‘Contamination of the German blood’: The first stage of the debate over the Rhenish occupation children and their mothers

In a letter of February 1927, the national women's committee of the right-wing German-National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP) asked the Reich Minister for the Occupied Territories (Reichsminister für die besetzten Gebiete) ‘whether any arrangements have been made to support the children of coloured troops in the occupied territory and prevent such mongrels (Mischlinge) from being absorbed by the German people (im deutschen Volke aufgehen)’.Footnote ¹⁴ In his reply, the Reichsminister reported that the majority of the children received social welfare. ‘Special measures’ against colonial French soldiers’ offspring were impossible, since ‘the children, if they are born out of wedlock, follow their mothers’ citizenship and therefore . . . are citizens of the Reich’.Footnote ¹⁵ Nevertheless, the minister promised to launch an official inquiry into the exact numbers of mixed-race children residing in the occupied Rhineland.

The German nationalists’ letter testified to the tenacity of the racialist fears mobilised by the black horror campaign, and by wartime German attacks on France's use of colonial troops as a ‘crime against civilisation’.Footnote ¹⁶ Officially supported propaganda contributed significantly to the creation of the racist stereotype of the Rheinlandbastard. One example are the activities of the main help office for the Palatinate (Haupthilfsstelle Pfalz), a front organisation set up by the Bavarian government to spread anti-French propaganda and combat separatism in the occupied Bavarian Palatinate. Between 1920 and 1922, the Haupthilfsstelle collaborated closely with the German-American journalist and white supremacist, Ray Beveridge, who toured Germany and Scandinavia to demonstrate ‘American solidarity’ with German black horror protesters.Footnote ¹⁷ The main help office's director, Dr August Ritter von Eberlein, arranged speaking engagements for Beveridge, launched her articles in the German press, and provided her with a steady supply of ‘documentation’ about rapes and other crimes allegedly committed by colonial French soldiers.Footnote ¹⁸ Beveridge's speeches, published in 1922 under the title, Die schwarze Schmach – Die weisse Schande (The Black Horror – The White Shame), drew heavily on propaganda materials gathered by Eberlein's staff.Footnote ¹⁹ The journalist accused Woodrow Wilson and the Allies of ‘betraying’ the interests of the white race and incited Germans to lynch African French soldiers: ‘In America, we string up any black who molests a white woman!’Footnote ²⁰

The mixed-race Rhenish children fulfilled an indispensable rhetorical function for racist demagogues such as Beveridge: they were ‘living proof’ of the relentless ‘degeneration’ that would befall the white race if world leaders continued to tolerate the presence of colonial troops in the Rhineland. To underscore the alleged ‘threats’ emanating from the mixed-race Besatzungskinder, black horror propaganda distinguished relatively little between black and white occupation children.

White Besatzungskinder were entirely absent from the visual propaganda Beveridge designed in collaboration with the main help office for the Palatinate. On 8 December 1920, the journalist urged August Eberlein to find her a mixed-race German child by an African French father. Images of such a child, she stressed, would have maximum political impact in the United States.Footnote ²² Evidently, Eberlein obliged. The cover page of Beveridge's The Black Horror – The White Shame featured a photograph of the author holding a well-fed black boy and an apathetic, hollow-eyed white girl: ‘Ray Beveridge with a bastard child, 9 months old, the offspring of a German white mother and a coloured Frenchman, and with an under-nourished German child, victim of the inhumane hunger blockade’.Footnote ²³ The illustration radically juxtaposed the material interests of occupation children and ‘real’ German children; simultaneously, it identified the typical occupation child as mixed-race.

Officials in the foreign office (Auswärtiges Amt) in Berlin criticised Beveridge's ‘hysterical exaggerations’, which were easily disproved by the French and thus threatened to discredit the entire black horror campaign.Footnote ²⁴ These objections notwithstanding, the foreign office, too, eagerly capitalised on racist hysteria over the mixed-race occupation children when politically opportune. During the autumn and winter of 1923, German diplomats collaborated with the Swedish pastor, Martin Liljeblad, whose ‘Ruhr Committee’ harnessed black horror propaganda to its campaign against the recent Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr industrial district. In November 1923, Liljeblad approached the German legation in Stockholm about data on ‘coloured mongrel children’ in the French-occupied Rhineland. In the light of Liljeblad's ‘untiring efforts and unquestionable successes’, the foreign office provided him with the requested statistics.Footnote ²⁵ The use to which Liljeblad put this type of information is evident from his English-language pamphlet, The World's Shame on the Rhine, published the following year. Based on the number of mixed-race children allegedly fathered within the span of one year by a colonial regiment stationed in Mainz (150), Liljeblad estimated that all colonial occupation soldiers together were responsible for the birth of 1,800 ‘mongrels’ annually. If the Rhineland occupation lasted the entire fifteen years stipulated in the Versailles Treaty, he predicted, ‘a band of 27,000 children of coloured troops and white mothers would be spread over the poor Rhinelands [sic]. What a peril this enormous army will be to Europe, we cannot even fancy.’Footnote ²⁶ Liljeblad claimed that 68,000 Swedes already had signed his protest ‘against the holding of coloured troops in Europe’.Footnote ²⁷

