About 640.000 French people left to work in Germany between the autumn of 1942 and the summer of 1944, as part of the labour drafting measures decreed by the Vichy government. Brought together from 1941 on, under the common authority of a regional prefect, the three Lorraine departments (Meuse, Meurthe-et-Moselle, Vosges) not under German domination account for 24.500 workers. In this industrial area of the occupied zone, every obligation was met with except in 1944. As a whole, 53 % of the conscripts had left even before the implementation of the february 16 1943 law creating the compulsory labour service ; it was an enforcement of the only existing law, that of sept. 4 1942, on the use of labour, the founding text on labour drafting. Whether at the region level or the department one, the French civil servants managed the departures with efficiency, sometimes overdoing it, but in modes that varied. Their activity was closely watched by the occupant who often resorted to power, simultaneously protecting some industrial sectors. Although long submissive, the Lorraine people, showed growing hostility to the "deportation of workers" from march 1943 on. The number of those who rebelled then increased, but only a minority joined the resistance. After a time in Germany spent in various conditions of work and life, most of the conscripted were back in spring 1945 to a country that had virtually forgotten them. Even before their return, a national federation of "labour deportees" was founded to link them. In the early fifties, the law even refused to officialize this designation which was banned by the ministry of justice, after a request from the association of the former "concentration camp deportees". With their numbers now dwindling, the former conscripts are still very bitter as they consider their being drafted to Germany was ordered by the French state and thus has never obtained the recognition that it should have had.