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* Two years later, in 1971, the film was discreetly released in movie theaters, shown on public television only in 1981.

* Darquier was under the command of René Bousquet, secretary general to the Vichy administration police. Brought to court after the war, Bousquet was acquitted in 1949. In 1991, he was finally charged with crimes against humanity. Two years later, he was assassinated, removing all possibility of a trial, and thus, any proceedings against the Vichy regime. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the revelation of President Mitterrand’s continued relationship with Bousquet caused a stir and even outrage.

* Guilloux participated in Le Congrès des écrivains anti-fascistes in 1935 (Palais de la Mutualité, Paris). In 1936, he traveled to the Soviet Union with his friends Schiffrin and Gide. That same year, Gide published Retour d’U.R.S.S in which he expressed his disillusionment with the Soviet Union.

* The GIs sentenced to death for war crimes were buried in a separate plot in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery Memorial.

* Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), who has killed a white woman, refuses to speak and so faces his destiny alone.