The fact that early 1920s debates over the Rhenish occupation children tended to be fixated on the offspring of African French soldiers signified a considerable propagandistic feat and testified to the virulence of racist anxieties in the aftermath of World War I. Actual figures of mixed-race children hardly substantiated claims about the impending ‘mulattoisation’ of the Rhineland. Although, during the post-war years, on average about one third of France's Rhine army was comprised of colonial troops, children fathered by colonial French soldiers made up only a very small portion of the larger group of occupation children in the French zone.Footnote ²⁸ In late March 1927, for example, officials in the Bavarian Palatinate counted a total of 715 out-of-wedlock children by European and colonial French troops; fewer than 10% (68) of these children had colonial French fathers.Footnote ²⁹ In 1931, the foreign office reported twenty-four mixed-race ‘occupation bastards’ for the Prussian Rhine Province and ninety-three for the Palatinate, respectively.Footnote ³⁰ These were low numbers indeed, even if officials highlighted the obstacles to obtaining accurate information. Thus, the president of the supreme regional court (Oberlandesgericht) in Düsseldorf complained that his office had no record of any legal guardians appointed for illegitimate children of ‘coloured members of the occupation troops’, since the mothers invariably tried to hide the fact that ‘a coloured is the child's father’.Footnote ³¹

One important factor contributing to the difficulties of ascertaining more exact numbers of out-of-wedlock occupation children was fear of harassment. In the French-occupied zone, the so-called ‘French sweethearts’ (Franzosenliebchen, or women dating French soldiers) were the target of bitter nationalist resentment often culminating in brutal physical attacks.Footnote ³² The city of Worms, where France's Senegalese troops were stationed until their withdrawal from Germany in June 1920, was a case in point. In July 1919, the French commander of Worms, Lieutenant Colonel Romieu, published an announcement in the local paper on administrative affairs, Wormser Zeitung. Romieu complained that for some time now, ‘organised bands of young people’ had been attacking German women and girls in the area, ‘cutting off their hair, covering their bodies in shoe polish, and publicising their names with libellous commentaries’. The French military clearly believed that German administrators turned a blind eye on these vigilante measures. For the future, Romieu promised to bring Worms's mayor before a police tribunal and to court-martial the perpetrators if the German authorities failed to make arrests ‘within forty-eight hours’.Footnote ³³

German officials often accused the mothers of occupation children of ‘polluting’ the German ‘racial stock’ and draining public coffers at the expense of hard-working, respectable families. A report on the care for occupation children by the district physician (Bezirksarzt) of Landau, Dr Schmitt, illustrates this line of reasoning.

The generous treatment of the mothers of the occupation children, Schmitt objected, constituted an injustice vis-à-vis ‘honest married women’ and widows, who had to pay out of their own pocket for the education and upbringing of their children. The district physician advocated a change in policy forcing the Franzosenweiber to support their ‘mostly syphilitic, mentally retarded, or otherwise inferior children’ on their own. To contain the moral and socio-hygienic dangers allegedly emanating from the mothers of occupation children, Schmitt proposed the stricter enforcement of existing laws against prostitution and abortion. His suggestions testify to the noxious ways in which stereotypes of working-class mothers of Besatzungskinder blended class prejudice, misogyny and racialist fears.

What did the real lives of occupation children and their mothers look like? The example of the rural county of St Goar in the French-occupied Prussian Rhineland sheds some light on this question. Only six of the twenty-eight known Besatzungskinder lived in relatively viable economic circumstances. In some of these cases, the foreign fathers contributed to the children's upkeep; in a few others, the mothers had married and their husbands had acknowledged the children. The overwhelming majority of St Goar's Besatzungskinder, however, lived profoundly precarious lives marked by extreme poverty, ill health and unstable care-giving situations. Typically, the soldiers abandoned their German girlfriends once they learned of their pregnancy. In many cases, the women claimed that men had broken their promise of marriage. Most of the mothers of St Goar's Besatzungskinder came from the lowest rungs of small-town and rural society. Their fathers were day labourers, small farmers and, in a few cases, minor public officials. Although the mothers’ parents often agreed to take in their daughter and her out-of-wedlock child, the report highlighted the great need of these families, as in the case of the forester (Förster) Jürgens and his wife, ‘who themselves have eight children and therefore have to make the greatest sacrifices to raise an additional child’.

