With a few exceptions, the authors in my corpus were ordinary soldiers who did not have public lives before or after the war. Information about them is thus difficult to obtain. The brief biographies included below are based on data found in studies of France's military collaboration, the World Biographical Index, different websites, and the memoirs themselves. Those biographies are tentative and sometimes duplicate information already available in the book; they should function as stopgaps for readers who, at some point, want to be reminded of “who was who” and “who did what.”

ANONYMOUS. 1922–. The anonymous author of Vae Victis joined the LVF in spring 1942, left it in summer 1944, and apparently went into exile (he claims to be writing “from abroad”). Lefèvre and Mabire (2003, 58) introduce a “caporal de Saint-Allaire” as the author of Vae Victis and even include a picture of him (295). They specify, however, that de Saint-Allaire is a “pseudonym” (58), presumably used to protect the identity of someone who was still alive (and living in France) in the early 2000s. With Bassompierre's Frères ennemis, Vae Victis [Woe to the Vanquished, 1948) is the first testimony published by a volunteer after the war.

AUVRAY, JACQUES. 1926–. Joined the Milice in summer 1944, the Charlemagne in the fall of the same year. Fought in Pomerania. Taken prisoner by the Russians, handed over to the French. Tried and sentenced to a short jail term.