Erased by Design: The Secret Detention of French Girls, Sexual Coercion, and the Nazi System That Treated Women as Property

I was sixteen years old when I discovered that survival itself could become a burden heavier than death.

My name is Jeanne Lemoine. I am seventy-eight now. For more than six decades, I remained silent—not out of fear, but because silence was expected of girls like me. France rebuilt itself on heroism and resistance. There was no place for testimonies that complicated that narrative. Yet silence does not mean absence. What happened to us existed, whether it was recorded or not.

In October 1943, German occupation had already reshaped daily life across Burgundy. Food was scarce. Men were gone. My father had died during the first days of the invasion in 1940. My mother, my younger brother, and I survived by cultivating whatever would grow in frozen soil. I still attended school when possible. I wanted to teach history one day. War does not ask permission before it intervenes.

That morning, two German soldiers arrived at our door. There was no shouting, no violence. Only paperwork. I was told to accompany them for a document verification. My mother squeezed my hand once. She did not cry. I never saw her again.

I was taken to a detention site that does not appear in official German records, French administrative archives, or postwar military documentation. That absence was intentional. The facility was located roughly forty kilometers north of Dijon, on a requisitioned rural estate once owned by wine producers. Barbed wire enclosed the property. Wooden barracks stood behind the main building. Floodlights remained on throughout the night. The camp existed in practice, but not on paper.

This is how systems hide crimes: by removing them from bureaucracy.

When I arrived, approximately seventy female detainees were held there, most between fifteen and twenty-five years old. Some were accused of resistance involvement. Many, like me, were never charged with anything. The criteria were arbitrary—geography, age, appearance, rumor. We were processed without trial, without records, without names.

Within days, I learned the camp’s unspoken rule: we were no longer regarded as prisoners, but as assets.

Each woman was assigned a number. Mine was forty-eight, sewn onto my clothing in black thread. Roll call took place at five every morning. We worked all day—laundry, kitchen labor, cleaning military uniforms, hauling supplies. The labor was not economically essential. Its purpose was exhaustion and control.

What defined the camp, however, was not work. It was observation.

Certain soldiers selected favorites. They watched specific girls for days or weeks. When a girl was summoned after curfew, she often returned before dawn altered—withdrawn, silent, emptied of resistance. Others never returned at all. There were no questions allowed. There were no reports filed.

This was not random violence. It followed a pattern.

A soldier named Klaus began watching me. He was young, quiet, outwardly disciplined. He never touched me in public. Instead, he left food—white bread, fruit—small acts that created obligation. Another prisoner, Simone, warned me that such attention was dangerous. Obsession, she said, could turn quickly into punishment.

In December 1943, Klaus ordered me to follow him to a stone cellar beneath the estate, once used as a wine vault. He spoke about his family. He showed me a photograph of his sister, a girl my age who remained in Berlin. He said I reminded him of her. That comparison was not affectionate—it was possessive.

What followed over the next months was not a relationship, nor was it framed as violence in the way postwar language prefers. It was coercion rooted in power imbalance, isolation, and threat. He summoned me repeatedly, not to labor, but to observe me, to speak at me, to control my presence. I survived by complying just enough to avoid escalation.

This is how abuse functions in systems of captivity: it disguises itself as attention.

In February 1944, Klaus learned that his sister had been killed during Allied bombing raids. His behavior changed. He began calling me by her name. He forced me to wear clothing he brought from Germany. He demanded that I sing songs associated with her childhood. I was no longer myself. I had become a substitute.

At his insistence, I was photographed holding a porcelain doll, posed to resemble his sister’s childhood portraits. These images were not keepsakes. They were attempts to reconstruct a loss through domination.

When the illusion collapsed—as it always does—his demeanor turned volatile. He reminded me that I was nothing, a foreign prisoner without legal existence. He nearly killed me in that cellar before ordering me never to return.

Survival, in such systems, is never clean.

On April 24, 1944, during the disruption caused by Allied strikes on nearby rail lines, Simone and I escaped through the surrounding forest. We walked for three days without food until we reached a village connected to the Resistance. Liberation did not restore what captivity had erased.

After the war, France celebrated victory and reconstruction. Testimonies like ours were unwelcome. There were no legal mechanisms for addressing undocumented detention sites, sexual coercion, or psychological captivity. Many survivors married, raised families, and learned to compartmentalize memory.

Simone did not survive long after the war. She took her own life in 1953.

I remained silent until 2003, when I read a historical study on undocumented Nazi detention facilities in occupied France. For the first time, I understood that what we experienced was not isolated—it was systematic. Silence had protected perpetrators, not victims.

This testimony is not about forgiveness. It is about record-keeping.

War crimes are not only committed in camps with gates and numbers. They occur in cellars, estates, and facilities designed to leave no trace. Women were treated as movable property. Desire was weaponized. Bureaucracy was used to erase responsibility.

Survival is not shameful. Silence is not neutral.

My name is Jeanne Lemoine. I was sixteen years old when I was detained without charge in occupied France. I am speaking now because history does not only belong to those who wrote reports—it belongs to those who were deliberately excluded from them.

If these stories are not documented, the system that enabled them survives intact.