Julia Torrie's study of civilian evacuations in France and Germany undertakes several tasks. The author examines the interplay between Germany and France in the formulation of policy to protect civilians from air raids. She looks at families as a source of potential or actual noncompliance under two authoritarian regimes when faced with leaving their homes under duress. Finally, she analyzes the role that evacuations played in excluding “undesirables” from the nation, and the manner in which experiences of evacuation contributed to the construction of postwar memory.

Before the war, planning for civilian evacuations reflected the recent historical experiences and ideological/cultural predilections of both sides. Having been invaded and occupied during World War I, French officials assumed that population transfers would be necessary to protect civilians in harm's way. Rather than envisioning mandatory transfers, however, plans stipulated that the decision to evacuate would lie in the hands of individuals, or more precisely, male heads of households. The responsibility for carrying out evacuations was distributed among local, regional, and national authorities. In Germany on the other hand, the Nazi regime believed the urban civil defense training, shelters, and anti-aircraft weapons would keep civilians safe. While Nazi authorities did expect to evacuate civilians from border regions to facilitate military staging operations, they believed that keeping civilians in place would strengthen the Volksgemeinschaft, which unlike the French, would not retreat. If evacuations were to occur, they were to be mandatory and local authorities would be allowed less discretion. The mass “exodus” of civilians that accompanied the Wehrmacht's invasion in the west in 1940 only strengthened Nazi leaders' conceptions of “French” methods as disorderly, individualistic, and undisciplined. The exigencies of war, including those arising from the German occupation of France, did encourage some convergence in the methods of population transfer, among them the priority given to evacuating children and the extensive role of para-governmental charitable organizations in feeding and housing evacuees, Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (NSV) on the German side, and the Secours National and the Comité de Secours Immédiat (C.O.S.I) on the French. As Torrie argues, the similarities arose because each side learned from the other. Nevertheless, the distinctively German approach to civilian evacuations caused more problems for the Nazi leadership than they solved, especially as aerial bombardments on Germany's cities increased and the war turned against the Third Reich.

Forced to undertake mass evacuations in the face of relentless Allied bombing and the military collapses on all fronts, Nazi leaders transferred women and children to distant rural areas, placing them with strangers whose unfamiliarity with (or dislike of) urban lifestyles caused conflict and resentment. When evacuees disobeyed the order to leave or returned without permission, officials threatened to cut off their allowances and ration coupons. Although German men were away at the front, except for workers in industries that were crucial to the war effort, evacuees resented the Nazi state's coercive disregard for the rights of families to decide for themselves and their refusal to acknowledge women's importance to urban communities. The most explosive episode of noncompliance took place in late 1943 in the Ruhr city of Witten when angry women forced the regime to abandon the mandatory evacuation of adults. In less urbanized France, by contrast, evacuations took place with less resistance because safe rural areas were closer to threatened cities and thus less disruptive to family bonds. French officials, eager to demonstrate sovereignty and respectful of family autonomy to the point of insisting that married women remain with their husbands often mitigated the draconian commands of the occupation. As a contrast to Witten, Torrie effectively describes the less unpopular and smoother evacuation of Cherbourg in 1944 to substantiate her comparisons.

“For Their Own Good” has a number of strengths. By applying Victoria de Grazia's insight about the family as a source of noncompliance under authoritarian regimes, Torrie reinforces the main conclusion of the now decades of research on popular opposition in the Third Reich. If an issue was deeply felt enough to mobilize large numbers of Germans, popular anger could limit the regime's room to maneuver. Yet by explaining the relevance of family ties to evacuations and revisiting the best-known examples of discontent (the Rosenstrasse protests and the outrage at the Nazi Party's removal of crucifixes in Bavarian schools, to name two examples), she has brought something new to the table. Extensively researched in local, regional, and national archives in both countries, Torrie not only illuminates the interactions between ordinary Germans and the Nazi regime in moments of crisis, but she also successfully calls our attention to the complex, ground-level negotiations between the French and Germans that underlay the relationships between the occupiers and occupied. Her chapter describing the manner in which Jews, psychiatric patients, and “asocials” were excluded from evacuations, although less devastating in France, identifies yet another means (as well as the ambiguities in the term “evacuation” which applied both to the transfer of civilians and to deportations to ghettos and death camps) by which Nazism's “enemies” met their end. Evacuation was meant to save “Aryans.” The refusal to evacuate “undesirables” meant their extermination by air raids. Finally, Torrie's account of evacuations and postwar memory describes how evacuees defined themselves as “victims,” pleading the need to restore the family to heal their equally victimized nations. Having been privileged relative to racial and social outcasts despite the negotiation and conflict that accompanied transfers of civilians, the status of victimhood became central to restore an idealized past of rootedness. Because evacuations lasted longer, the author argues, they were arguably more significant to the construction of memory than the experience of air raids themselves.

Despite its contributions, occasional repetition detracts from the book's strengths. Moreover, despite her excellent analysis of short-term causes for the differences in French and German evacuations, Torrie barely touches upon long-term factors that might have contributed to the perceptions of each side's “national characters,” as well as the actual difference in weight that each side granted family autonomy. She alludes, for example (p. 29), to the relevance of “republican freedoms” in the case of France but does not develop the point, particularly how those freedoms would have conflicted with, or were reconciled to, Vichy's valorization of the family. Nevertheless, Torrie has accomplished a great deal, a rich analysis of the significance of evacuations to national identity, the relationship between rulers and ruled, as well as the ambiguous mix of competition and sharing among enemies.