Voices from the Dark Years

The clearest picture yet of what life was really like in German-occupied France during World War II, using previously unpublished first-person accounts of ordinary men and women who lived through this extraordinary and dangerous time



Using new, meticulously researched material, Douglas Boyd tells an enthralling and sometimes chilling narrative history of the Occupation, as lived by the French people. Less than one per cent of the French people were pro-German. Is it pure coincidence that the same percentage actively resisted the Germans despite knowing that, if caught, their husbands, wives, and children were considered equally culpable under the brutal Teutonic principle of Sippenhaft—guilt by association? It is a record of great heroism and ultimate cruelty.