The following article is from our August 2005 issue.

In War, Germs of Conciliation. How a German and a French officer saved La Rochelle. By Uwe Siemon-Netto

After three centuries of enmity, the Germans and French now consider themselves close friends. Contrary to a widespread stereotype, this reversal is not just the result of an "order from above." And it began well before World War II ended 60 years ago.

Only a few steps from La Rochelle's lavish Vieux Marché, a basement door separates this exquisite town - the sunniest in all of France - from its stark past. The unmarked door opens to a large private museum commemorating this Atlantic port city's German occupation. La Rochelle with its huge submarine base, La Palisse, was the Wehrmacht's last major holdout in France. Its last fortress commander, Vice Admiral Ernst Schirlitz, did not surrender until May 8, 1945, the day World War II ended in Europe. Yet today, he is seen as a positive figure in the history of La Rochelle, for he saved it from Hitler's wrath.

This is why there is nothing accusatory about the style and content of the Musée Rochelais de la Dernière Guerre, whose name is to be interpreted in two ways, according to its owner, Jean-Luc Labour, until recently director of La Rochelle's tourist office. "Dernière guerre," he explained in an interview, "not only refers to the most recent war between our nations but also suggests that it was indeed the last one - a horror not to be repeated."

There has never been any public resistance to Labour purchasing the 8,500-foot basement of the former Hôtel des Étrangers, once the German headquarters in La Rochelle, and filling it with the former enemy's military memorabilia. There are machine guns, flags, uniforms, war maps, photographs, documents, field telephones, murals showing maritime motifs painted by German sailors, and officer's mess menus featuring pigs knuckles with sauerkraut on Thursdays and boiled fish on Fridays.

"People realize that this place simply relates a historical reality," said Labour, whose museum used to be the air raid shelter for the German headquarters staff; the cellar's 10-foot concrete ceiling protected the officers from Allied bombs and naval artillery rounds. The commanding admiral spent many a night in this bunker on a sparse steel bed. It is still there.

"Of course this kind of a museum would not sit well with the residents of cities such as Nantes where the German occupation was particularly brutal," Labour said. "But here the Germans have certainly done less harm than Richelieu." From 1626 to 1628, Armand Jean du Plessis Richelieu, cardinal and statesman, commanded a terrible siege of La Rochelle, destroying the power of the Huguenots in this once thriving bastion of French Protestantism.

In fact, La Rochelle owes the present unblemished state of its beauty to the unusual relationship between Schirlitz and Commander Hubert Meyer, a senior French naval officer. In secret meetings in an abandoned casino between September 1944 and May 1945, Schirlitz, a Prussian pastor's son, and Meyer, a Protestant from Lorraine, concluded a pact preventing the city and the submarine base from being blown up according to Hitler's orders. This treaty also allowed the Allies to supply La Rochelle's civilian residents with food and medicine. Schirlitz remained faithful to his word that sailors and soldiers under his command would not benefit from any of these provisions.

More than two decades later, Meyer, then a retired rear admiral and mayor of Royan, wrote Schirlitz a moving letter reminiscing about "this beautiful story of two sailors, who, though enemies, defended the interests of their respective countries and yet were the first to pave, for our two nations, the way to reconciliation and friendship and have now seen the dawn of a new Europe."

Meyer et Schirlitz, les meilleurs ennemis. (Meyer and Schirlitz, the best of enemies)," thus reads the title of a new book about this unusual relationship between two officers from opposite camps which lends credence to Schirlitz' favorite dictum: "Among seamen it's always easy to reach an understanding." In this case, the understanding was that, at this late stage of the war, both he and Meyer were, in Schirlitz's words, "working for our children."

The "beautiful story" did, by no means, end with Schirlitz' surrender of his ceremonial sword to Meyer who promised to return it one day, and who then became Schirlitz' successor as commander of La Rochelle and the submarine base. When Schirlitz was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp, Meyer visited him and protested vigorously against the camp's scandalous conditions. When Schirlitz asked him for news about his family, who were thought killed in an air raid on the German port city of Kiel, Meyer launched an inquiry and reported to the admiral that his wife, whom he thought dead, had actually survived.

