A French nurse facing a wounded enemy soldier

In the autumn of 1941, Paris had been occupied by the Wehrmacht since June 1940. The German army had its own medical facilities (Kriegslazarette, military hospitals in requisitioned buildings), but wounded or sick German soldiers were sometimes treated as emergencies in French hospitals, whose establishments and supplies were requisitioned.

Humanitarian law was unambiguous: the Geneva Convention of 1929 and medical ethics required treating any wounded person without distinction of nationality or uniform. For a nurse trained in this tradition (the Red Cross, the Assistance Publique of Paris), to refuse care to a wounded man, even a German, contradicted her oath.

But this duty came into tension with national feeling and the growing hostility toward the occupier after the summer of 1941: attacks by the communist resistance, executions of hostages, a hardening of repression. To treat an enemy soldier could be experienced as a compromise, at a time when other caregivers were already joining the Resistance (hiding Allied airmen, providing false certificates, secretly treating resistance fighters). The dilemma: the humanitarian obligation to treat without distinction, or the awareness of aiding the enemy.