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Anyone who paid attention during their Junior and High School years is well aware of the major episodes of history’s greatest conflict World War Two and it’s accompanying tragedies of The Holocaust. Fact based films such as Schindler’s List have made it painfully apparent how horrific war and genocide is. Against Their Will on the other hand is the first film I’ve seen that relates to the Nazi occupation and it’s tragic effects on a specific region of France known as Alsace. The area (along with neighboring Lorraine) was hotly contested between France and Germany for centuries, and by the start of World War Two had been annexed back to the German Reich.
Once this occurred the Nazi regime lost no time trying to suppress or wipe out anything French about the region. Everything from street signs to schoolbooks were changed over to German and speaking French in public was strictly forbidden. All occupying local government administration and economic activity had to be conducted in German. Oppressive as this new state of affairs was for the predominantly French population, it was hardly one of the worst aspects of life in Nazi-dominated Europe. However, what Against Their Will depicts is how insidious wartime propaganda was in Alsace-Lorraine, going to great lengths to force the population into compliance with their German overlords who would supposedly provide them a better way of life.
Against Their Will is a heartrending story of two young women from Alsace who look as though they’re barely out of high school and quickly realize that their lives under the Nazi yoke are going to be anything but benign. What they experience strains their friendship almost to the breaking point. In the story Lisette (played by Louise Herero) is blonde and very Aryan-looking which puts her on a pedestal in their town, especially because her father is a collaborator with the occupying Nazi forces. On the other hand, Alice (played by Flore Bonaventura) is dark haired and generally very opposite in appearance from Lisette.
Unfortunately for Alice her father has been shipped off to a prison camp for treating a wounded British soldier which goes to show just how lacking in human decency the Nazis were. Now, I don’t want to be much of a spoiler here for anyone that may want to watch Against Their Will, and without going into too much plot detail, let’s suffice it to say that being yanked away from your home and being forced to work in a dangerous munitions factory in Germany (after being sent to a strict Nazi indoctrination school) would be traumatizing to say the least. The sadistic head matron is especially mean to Lisette and Alice as though her power trip has gotten totally out of hand.
The story nevertheless makes it plain that no matter how high a women may rise in the Nazi hierarchy like the head matron mentioned above — they were always deemed inferior to men and never be allowed any real authority which to me seemed as though this matron witch was almost a slave to this cruel system herself. While Alice in particular was unwilling to sing the praises of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, Lisette straddles the fence and cannot make up her mind as to where her loyalties are which brings us to the most sinister aspect of Against Their Will in my view. This would be the “lebensborn” program. In 1935 Heinrich Himmler, one of Hitler’s most notorious henchman was largely responsible for creating this program to dramatically increase the birthrate of the Aryan population.
This breeding initiative was based around certain genetic characteristics like blonde hair and blue eyes. These were just the most notable physical characteristics but the main purpose for all of this was to produce more and more children of the Aryan “master race” which were also supposed to have physical, intellectual and military superiority over all other ethnic and racial categories to dominate the rest of Europe, and eventually the entire world. The immorality regarding this program is so twisted on numerous levels to put it mildly. Since the SS was such a big part of this program, it meant that children in many Nazi occupied areas of Europe were kidnapped from their homes and forced into Hitler’s indoctrination camps just as occurs in Against Their Will. It also meant that SS henchman and other military personnel who were already engaged or married would carry on extramarital affairs with captive women deemed suitable for breeding.
Perhaps the worst aspect of this initiative was that many women were required to participate in this program whether they wanted to or not. Forcible compliance…which means outright rape was used to further along the cause of this so-called master race! Refusal to cooperate on the part of these women would likely lead to dire consequences such as being shipped off to a concentration camp to be used as slave labor to support the Nazi war machine and/or being executed. Although the story was a little confusing to follow because it appeared that both dubbing and subtitles were used for this French-language film, Against Their Will is compelling to view as it provides a seldom seen “behind-the-scenes” aspect of World War Two and The Holocaust beyond the battlefields, concentration camps, and partisan resistance films that are typical of this sub genre.