Disproving6 Dr Schmitt's stereotype of the lazy welfare recipient, the mothers of St Goar's Besatzungskinder worked extremely hard to support themselves and their children. To keep her employment as a domestic servant, Johanna Lingens left her son, Heinrich, with her widowed father, Jakob, a small farmer (Ackerer). When her father threw her and the child out, Johanna temporarily put her child into foster care, yet the fees soon surpassed her earnings. Eventually, a social worker convinced Jakob Lingens to take Johanna and her son back, though she noted with concern that ‘the child makes a neglected impression; he lacks the necessary care in his grandfather's household’. The war widow, Gertrud Müller, had four legitimate children as well as one out-of-wedlock child by a French soldier, who had cut off all contact with her after his transfer back to France. Müller supported her five children with money she earned by sewing. Occasionally, she received food and clothing from the district welfare office (Kreiswohlfahrtsamt). The report noted that the mother ‘now leads a respectable life and tries hard to raise her children well. The current inflation, however, often creates severe need, which affects not only the French child (Franzosenkind), but also the war orphans.’ Magda Fiedler, also a widow, lived alone with three children, one of whom, Liesel, was the daughter of a French soldier. Liesel was so sickly – according to the report, she suffered from congenital syphilis – that her mother was unable to resume any paid work. ‘Therefore, the family is often in great need, which the welfare office can alleviate only very slightly.’Footnote ³⁵

The St Goar case studies show that the mothers and their families frequently shouldered the main burden of raising out-of-wedlock occupation children. The example of St Goar also suggests that public welfare funds in the occupied territory often were so depleted that officials, even if they acknowledged legitimate need, were unable to offer adequate material support to the families of Besatzungskinder. Ironically, the intense nationalism of the early 1920s led many German officials to resist French involvement in social welfare for German Besatzungskinder. In May 1920, the Bavarian representative at the office of the Reich commissioner for the occupied Rhenish territories (Bayerischer Vertreter bei dem Reichskommissar für die besetzten rheinischen Gebiete) reported with some alarm that

Eight months later, Frau Held, district social worker (Kreisfürsorgerin) in the occupied Bavarian Palatinate, expressed concern that some mothers of mixed-race occupation children believed ‘firmly in the possibility of marrying’ their children's fathers. Held blamed these expectations on certain French and German priests, who had encouraged the African soldiers to attend their children's baptisms and given their blessings to inter-racial marriages. ‘The mother of one hitherto innocent girl told me that she only agreed to her daughter's relationship with a black after “her” priest assured her that he would permit a future marriage’. The welfare official viewed with great suspicion the visits a French priest had paid to the children's home run by the deaconesses (Diakonissenhaus) in Speyer. Among other things, the cleric had promised that the French state would provide for the illegitimate children of colonial French soldiers. Held discounted this as a sinister propagandistic ploy:

German resistance against French participation in the care of the mixed-race occupation children, and the opposition of officials to marriages between colonial French soldiers and Rhenish women, together underline the ways in which nationalist and racist hysteria obstructed more rational approaches to social welfare for Besatzungskinder during the early 1920s. In April 1922, the district president (Regierungspräsident) in Koblenz in the American zone supported requests that the Reich cover social services for impoverished occupation children and their mothers as part of the costs of the Allied occupation. He stressed the ‘political significance’ of the issue, since ‘it would cause great bitterness among the [Rhenish] population if the state avoided its responsibilities’. Moreover, because local welfare providers often were ‘negligent due to the strong resentment against the girls who have become involved with American soldiers, the direct support through state funds is urgently necessary in the children's own interest’.Footnote ³⁸ Some fragmentary evidence exists suggesting that as a result of such conflicts over the social rights of out-of-wedlock Besatzungskinder, the latter's lives may have become significantly more precarious than those of illegitimate children living in unoccupied Germany. In July 1921, the mayor of Landau reported that of forty-five occupation children born in his town, fifteen (33%) had died.Footnote ³⁹ By comparison, the infant mortality rate for illegitimate children in the Reich as a whole was 25.5 percent.Footnote ⁴⁰

