Renoir - Porträt einer Zeitenwende

Half-timbered houses, storks, wine, sauerkraut, traditional headdresses, the Alsatian accent: these images and clichés of Alsace occupy the imagination of almost all French people. Few other regions can boast such a charming and popular heritage. But behind this apparent prosperity and love of a job well done lies a more painful history. Ravaged by three wars in less than a century, Alsace saw its inhabitants forced to change nationality four times during a single lifetime. A tormented, extraordinary destiny, little known to the rest of the country.

Between 1941 and 1945 around 30,000 French citizens voluntarily joined the German army and engaged in terrible war crimes in central and eastern Europe. This documentary explores a little-known chapter in the story of the second world war and France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.

A look back at a cruel conflict, the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), which changed the political geography of Europe and sowed the seeds of a deep antagonism between France and Germany that culminated in two world wars. Excerpts from the diaries of the witnesses, photographs and painted panoramas tell the truth about a forgotten war.

For more than a decade, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's right-hand man during the infamous Third Reich, assembled a collection of thousands of works of art that were meticulously catalogued.

Franz Stock, a German military chaplain, accompanied hundreds of resistance fighters sentenced to death to Paris. Through his diary, which documented the judicial terror orchestrated by the Wehrmacht during the Occupation, a story that questions the ambiguity of this testimony.