Читать книгу The Moselle Cycle Route. From the source to the Rhine at Koblenz онлайн

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German occupation lasted nearly 50 years. During this period the French language was supressed and a process of Germanisation carried out (as a legacy of this time, the trains in Alsace and northern Lorraine run on the right, compared with on the left in the rest of France). German control lasted until 1919, when the treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War (1914–1918), returned Alsace and the Moselle département to France, ordered German military withdrawal from the Rhineland and created a small buffer state (Saarland) between France and Germany. Under French rule (1919–1940) a reverse process occurred, with the German language banned. In 1935 Germany, now under Nazi control, reoccupied the Rhineland and Saarland. A brief period of draconian German occupation of France (1940–1944) occurred during the Second World War, followed by a final return to French rule after the defeat of Nazi Germany. There were families whose sons fought for Germany in 1914–1918, then began the Second World War fighting for France, only to be re-conscripted into the German army in 1940, most probably fighting and dying on the eastern front.