The most sinister nationalist resentment and racial prejudice directed against mixed-race Besatzungskinder manifested itself in attempts to remove such children from the German nation. As Reiner Pommerin, Tina Campt and others have shown, at least some Weimar-era officials were sufficiently concerned about the spectre of ‘racial pollution’ to contemplate seriously the possibility of forced sterilisation of the mixed-race Rheinlandbastarde.Footnote ⁴¹ In late 1927, these plans were abandoned, partly because Germany still lacked a sterilisation law. That same year, officials in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Territories collaborated with the General Evangelical-Protestant Missionary Association (Allgemeiner Evangelisch-Protestantischer Missionsverein, or AEPM) to persuade Rhenish mothers of mixed-race Besatzungskinder to give up their children and send them to ‘new homes’ in Africa and Asia. The scheme, however, soon foundered on the mothers’ resistance. In early January 1928, Dr Witte, head of the AEPM's East Asia Mission, regretted that, excepting only one case, pastors in the occupied territories had been unable to convince the mothers of mixed-race Besatzungskinder to agree to their children's ‘deportation to Africa or other countries’. Most pastors reported that ‘the coloured children are treated well by their relatives’, although other children often bullied them. Witte consoled himself with the fact that the actual number of mixed-race children was ‘not terribly big’ and expressed the hope ‘that they eventually will be absorbed by the German blood’.Footnote ⁴² One week later, officials in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Territories informed Witte that the mothers’ opposition and the concern ‘that official intervention in this area would have undesirable political consequences’ had convinced them to drop all plans for the deportation of the mixed-race Besatzungskinder.Footnote ⁴³

The ‘litigious turn’: German mothers’ paternity suits against French soldiers

The abandonment of schemes for the forced sterilisation and removal of the mixed-race Rheinlandbastarde to Africa and Asia overlapped with the arrival of a litigious turn in official approaches to the problem of the Besatzungskinder. In 1927, the German government began supporting Rhenish mothers’ paternity suits against French soldiers in the hope of setting a legal precedent. This shift in policy was partly the result of growing pressures on the central state to alleviate the financial burdens on public social welfare in the occupied territory. By the late 1920s, the percentage of Besatzungskinder dependent on public assistance often was significant. In 1927, occupied Hesse reported 354 out-of-wedlock occupation children, 211 of whom regularly received state support. In the city of Mainz, all the 151 illegitimate children of French occupation soldiers were dependent on social welfare.Footnote ⁴⁴ Of 691 out-of-wedlock occupation children reported for the county (Regierungsbezirk) of Düsseldorf for 1930, one quarter (166) was on public welfare.Footnote ⁴⁵

Since the strains on public social welfare in the Rhineland were nothing new in 1928, this factor alone does not explain the timing of the paternity suits against French soldiers. As we have seen, during the early 1920s, German officials adamantly opposed French involvement in the care for out-of-wedlock Besatzungskinder. This contrast points to the importance of recent changes in foreign relations. The Dawes Plan of 1924, which rendered reparations more manageable for Germany, and the Locarno Treaty of 1925, in which Belgium, France and the German Reich pledged not to alter their mutual borders by force, constituted major milestones of détente. The year 1925 also brought the end of the Ruhr occupation and the completion of the first phase of the removal of Allied troops from the Rhineland. Germany's admission to the League of Nations in 1926 was an important indicator of the country's progress towards international rehabilitation.Footnote ⁴⁶ All these developments – as well as the coming to power in the Reich of a Social Democratic coalition government in June of 1928 – were necessary preconditions of the legal turn in the debate over the Rhenish Besatzungskinder.

Last but not least, the late 1920s witnessed important changes in the behaviour of the unwed mothers of occupation children. Rather than hiding their children's foreign paternity out of fear of discrimination and harassment, many Rhenish mothers now approached state officials for help in locating and suing their child's Allied father. In late April 1927, Dr Karl Führ, a lawyer in the town of Landau in the occupied Bavarian Palatinate, wrote a letter to Eva Meyer in Langenschwalbach. Führ specialised in the legal aspects of the occupation; he defended Germans before French military courts.

Führ proceeded to lay out in detail the conditions under which French law permitted paternity suits, and he urged Eva Meyer to verify that her daughter's case met these requirements. Two weeks later, Führ applied to the Inter-Allied Rhineland Commission (IARC) in Koblenz to grant Lotte Meyer the right to sue in forma pauperis (Armenrecht, or pauper's status under the law), which would allow her to use the services of a French poor litigants’ counsel. On 24 June, he learned that the decision on this matter lay within the purview of the state prosecutor in Latour's home town of Denain. When Lotte Meyer and her mother could not afford to hire a French lawyer, Führ volunteered his services.Footnote ⁴⁸ He copied his correspondence with the Meyers to the Reich Minister for the Occupied Territories in Berlin.

