Radical reordering along old lines

The experience of Nazi occupation during the Second World War was the formative moment in the German—Alsatian and Franco-Alsatian relationship. National Socialist administrators fundamentally transformed the parameters of belonging in the province and introduced a previously unexperienced level of coercion and violence to the reordering of the borderland’s population. The Nazi administration’s conscious abandonment of any semblance of conciliatory action was particularly striking. There were to be no half-measures. Alsatians would or would not be completely German and treated as such. Yet the German occupation of Alsace during World War II was marked by both difference and continuity with previous sovereignty transfers that had occurred in 1871 and 1918. This chapter will examine post-armistice population policies, citizenship laws, and military service requirements to demonstrate that Nazi actions and policies in Alsace are better understood as representing an intensification of earlier imperial and French programs rather than a drastic break with the past.