French President Emmanuel Macron marked on Saturday the 80th anniversary of Free French troops liberating the eastern city of Strasbourg from Nazi occupation and called for overlooked victims of World War II to be honored. The president reviewed troops and attended a military ceremony at the Place Broglie in central Strasbourg, bowing before a monument to General Philippe Leclerc who led Free French troops into the city on November 23, 1944.
The general, who commanded the Second Armoured Division, and his men had sworn three years earlier while fighting in Libya to one day liberate Alsace. "When we knew the flag was up on the cathedral, we had reached our objective – freedom, freeing Alsace, a province dear to the heart of the Second Armoured Division," said Roger Le Neurès, a 101-year-old veteran of the fight present at the ceremony. France's colors flew from the cathedral's spire during the ceremony in homage to the city's liberators.
Macron announced that scholar and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch, tortured and executed by the Gestapo in 1944, would be reinterred in the Panthéon – the Paris monument to France's greatest citizens.
Speaking after the ceremony in Strasbourg, the president highlighted the fate of tens of thousands of Alsatian men forcibly enlisted into the German army. "These children of Alsace... were captured, dressed in a uniform they loathed in the service of a cause that made them slaves, instruments of a crime that killed them too, and threatened with reprisals if they attempted to flee," he said. The conscripts' "tragedy must be named, recognized and taught" Macron added.
Berlin saw Alsatians as its own citizens after annexing the province – fought over for decades by France and Germany – following France's defeat in 1940. The forced conscription is "something that's always been misunderstood," said 99-year-old Jean-Marie Hostert, one of the surviving members of this group known as "Malgré-nous" ("against our will"). "We didn't want to go" to fight alongside the Germans, added Hostert, speaking during the commemorations in Strasbourg.
"Following the war, people wanted to highlight the memory of heroes, resistance fighters, everything that could bind France together again," said historian Christophe Woehrle. "In that whole story, the 'Malgré-nous' are a bit of a stain. It's not glorious. It's not something you can build a national memory from," he added.
Macron was also scheduled to visit Natzweiler-Struthof, around 60 kilometers west of Strasbourg, the only concentration camp built by the Nazis on French soil. Around 17,000 of the 50,000 interned at Struthof and its satellite camps during the war died or disappeared.