The case of Meyer v. Latour apparently never progressed beyond the failed attempt to achieve pauper's status for the plaintiff.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nevertheless, by approaching the German government over the legal rights of her illegitimate granddaughter, Eva Meyer helped set into motion a major shift in official policy. A decree by the Inter-Allied Rhineland Commission on 30 July 1921 had banned German courts from presiding over paternity suits against Allied soldiers, rendering German officials pessimistic about the prospects of obtaining child support for out-of-wedlock Besatzungskinder.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Meyer case prompted them to rethink their strategy. On 25 June 1927, the Reich Minister for the Occupied Territories inquired whether the foreign office ‘would be willing to mediate in an appropriate case of a paternity suit in France’. He offered to cover the costs of litigation ‘in a few particularly suitable cases’, since ‘the German occupation children are completely deprived of any rights vis-à-vis their father’.Footnote ⁵¹ The Reich minister obtained the support of the Prussian Minister of the Interior (Preussischer Minister des Inneren). In February 1928, the latter told him that he would ‘welcome it in the interest of the population of the occupied territory if we could initiate a paternity suit in France, if necessary by covering the costs through Reich funds.’Footnote ⁵²

Why this focus on French soldiers’ illegitimate offspring? After all, contemporary statistics showed that the number of out-of-wedlock children fathered by American and British troops was far more significant. After the end of the Allied occupation on 30 June 1930, officials in the Prussian Rhineland counted 4,532 Besatzungskinder still residing there. Of these, the majority (1,866) had American fathers, and close to 1,100 had British fathers. By comparison, French troops had considerably fewer illegitimate Rhenish children (864).Footnote ⁵³ This imbalance was particularly noteworthy given that the US army had left the Rhineland in February 1923 and that French troops significantly outnumbered their British colleagues.Footnote ⁵⁴ Political factors certainly played a role in the initial decision to focus on paternity suits against French soldiers. German officials were probably hesitant to alienate American leaders, since they depended on the latter's support in their ongoing efforts to negotiate more lenient reparations conditions. Since German diplomats considered France the main obstacle to a revision of the Versailles Treaty, and since they strove to exploit political differences among the Allies, this may help explain why officials did not pursue child support claims against British troops.

And yet, in certain ways it was the recent Franco–German rapprochement, and not the long-standing Franco–German antagonism, that explains why the official German campaign for child support for Besatzungskinder focused on French fathers. Unless German mothers had the right to sue in forma pauperis before the courts of a foreign country, paternity suits against occupation soldiers were prohibitively expensive. In contrast to US law, which did not grant German citizens this right, the Franco–German trade agreement of August 1927 allowed Germans under certain conditions to claim pauper's status in legal proceedings before French courts.Footnote ⁵⁵ This provision played a crucial role in enabling working-class mothers of illegitimate occupation children to initiate paternity suits against French men.

There were other legal factors, as well, that caused German officials to concentrate their litigious efforts on French fathers. Residency requirements and other restrictions severely limited the rights of foreign illegitimate children and their mothers in the United States and United Kingdom.Footnote ⁵⁶ In contrast, recent reforms of French paternity law posed fewer obstacles and were more easily compatible with German law. In France, the civil code of 1804 traditionally prohibited paternity suits.Footnote ⁵⁷ The law on the ‘judicial recognition of natural paternity’ of 16 November 1912 modified Article 340 of the civil code, allowing paternity searches under certain conditions. Important restrictions were that ‘the man could not have been married to another woman at the legal time of conception’, and that ‘a mother could take action only as plaintiff in the name of the child during the first two years of the child's infancy, or within two years after the father stopped supporting the child or their relationship ended’.Footnote ⁵⁸

In July 1927, the Reich Minister for the Occupied Territories asked Dr Führ to review another potential paternity suit against a member of the French army of the Rhine.Footnote ⁵⁹ On 21 June 1925, the factory worker, Hermine Becker, had given birth to an illegitimate son, Jakob. Becker lived in Euskirchen near Cologne in the Prussian Rhine Province. According to her, Jakob's father was the French adjutant, Claude Montclair, with whom she had had a four-year-long relationship ending in February 1925, when Montclair returned to his home in Constantine, Algeria.Footnote ⁶⁰ When interviewed by the Prussian Regierungspräsident in Cologne during June 1927, the mayor of Euskirchen furnished a number of items attesting to the seriousness of the relationship between Becker and Montclair, among them letters and telegrams by Montclair, as well as a photograph of the couple showing Becker five months pregnant.Footnote ⁶¹

Führ advised against pursuing child support claims for Jakob Becker, since the two-year time limit on paternity searches had expired.Footnote ⁶² In April 1928, the Reich Minister for the Occupied Territories nevertheless instructed the foreign office to collaborate with Führ and the German embassy in Paris in preparing a paternity suit against Claude Montclair. Two legal developments in France rendered German officials hopeful that Hermine Becker's case had a chance of success. One of them concerned Article 1382 of the French civil code, which under certain conditions allowed mothers of illegitimate children to sue for damages and child support.Footnote ⁶³ In child support cases, Article 1382 required proof that the father was at fault; seduction, a broken promise of marriage, or the abuse of a relationship of authority could constitute legal grounds for damages. These were stringent requirements. However, according to the German embassy in Paris, in recent years French judges had interpreted the provisions of Article 1382 more liberally.Footnote ⁶⁴ The advantage of Article 1382 was that it imposed no deadline on child support claims. A second strategy focused on the 1912 reform of French paternity law. German legal experts argued that the revision of Article 340 of the civil code had adjusted French and German illegitimacy laws sufficiently to allow French courts to use German law in those cases where a German child and mother brought charges against a French father.Footnote ⁶⁵

