

It was luck that people [like Wormser-Migot] weren't in the camps. You can't imagine, you know, the things that could happen [there]. So she judged all this and she was much too assertive and much too skeptical.... She did not feel the drama of the concentration camps. This escaped her. She reasoned like a normal woman. So that I find Germaine Tillion more trustworthy.

Georges Wellers²

When the mirror broke and the obsessions of what Henry Rousso has termed the Vichy Syndrome emerged in the late 1960s, they had two components. ³ The dominant element was recognition of the nature of the collaboration of the Vichy Regime with the Third Reich, particularly in the deportation of Jews. Confrontation with the previously unacknowledged degree of French support for and acquiescence to Vichy authority fed a second element of the Syndrome: an attack on the hegemony of Resistance memory of the war. The issue was both whether a "silent majority" in France during the war had favored Vichy rather than the Resistance, and whether the resisters' memory of their own experiences had been corrupted by fabulists. Nowhere were conflicts over the Resistance memory more painful than for deported resisters, who had themselves struggled for recognition and distinction after the war. In this article, I examine the trajectory of one prominent deported resister and historian of deportation, Germaine Tillion. ⁴ At Ravensbrück, Tillion developed the narrative of extermination she has presented over the succeeding half-century. This narrative became an important element of the Resistance representation of the war. ⁵ After 1968 Tillion played an important role in critiquing both the presentation of the French as fundamentally Vichyite and that of the resisters' memory as mythopoetic, embodied in the challenge brought by the historian Olga Wormser-Migot. The struggle against the generation of Holocaust negationists of the 1970s and 1980s, the height of what Henry Rousso refers to as the "Jewish memory" phase of the obsession, was ushered in by this earlier conflict among historians and survivors, neither of whom had any doubts about the Nazi use of gas chambers to exterminate Jews. ⁶ I will conclude by examining the nature of the "unfinished mourning" Rousso identifies at the heart of the Vichy Syndrome and the ways in which this concept, transferred from the individual to the collective by Rousso, is enriched when it is brought back from collective psychology in order to analyze the individual case of Tillion.

*

Germaine Tillion was an ethnographer in the Aurès in Algeria who returned to France in time to hear Pètain's capitulation. Beginning in June 1940, Tillion played a major role in one of the first resistance groups in France. She was arrested in 1942 and deported the following year to Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp created solely for women. Her mother, Emilie Tillion, was also arrested for Resistance activities and deported to Ravensbrück. She died there in March 1945. Late the following month, Tillion was released and on her return to France put aside her work on Algeria for study of the camps. The British would allow only one French deportee to attend all the 1947 trials of Ravensbrück camp administrators (for witnesses could not attend trials before they testified), and two deportee organizations chose Tillion as their representative. The trials were a disappointment to Tillion, leaving her with "the memory of a nightmare," ^7...