| 3 German soldiers are seen at Le Havre, France during World War II on April 2, 1941. A German propaganda photograph shows German soldiers confident after victories all over Europe. For the German public, it seemed the war would end soon in Germany’s favor. Occupying a central place in the defensive system of the Atlantic Wall, Le Havre was on the front line. The people of Le Havre knew this only too well: in 1940, ahead of the German occupation, they had left the city en masse. The geographer Armand Frémont (January 31, 1933 – March 2, 2019) testified with emotion to his family’s exodus: “They were leaving for an unknown even deeper than America, in a migration that was very orderly in detail and totally unreasonable in substance. By leaving Le Havre early enough, they avoid the drama, the death, the scenes of hysteria on the Quilleboeuf and Berville ferries to cross the Seine, the traffic jams, the machine-gunning, the haggard children. They leave with great fear, but they make the same choice as that dictated by the collective flow, much stronger than their individual destiny.” Although it was the Germans who were dropping bombs in June 1940, almost as soon as they stopped, it was the RAF who started to drop its bombs on Le Havre. his went on for the next 2 years. For the rest of 1940 and the whole of 1941 the bombing raids were at night and then in 1942 they began to be during the day as well as the night. Although the bombs were aimed at the port and factories, aiming in the dark was an imprecise science, and often it was the town and its French citizens who were hit. Le Havre’s occupation was marked by 4 years of economic collaboration. The Augustin-Normand shipyards, for example, owed 88 percent of their turnover to German orders; Caillard cranes 68 percent. Most remarkable is the amount of new business generated by the construction of the Atlantic Wall, of which Le Havre was supposed to be a key fortress; with no fewer than 420 reinforced concrete bunkers. This vast enterprise built the fortunes of building and public works firms like Dieppedalle or Thireau-Morel, as well as bringing unemployment down from 17,133 (in a city of 160,000 prewar inhabitants) in early 1941 to just 1080 in April 1942. Le Havre’s businesses were also tainted by the Aryanization of Jewish firms. Aryanization built on a solid tradition of prewar anti-Semitism (despite the Jewish community’s relatively small size); vigorously promoted by the prefectoral authorities, it was complacently reported in Le Petit Havre, the authorized local daily which counted future president René Coty among its board members. The record is not entirely disgraceful: Le Havre’s coffee dealers refused to buy out a colleague of Jewish ancestry, while other Jewish businesses were kept going for the duration, and then returned to their rightful owners, by friendly non-Jewish figureheads. More often, however, the opportunities offered by Aryanization to purchasers, and even more to the administrateurs provisoires who “earned” 3,000 Francs a month — twice a white-collar worker’s wage — for each firm under their “care” — were simply too lucrative to be passed up. Le Havre’s politicians, Mayor Pierre Courant at their head, were also leaders in the so-called Comité ouvrier de secours immédiat, a relief organization that derived most of its funding from the proceeds of the confiscation of Jewish property, via the German occupying authority — and advertised the fact. Le Havre was a major challenge for both the Allies and the Germans: it was the most important and best-equipped port in the Channel, facing England, and it was a solid base for enemy submarines, hidden in the 8 cells of a particularly well defended base. The “carpet” bombings by British aircraft – and not American, as a persistent legend has it – caused considerable damage from the unguided mass munitions. Reconnaissance planes 1st mark the terrain with rockets, then the Halifaxes and Lancasters arrive in line, up to 350 aircraft at a time, in rows of 20, dropping their incendiary or explosive bombs without losing altitude. Then they return to their base, under heavy fire from the German anti-aircraft guns, which are not very effective due to the height of the targets. Le Havre suffered 132 bombings by the Allies during the war. The Nazis also destroyed the port infrastructure and sank ships before leaving the city. The greatest destruction, however, occurred on September 5-6, 1944, when the British Royal Air Force (RAF) bombed the city center and the port to weaken the Nazi German garrison under Operation Astonia – often described as “the storm of iron and fire.” The results of the bombing campaign were appalling: 5,000 deaths (including 1,770 in 1944), 75,000 to 80,000 injured, 150 hectares of land razed, 12,500 buildings destroyed. The port was also devastated, and the Nazi Germans left some 350 wrecks lie at the bottom of the sea. Le Havre was liberated by Allied troops on September 12, 1944. The reckoning, when it came, was partial and messy: the l’impossible typologie of confiscations and penalties. The local Comite´ de confiscation des profits illicites dealt with 1813 cases in Seine-Maritime, 256 of them in Le Havre. Firms could deduct unpaid bills from their liability to confiscation of profits on German orders. They might claim in mitigation to have derived profits on French, not German, turnover, or to have been constrained by the Germans, or to have supplied important information to the Resistance. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0502.jpg |
| Image Size | 83.73 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 654 x 1024 |
| Photographer | |
| Photographer Title | Signal |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | April 2, 1941 |
| Location | |
| City | Le Havre |
| State or Province | Normandy |
| Country | France |
| Archive | |
| Record Number | |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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