This, however, was far from certain. French judges had considerable discretionary power when it came to defining the legal grounds for paternity suits. In the post-war years, major French courts rejected the admissibility of foreign illegitimacy laws in paternity suits against French citizens. Thus, on 22 December 1920, the Paris appeal court (cour d'appel) ruled that Article 340 of the civil code was so fundamental to France's public order that foreigners, too, had to submit to its provisions.Footnote ⁶⁶ To a significant extent, then, official German attempts to secure child support for the illegitimate Rhenish children of French occupation soldiers depended on French judges’ willingness to put the interests of the German child and mother above traditional notions of the centrality of Article 340 to the stability of France's public order.

The law suit against Claude Montclair illustrates the crucial role of French officials and legal professionals in facilitating the legal turn in the debate over the Rhenish occupation children. Because the defendant had returned to Algeria, setting up the trial required a complex system for the exchange of information and legal documents. In December 1928, Montclair rejected the charges brought against him, claiming that he was ‘the victim of outrageous blackmail’ and that Hermine Becker ‘had had numerous lovers’ during the time he had known her. The state prosecutor in Constantine asked his colleague in Paris to forward Montclair's statement to the German ambassador and to find out whether Becker intended to uphold her charges. The German embassy relayed the document to Dr Führ, who contacted the mayor of Euskirchen to request an official response to Montclair's accusations, as well as a statement by Becker herself.Footnote ⁶⁷ What is perhaps most striking about this chain of communication is French officials’ acceptance of the German government's intense involvement in a civil trial against a French citizen on French soil. This attests to the goodwill of French authorities, who seem to have been relatively unconcerned about the possibility that Germany might exploit the law suit for political purposes.

In May 1929, the civil court in Constantine granted Becker the right to sue in forma pauperis.Footnote ⁶⁸ Over the course of the next month, Becker's Algerian lawyer, Dr L. Saingery, consulted repeatedly with his German colleague, Dr Führ. Saingery filed claims on behalf of Jakob Becker for recognition of paternity and child support of 400 francs per month; he also filed a claim on the mother's behalf for damages resulting from seduction.Footnote ⁶⁹ Hermine Becker's deposition, given in June 1929 before a court in Euskirchen, carefully addressed the conditions of Articles 340 and 1382 of the French civil code. French and German law excluded promiscuous women from the right to bring paternity suits. To satisfy a crucial requirement of German illegitimacy law, Becker affirmed that she had not had intercourse with any man other than Montclair during the legal time of conception (the period between Day 302 and Day 180 before the child's date of birth). She underlined the quasi-marital nature of their relationship (wilde Ehe, or concubinage notoire). Becker rejected Montclair's attacks on her moral character: ‘Since I considered him my fiancé, he certainly did not give me any money or special gifts for sexual intercourse’. As her future husband, he was entitled to demand intercourse; if she refused, he would use ‘more or less force’. According to Becker, when she got pregnant, Montclair had renewed his promise of marriage and given her a golden engagement ring. Until the sixth month of her pregnancy, he had continued to visit her regularly; his sudden announcement by telegram that he had returned to Algeria had come as a shock.Footnote ⁷⁰

Under the conditions of Article 340 of the French civil code, Becker's case against Montclair was rather weak. She lacked a letter in which the father acknowledged Jakob as his own; more important yet, she had filed her paternity suit too late. Given that French troops had been stationed in the Rhineland since the armistice of November 1918, it was likely that most German mothers of occupation children would face the same problem. This was a crucial reason why German officials argued in favour of using German illegitimacy law in paternity suits against French soldiers. Compared to French law, the German civil code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, or BGB) contained significantly fewer restrictions on paternity suits. According to Article 1717 of the BGB, if a man was unable to prove that he had not had sexual relations with a woman during the time of conception, or that the mother had had sexual relationships with other men during that time, a court could order him to pay child support. Many unwed fathers tried to avoid paying by accusing the woman of promiscuity; their behaviour often caused lengthy delays in the court's decision. Ultimately, however, in Germany ‘only a minority of cases ended with the child losing its right to support payments’.Footnote ⁷¹

