One of the most striking moments in Marcel Ophuls's celebrated documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié [The Sorrow and the Pity] (1971) is certainly André Harris's interview with Christian de La Mazière, the former French SS volunteer. Filmed at the castle of Sigmaringen, in remembrance of a “pitiful expedition” he had undertaken there in the hope of meeting Marshall Pétain (La Mazière 2003, 203), La Mazière recounts how he enlisted in the SS in the summer of 1944, then went on to fight the Russians in Pomerania in February–March 1945. This interview, as Henry Rousso (1987a, 119) points out in his analysis of Ophuls's movie, brought to light an aspect of the Occupation that had been “unrecognized and forgotten”: Thousands of Frenchmen had volunteered to fight on the German side during World War II. Moreover, according to Rousso, these men had not acted out of “venality” or “moral or intellectual turpitude,” as some stereotype of the collaborationist has it; they had become involved out of “political and ideological conviction” – to defend on the battlefield the cause that for them was the correct one.

While La Mazière's appearance in Le Chagrin et la pitié reminded viewers of the military side of the collaboration, it also signaled the existence of a specific type of memory: Several of the French who had fought with the Nazis were ready to testify, more precisely, to tell why they had enlisted, what they had experienced during the war, and how they had (or had not) adjusted after the end of the conflict.