Faith: A city shows forgiveness pays

LA ROCHELLE, France, April 3 (UPI) -- As the cycle of reprisals and retaliation in the Holy Land accelerates with frightening speed, Christians may be permitted to remind everyone the very core of their theology offers a more efficacious alternative.

It's called forgiveness and conciliation.

La Rochelle provides living proof this alternative works. Would you believe this sun-drenched port city in southwestern France actually has a museum that is -- in the words of its founder -- "designed to elicit compassion not just for our people during World War II but also for the German troops stationed here"?

Compassion for the former archenemy? This is biblical, of course, but is it practicable? Could it perhaps work in the very country where this concept was first formulated some 2,000 years ago?

You would have been considered a utopist had you suggested a mere six decades ago that this was feasible between Germany and France, two neighbors with a 300-year track record of mutual loathing, invasions and acts of inhumanity.

Yet it did happen thanks to the Christian faith of Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman, Charles de Gaulle and others. And no other place symbolizes its success as much as the "Musée Rochelais de la Dernière Guerre."

The museum is a 5,500-square foot complex in the basement of the former Hôtel des Étrangers that served as an air raid shelter for Vice Adm. Ernst Schirlitz, the German military governor, and his staff.

Schirlitz' simple bed is still there, as are his desk, his telephone, uniforms and photographs of German sailors and their families. The cellar's 10-foot thick concrete ceilings are covered with frescos showing maritime scenes. They were the work of German submariners, whose biggest base during the war was at La Rochelle.

The museum does not glorify the city's former occupiers, of course, but neither was it designed to portray them as fiends.

"We simply want to show that they were part of our history as much as Eleonor of Aquitaine, John Calvin, Theodore Beza, his disciple, and Cardinal (Armand de) Richelieu," says Jean-Luc Labour, La Rochelle's director of tourism, who founded this place.

To be sure, it helped that Schirlitz was a decent officer, who refused to execute Hitler's orders to raze this perhaps most beautiful seaport in all of Europe when it became clear that Germany had lost the war.

The museum, which is only open to tour groups that have announced their arrival well in advance, documents Schirlitz' honorable comportment. Says Labour, "He has never had any of the local people killed."

Moreover, in secret meetings with Cmdr. Hubert Meyer of the Free French Navy, Schirlitz arranged a truce with the Allied forces surrounding La Rochelle to prevent damage to the city.

And he allowed the Allies to clandestinely supply the 13,000 French civilians who had remained in the besieged city, while making sure the 17,000 German sailors stationed there did not benefit from this arrangement.

"Schirlitz certainly has caused less damage to our town than Richelieu," mused Labour, pointing out that when royal French troops under the command of this ruthless cleric and statesman laid siege on La Rochelle in 1627-28, more than 23,000 of its chiefly Protestant 28,000 inhabitants lost their lives.

"When the Allies liberated La Rochelle on May 8, 1945, Schirlitz was taken to Bordeaux to be tried for war crimes he had never committed. Hubert Meyer, by then a French admiral, heard about this, stormed unannounced into the courtroom and insisted to be heard.

"As a result of Meyer's testimony, Schirlitz was acquitted, and the two men remained friends for life," Labour said.

This is not a typical World War II story, of course, but it is one worth remembering as elsewhere on the troubled globe allegedly traditional antagonists seem unable to end the cycle of mutual acts of violence.

The tourist season always starts early in La Rochelle. And among the first buses that roll in every year are luxurious coaches carrying very old men from Germany -- former sailors visiting first French, then German war cemeteries in the area, always in that order.

"These are quality tourists, we love to have them because they are very tactful," the late Michel Crépeau, La Rochelle's fabled mayor, told this correspondent years ago.

That was long before today's grisly events in the Holy Land beggared a comparable spirit of conciliation. But already then Crépeau mused, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if people from crisis spots around the world could come here to witness our warm friendship with those upright old submariners, whom Hitler had once ordered here to occupy us?"