In July 1929, Dr Führ wrote to Dr Saingery that he believed Becker's case warranted using German illegitimacy law, ‘since the child was conceived and born in Germany’. He stressed that the 1912 reform of Article 340 had removed contradictions between French and German illegitimacy laws.Footnote ⁷² Evidently, this line of reasoning convinced Saingery as well as the Algerian judge. On 26 November 1929, the civil court of Constantine ruled in the first instance that in the law suit of Hermine Becker against Claude Montclair, ‘the national law of the child, which is German law’ was decisive. The court justified this decision with the argument that ‘when two national laws coincide, the stricter one has to come into application’. While in French law, a successful paternity suit established a familial relationship between the father and his out-of-wedlock child, German law merely stipulated that the father had to pay child support until his son or daughter reached the age of sixteen.Footnote ⁷³

The Constantine ruling represented a major breakthrough for German officials seeking a legal precedent for the use of German illegitimacy law in paternity suits against French soldiers. Other French judges adopted a similar position. In early January 1930, an Alsatian court used German law as the basis of its decision to grant child support to a German woman suing the French father of her illegitimate child. The court argued that ‘according to international private law, the citizenship of the mother is decisive’.Footnote ⁷⁴ In addition to establishing a legal precedent, Hermine Becker's law suit against Claude Montclair had created a pattern of Franco–German co-operation also apparent during subsequent paternity searches. In the spring and summer of 1930, German officials repeatedly received assistance from French authorities in their efforts to locate the French fathers of Rhenish occupation children.Footnote ⁷⁵

Parallel to the government's efforts to establish a legal precedent for paternity suits against French soldiers, the issue of the Rhenish occupation children stirred renewed public interest in the autumn of 1929. The immediate political context was the heated debate about the Young Plan, a new proposal for a modified reparations scheme. The Allies had promised that if Germany approved the Young Plan (which the Reichstag finally did on 12 March 1930), the Rhineland would be evacuated ahead of schedule by 30 June 1930. In contrast, right-wing German nationalists demanded an immediate end to reparations and the unconditional removal of all Allied occupation troops; in December 1929, a popular referendum against the Young Plan organised by the National Socialists and the DNVP failed.

The Young Plan raised the prospect of the early evacuation of the Rhineland while at the same time polarising public opinion over the issue of reparations policy. It is thus perhaps not surprising that the debate about the Besatzungskinder now shifted towards the long-term financial burdens the children imposed on the German state. On 19 October 1929, the Kölner Tageblatt (Cologne Daily) ran a story subsequently picked up by newspapers around the country. The paper reported that Allied soldiers had fathered 15,000 illegitimate German children. It also alleged that a ‘major Rhenish women's organisation’ had prepared a paternity suit in England to establish a legal precedent.Footnote ⁷⁶ Ten days later, the left-wing magazine Die Weltbühne (The World Stage) similarly praised the efforts of a ‘pacifist women's group in the occupied territory’ to sue British soldiers for child support.Footnote ⁷⁷ Both articles suggested that Allied soldiers’ child support dues should be credited towards German reparations.

Reports about the out-of-wedlock occupation children published during the final phase of the Young Plan referendum had a markedly shriller tone. On 16 December 1929, Welt am Morgen (The World in the Morning) featured an article entitled ‘Who Pays for the Costs of Child Support Resulting from the Occupation?’ The article, which also appeared in other papers, reiterated the inflated number of 15,000 occupation children and claimed that Rhenish women's organisations were filing paternity suits in England and France. Should these efforts fail, the women would ‘bring this embarrassing matter before the League of Nations, because it is impossible to leave 15,000 children without protection and material support only because the army of occupation has withdrawn prematurely for political reasons. The League of Nations is responsible for the occupation – let it resolve the resulting social problems!’Footnote ⁷⁸ On 23 December, the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhineland Newspaper) claimed that ‘Two Divisions of Occupation Children’ would remain in the Rhineland long after the withdrawal of Allied troops. The article supported efforts to obtain child support from French and British soldiers, yet warned that for decades to come, the ‘children's army on the Rhine’ would represent an ‘unpleasant, bitter souvenir de France’.Footnote ⁷⁹

It is not clear what prompted the initial report about a Rhenish women's organisation allegedly preparing a paternity suit against British soldiers; government officials were unable to verify this information.Footnote ⁸⁰ The story's strong resonance in the press sheds light on the continuities and shifts in public attitudes towards the Besatzungskinder over the course of the 1920s. In 1929, the issue of the occupation children still functioned as a metaphor for Germany's ‘victimisation’.Footnote ⁸¹ Nationalists used the example of the continuing costs of supporting Allied soldiers’ illegitimate German children to disparage the political achievement of the early evacuation of the Rhineland and underscore the enduring burdens of the Versailles Treaty. The spectre of the ‘children's army on the Rhine’ depicted the Besatzungskinder as alien elements potentially threatening the nation from within, a theme reminiscent of certain aspects of black horror propaganda. And yet, late 1920s discourses also differed in important respects from the earlier debate over the Rheinlandbastarde. Especially striking is the shift away from the fixation on the mixed-race children and towards a focus on the illegitimate offspring of white British and French troops. The debate over the occupation children still had strong nationalistic overtones; racialist concerns, by comparison, (temporarily) seem to have become less central to it. Arguably, the widespread support for the quest for child support for Besatzungskinder reflected an at least tacit acknowledgment that the children had become a permanent part of German society. This, too, was a marked contrast to the black horror campaign, which had denied categorically any possibility of the inclusion of black Besatzungskinder into the nation.