When Schirlitz was falsely accused of war crimes - he was alleged to have condoned the murder of three French prisoners-of-war by a German sergeant - Meyer, by then based in Lebanon, rushed to Bordeaux to testify before a military tribunal to the admiral's impeccable behavior. Schirlitz was acquitted and released.

Back among the ruins of Germany, the admiral fell on hard times. For a while he was forced to eke out a living as a night watchman and an insurance salesman. But Meyer, now highly decorated, never forgot him. In 1954 - 10 years after the first encounter between the two officers - he returned his ceremonial sword to Schirlitz, as promised. Later, Meyer and his wife drove from southwestern France to Kiel to pay their respects to the man Meyer called "my noble former adversary." The two men died in 1978 within two months of each other - first Meyer in an automobile accident, then Schirlitz in his sleep.

Such heartening experiences during the horrors of war, though not the rule, contributed to the process of reconciliation while the fighting was still going on. "Sometimes French prisoners-of-war and deportees held in Germany later became pioneers of the very friendship we are enjoying today," said Fernand Peyronnet, a farmer in Festalemps, not far from La Rochelle.

Peyronnet had helped 18 Jewish families escape from German-occupied France, was caught and deported to Czechoslovakia, where he was to work on the railroads. But no sooner was he in Czechoslovakia than he joined an anti-Nazi underground resistance group that included Germans. "I hate the Nazis but I cannot hate the German people because many helped us prisoners, especially the farmers who treated us well," he said. "In captivity we learned that we, French and Germans, must bury our mutual rancor because we are of the same stock and have the same culture." This insight made Peyronnet one of the leading promoters of the sister-town relationship between Ribérac, a market town close to his farm, and Rietberg in Westphalia. In the last half-century, more than 4,000 such partnerships have been concluded between German and French towns, villages and regions. In many cases, they proved instrumental in fostering reconciliation, especially where they were initiated not by the authorities but by simple residents as a result of chance encounters.

In the case of Ribérac and Riet­berg, it all began when teachers from both towns met on a camping ground at the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux and subsequently inspired their classes to visit each other. Soon, an amazing traffic developed up and down the roads and freeways connecting Ribérac and Rietberg, which are 800 miles apart. By bus and car, French and German students, huntsmen, brass bands, soccer teams and aviators came to see each other long before the town councils, following popular demand, made the partnership official. Now they are holding joint meetings at least twice a year.

Among the passengers on the first bus to Rietberg was former deportee Peyronnet. "When I arrived I wasn't allowed to buy a single beer," he remembered. "Strangers pulled me into pubs, where we raised our glasses to two great European statesmen: 'Prost Adenauer, vive le Général de Gaulle!' "

If French prisoners-of-war were treated well in Germany, they
often made sure later that German POWs were equally well taken care of in France. This happened to Helmut Seidel, a butcher in civilian life, who was assigned to work at Château Ducru-Beaucaillou, one of the most famous vineyards in the Bordeaux region, where he continued to live even after his liberation. Before his death a few years ago, Seidel related how in December of 1945, while he was still technically detained, representatives of the local chapter of the French veterans association invited him to their Christmas party.

And further north in Chinon, a vintner rescued a half-starved Bavarian barber by the name of Ernst Zeininger from a POW camp, nursed him back to health and put him to work in his fields. When a few months later the vintner lay dying, he made Zei­ninger promise to take care of his wife, children and vineyard. So, instead of returning to Bavaria, the barber stayed, took care of the vintner's widow, raised her children as if they were his own and transformed the winery into one of the most celebrated along the Loire River - the Château Olga Raffault.

Meanwhile back in La Rochelle, German naval veterans began visiting their former garrison by the busloads not all that long after the war. "They are always welcome, because they behaved well during the occupation and each time made sure to first go to the French military cemetery and then to the German cemetery nearby, a tactful order of sequence much appreciated by the locals," said Labour. "Alas, by now there are fewer and fewer of these veterans. Most have died."

In La Rochelle, too, a quay now bears Meyer's name. "Will Schirlitz be equally honored one day?" Labour is asked. "Is there a street named after General von Choltitz in Paris?" he replied. Dietrich von Choltitz, German city commandant of Paris, resisted Hitler's order to have the French capital razed. "I guess at this point it's still a little too early to go quite that far."

- Uwe Siemon-Netto is a Washington-based columnist and university lecturer.