When Jacques Roquencourt handles photographs, he does so with delicate hands. An accomplished aerospace engineer, he spent his life building things like airborne radar systems. He is also one of France’s foremost experts on early photography, particularly the work of Daguerre.
But when a package of photographs arrived recently from Freiburg, Germany, he handled them with special delicacy. For if investigations under way bear fruit, one of the men in the black and white photos, taken in the 1930s, will prove to be the father whose identity has remained a mystery to Roquencourt for all his 67 years.
The so-called enfants de Boches — roughly, children of the Hun — born during the war to French women and German soldiers, are seeking to fill a hole in their lives, hunting for long-lost German fathers they never knew and speaking openly of the maltreatment they suffered from their French neighbors. It is estimated that 200,000 children were born of these wartime love affairs.
Photos of the time depict young women, their heads shorn in shame, being hounded through villages, clutching the child of a German father. About 20,000 women had their heads shaved. Many rejected the children, gave them up for adoption or placed them in orphanages.
But now these children, in their late 60s, are struggling to put their lives in order while there is still time. They have formed an association and sought the help of the German and French governments to try to identify their fathers, in many cases already dead, or families that their fathers founded in Germany after the war.
In a speech last year in Berlin, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner paid tribute to the war children, the first time a French government had officially done so, calling them “the offspring of damned women and fathers whose memory has been assassinated.” Sixty years after the fact, he said, “they ask for their misery, their lives, their identity to be recognized.”
Roquencourt is one of them.
A tall, white-haired man with an engaging smile, he was reared in the west of France by a woman he still calls “mother.” But in the 1980s, when he prepared to marry, his bride’s father, a retired naval officer, asked the police for a background check on his future son-in-law. Only then did Roquencourt learn that his mother was actually an adoptive parent. His biological mother had placed him as an infant in an orphanage, where he remained until he was five-and-a-half years old, when he was adopted.
“My adoptive mother had a son, Maurice Roquencourt, who died during the war in a labor camp near Frankfurt,” Roquencourt said in an interview in his home, a half hour from Paris. “I’ve often thought that she took me in to replace her son.”
Roquencourt tracked down family members on his biological mother’s side. He got to know her son and daughter by a later marriage.
“I went to the communions and marriages of their children,” he said.
Lately though, the connection has weakened.
When he found his biological mother, by then in a retirement home, she refused to recognize him.
“She denied that I was her child, or that she had abandoned me twice,” he said, once by placing him in an orphanage and a second time by allowing him to be adopted. “She denied it. It distresses me. It’s always painfully on my mind.”
But when it came to finding his father, Roquencourt was stymied. From a half-brother, the son of his biological mother, who later married a Frenchman, he learned that his father had been a physician and a major in the Wehrmacht. From one of his mother’s cousins, he learned that his father had been the director of a German military hospital in Cherbourg, where the German submarine fleet was based.
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