CHAVILLE, France: Claudine Spire pointed to a group of toddlers in a black-and-white photo. “I thought I recognized myself,” she said, indicating a girl with curly hair and a short coat. But it was not her.
As part of the 78-year-old Frenchwoman’s relentless search for her roots, Spire found the photo a few days ago in the archives of the French ministry of foreign affairs.
“I felt as a child that I didn’t quite belong,” she said. “I didn’t look like anyone in the family.”

Spire is among the post-war children from the French-occupied part of Germany who had German mothers and French soldiers as fathers.
About 1,500 of them were brought to France, presumably illegally, by French authorities between 1946 and 1951 and handed over to adoptive families.
“The French authorities actively sought these children and pressured the mothers to give them up,” said Yves Denechere, a historian at the University of Angers. “This was about replenishing the population after the war.”
German women expecting a child from a Frenchman were required to report this to the occupying authorities. While still in the maternity ward, many were visited by “research officers” who urged them to part with the child, claiming that their son or daughter would have a better future in France.
The officers brought a form, ready for the mothers to sign: “For personal reasons, I hand over my child to the French authorities,” it said. The mothers waived all rights to the child, and stated that they did so willingly.

Claudine Spire’s mother, who became pregnant at 19, was pressured by her parents to give up the “child of the enemy.”
Claudine was placed in a French children’s home in Nordrach in the Black Forest when she was barely one and a half.
The French occupying authorities had set up the home in a former “Lebensborn” institution that had been run by the Nazis to promote the Aryan race.
In selecting children for adoption, the French postwar authorities used racial selection criteria that were eerily similar to those applied by the Third Reich.

“The children sent to France were mainly white, with blond hair, and in good health,” said Denechere.

Since about half of the French soldiers stationed in Germany were from North or sub-Saharan Africa, many children did not match the criteria and were either returned to their mothers or placed in German children’s homes.
“I was on the list of children who were not to be proposed for adoption,” said Spire, whose father came from Morocco.
But adoptive parents were found for her regardless, and she grew up in a loving family.
Only in her early 50s did she feel compelled to search for her roots.
“I knew that I was adopted, but I didn’t know the circumstances,” she said.
The more she learnt about the past, the more she was shocked.
“It’s absolutely disgusting what the French state did back then,” Spire said, also condemning postwar Germany for allowing the adoptions to happen.
Spire eventually found her German mother. Their first meeting took place in the entrance hall of a hospital in Offenburg in southwest Germany, just across the border from Strasbourg.
“It was very strange. She hadn’t told her husband and daughter anything about me,” Spire remembered.
Her mother addressed her as Margarete, her birth name that was changed upon adoption.
“Our origins were erased,” Spire states.
These adoptions took place in a legal vacuum, as Germany, having no government, was divided into zones occupied by various Allied countries.
“Those were irregular, illegitimate practices,” said Denechere.
Yet been no legal challenges have been brought, the historian added.
“Against whom? And for what exactly?,” he said.
In addition such cases would presumably be covered by statutes of limitations by now.
“This part of history is completely unknown to the public,” he said.
This is gradually changing thanks in part to a 2022 documentary on the topic and a recent novel by author Anke Feuchter telling the story of a woman in a similar situation as Spire’s mother.
With criticism of the practice mounting, many adopted children of the occupation are still looking for their German roots.
Their search, it turns out, has been facilitated by the French authorities’ decision to repatriate all documents related to the adoptions in a bid to remove traces of the practices.
Today, those very documents have allowed historians and interested parties to shed light on a dark chapter of German-French post-war history.
This is how Claudine Spire found photos of children in Nordrach who, like her, were adopted.
But she has yet to find any pictures of herself from back then.

WASHINGTON/WEST PALM BEACH, Florida: US President Donald Trump on Sunday bore down on his administration’s latest message that the exclusion of smartphones and computers from his reciprocal tariffs on China will be short-lived, pledging a national security trade investigation into the semiconductor sector.
Those electronics “are just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket,’” Trump said in a social media post. “We are taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN in the upcoming National Security Tariff Investigations.”
The White House had announced the exclusions from steep reciprocal tariffs on Friday.
Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, earlier on Sunday said that critical technology products from China would face separate new duties along with semiconductors within the next two months.
The exclusions announced on Friday were seen as a big break for technology firms such as Apple and Dell Technologies that rely on imports from China.
Trump’s back-and-forth on tariffs last week triggered the wildest swings on Wall Street since the COVID pandemic of 2020. The benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 index is down more than 10 percent since Trump took office on January 20.
Lutnick said Trump would enact “a special focus-type of tariff” on smartphones, computers and other electronics products in a month or two, alongside sectoral tariffs targeting semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. The new duties would fall outside Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs, under which levies on Chinese imports climbed to 125 percent last week, he said.
“He’s saying they’re exempt from the reciprocal tariffs, but they’re included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two,” Lutnick said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” predicting that the levies would bring production of those products to the United States. “These are things that are national security, that we need to be made in America.”
Beijing increased its own tariffs on US imports to 125 percent on Friday in response. On Sunday, before Lutnick’s comments, China said it was evaluating the impact of the exclusions for the technology products implemented late on Friday.
“The bell on a tiger’s neck can only be untied by the person who tied it,” China’s Ministry of Commerce said.
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who endorsed Trump’s run for president but who has criticized the tariffs, on Sunday called on him to pause the broad and steep reciprocal tariffs on China for three months, as Trump did for most countries last week.
If Trump paused Chinese tariffs for 90 days and cut them to 10 percent temporarily, “he would achieve the same objective in causing US businesses to relocate their supply chains from China without the disruption and risk,” Ackman wrote on X.

’CHANGES EVERY DAY’
Sven Henrich, founder and lead market strategist for NorthmanTrader, was harshly critical of how the tariff issue was being handled on Sunday. “Sentiment check: The biggest rally of the year would come on the day Lutnick gets fired,” Henrich wrote on X. “I suggest the administration figures out who controls the message, whatever it is, as it changes every day. US business can’t plan or invest with the constant back and forth.”
US Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, criticized the latest revision to Trump’s tariff plan, which economists have warned could dent economic growth and fuel inflation.
“There is no tariff policy — only chaos and corruption,” Warren said on ABC’s “This Week,” speaking before Trump’s latest post on social media.
In a notice to shippers late on Friday, the US Customs and Border Protection agency published a list of tariff codes excluded from the import taxes. It featured 20 product categories, including computers, laptops, disc drives, semiconductor devices, memory chips and flat panel displays.
In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said the US has opened an invitation to China to negotiate, but he criticized China’s connection to the lethal fentanyl supply chain and did not include it on a list of seven entities — the United Kingdom, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and Israel — with which he said the administration was in talks.
Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that there were no plans yet for Trump to speak to Chinese President Xi Jinping on tariffs, accusing China of creating trade friction by responding with levies of its own. But he expressed hopes for some non-Chinese deals.
“My goal is to get meaningful deals before 90 days, and I think we’re going to be there with several countries in the next few weeks,” Greer said.
Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he was worried about the United States sliding into recession, or worse, as a result of the tariffs.
“Right now we are at a decision-making point and very close to a recession,” Dalio said on Sunday. “And I’m worried about something worse than a recession if this isn’t handled well.”