What were the practical implications of the litigious turn for the lives of the Rhenish occupation children and their mothers? In January 1930, Dr Führ, the lawyer specialising in paternity suits against French soldiers, complained that he was ‘inundated’ with requests for legal advice by mothers of Besatzungskinder.Footnote ⁸² The mothers often possessed significant knowledge of the legal process. Thus, on 22 October 1929, Erna Schulz wrote to Führ ‘with the polite request to provide information as soon as possible’. Schulz had an out-of-wedlock child with a French soldier who was about to leave Germany; the father had acknowledged his child before a German court. Schulz sent Führ a copy of the German document to see if it provided sufficient legal grounds for claiming child support. In case additional materials were needed, she urged the lawyer ‘to take immediately the necessary steps so [the father] acknowledges his paternity before French authorities’.Footnote ⁸³ Many of the women who contacted Führ had read in the newspaper about the paternity suits against occupation soldiers. Gerlinde Kuhn, who wrote to Führ on 20 December 1929, sought child support from a former American soldier. For several years, the father had contributed four dollars per month towards the costs of raising their mutual child, yet now he had ceased his payments, arguing that ‘he is not legally required to do so’. Kuhn asked Führ ‘to give me advice and perhaps be my legal representative, so I obtain my legal rights. Since I am not able to continue supporting and raising the child, I could easily obtain official proof of indigence (Armenattest)’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Kuhn's letter prompted officials in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Territories to re-examine the status of foreign illegitimate children in US law.Footnote ⁸⁵ During 1927–30, Dr Führ's office provided free legal advice and services to a sizeable number of unwed mothers of occupation children. This was an important opportunity for the mothers to defend their own and their children's legal rights and material interests.

It is difficult to say how many of the paternity suits against French soldiers ultimately were successful and resulted in significant improvements in the children's standard of living. The activity report for 1928–30 of the Archiv für Berufsvormünder, an organisation representing many of the professional guardians of illegitimate German children of foreign fathers, offers some tentative clues. In 1930, the Archiv worked on 4,000 cases of child support claims ‘by German children, whose fathers reside abroad, or by foreign children, whose fathers reside in Germany or abroad’. The annual turnover of such cases was roughly 1,400. Between 1924 and 1930, the amount of child support the organisation had been able to secure had risen from 18,518 marks to 171,940 marks. The Archiv claimed that 28% of its cases were successful and prided itself on this ‘remarkable achievement, given that these are almost exclusively difficult cases’. In 23% of the cases, it had been impossible to locate the foreign fathers, and in an even greater number of incidents, legal obstacles had prevented the filing of child support claims. Among the countries where the organisation's efforts had been particularly successful were France, Poland and Russia.Footnote ⁸⁶

Though it is impossible to say exactly how many Rhenish Besatzungskinder the Archiv für Berufsvormünder represented, these children probably comprised a substantial portion of its cases. A considerable percentage of occupation children were dependent on public social welfare and had a professional guardian appointed by the youth welfare office (Jugendamt); the Archiv represented many local youth welfare offices. Given the progress in Franco–German collaboration on child support claims against French soldiers, it is plausible to assume that a not insignificant number of the Archiv's wards benefited from these legal improvements. From the winter of 1929, the Archiv was in contact with Dr Führ to exchange information on the progress of child support claims against French soldiers; its staff took a keen interest in the decision of the Constantine court of November 1929.Footnote ⁸⁷ They also shared one of their own successful examples of a child support claim against a French occupation soldier. This was the case of the Moroccan soldier, Messaoud Y. The Archiv had located Y. with the help of his French military superiors, who relayed to him the request that he help support his illegitimate German child. Y. declared that ‘he was willing to send a financial contribution to the mother of the child’ and asked for the woman's address so he could ‘send her personally the requested support’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Especially in cases like this one, where the fathers were located relatively swiftly and agreed to pay a certain form of child support, the lives of some occupation children may have improved considerably.Footnote ⁸⁹ The case of Messaoud Y. suggests that mixed-race Besatzungskinder were not excluded from this possibility.