Digital Studies of The Holocaust
This collaborative research project aims to introduce the process of data analysis to Holocaust studies to create new ways of seeing and remembering the Holocaust.
Between Liberation and Murder:
The Lives of Seven Men in the Final Year of the War
By Yannis Soonjung Kwon, Undergraduate Research Apprentice
posted July 19, 2023
Yannis Kwon joined the Ackerman Center as a part of the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP). She is pursuing a degree in history with an interest in Holocaust studies and Jewish history and thought. Kwon is a second-generation Korean American who has lived throughout the American South, and she enjoys integrating what she has learned from Jewish history, its traditions of questioning and creation, and the idea of otherness into her studies, art, and writing.
In the year following the landing of Allied troops at the beaches of Normandy, both the war and the Holocaust changed pace due to the Nazis’ hasty decisions and the French Resistance’s heightened activity. France had previously been the Reich’s symbolic display of power over Western Europe, and its liberation marked the beginning of the Reich’s panicked unraveling. As Allied forced gradually liberated France, rural bands of guerilla fighters called Maquisards continued to fight back from behind the Nazi lines. This case study outlines the arrest, detention, and fate of seven French resistance fighters: Albert Pechoux (alt. Pichoux), Louis Romand, Ernest Bovey (alt. Bouey), Louis Capitaine, Louis Giraud, Joseph Laforge, and Henri Matthieu (alt. Henry). The end of their lives would unfold within the context of clandestine resistance and the chaotic final months of the war.
Albert Pechoux served in the Groupement Hervé du Maquis d’Orgelet et Arinthod, from January 1, 1942, up until his arrest on June 28, 1944. This maquis was connected to the greater Forces Françaises de l’Interieur in the Jura region. He and other maquisards participated in the tampering of telephone and supply lines as well as the arresting of Gestapo agents and Nazi militiamen. Though only Pechoux’s records from his time of resistance could be found, he and Louis Romand’s prisoner ID cards would be marked with Frülingswind (trans. “Spring Wind”), the indicator to pay special attention to suspected or confirmed French Resistance fighters captured specifically in the summer of 1944.1
Louis Capitaine was the only one to be captured in Vichy Paris, and although transports from Paris to Dachau were still occurring at this time, he was sent to Montluc Prison in Lyon in the south of France for internment instead. Montluc was a notorious interrogation center for French Resistance members awaiting deportation. Ernest Bovey, Louis Giraud, Joseph Laforge, and Henri Matthieu’s proximities of their cities of arrest to their internment in Lyon indicate the highly probable knowledge of and degrees of inexplicit participation in southern France’s comprehensive resistance activity.
After their collective internment, they arrived at Dachau on July 2, 1944. On August 28, they attempted to escape together. Romand, Pechoux, Laforge, and Matthieu were recaptured on September 2, 1944, and Capitaine, Giraud, and Bovey were recaptured on September 5, 1944. Instead of being immediately executed upon their recapture, each of their Dachau ID cards indicate continued work assignments after returning to Dachau as well as their collective transport to Buchenwald on November 18.
From Buchenwald, they were transferred to Langensalza on December 4 with fellow Fluchtpunkt prisoners. Langensalza, also known as Langenwerke AG, was a sub-camp of Buchenwald that was designated as the punishment camp for prisoners marked as Fluchtpunkt (“escaped and recaptured”) to build and assemble aircraft parts.2 On February 11, 1945, only Ernest Bovey and Louis Giraud were transferred to Mittelbau-Dora from which their whereabouts are unknown.
Capitaine, Laforge, Matthieu, Pechoux, and Romand continued to work in Langensalza until April 3, 1945, when Buchenwald’s subcamps were evacuated to the Buchenwald main camp. With the Allied forces approaching from the east and west, the Nazis sought to retain control over their remaining prisoners. With Flossenburg as the initial destination, the Buchenwald prisoners were marched to Weimar Station and boarded trains on April 7. Those who were too weak to travel were left behind in Buchenwald or killed on the march to Weimar Station. Louis Romand was among those killed on that day.3 Due to numerous air raids and destroyed rail lines, the train had to take detours through several rural towns, and what was meant to be a few days’ trip to Flossenburg became a three-week-long trip to Dachau.4
Of the 4,500 who left Buchenwald, less than 1,000 arrived at Dachau on April 28. Joseph Laforge perished from the transport’s abysmal conditions on April 24 during their passage through Pocking, Germany.5 Pechoux and Matthieu’s exact time and location of death on the transport were not recorded. Louis Capitaine survived the transport to Dachau and was liberated the next day on the 29th. However, he was unable to recover from his emaciation and typhus. He died on June 8, 1945, in Dachau’s displaced persons camp. The Allied troops caring for Dachau’s survivors recorded his death and grave details.
Mere moments separated life and death in the final months of the war. Until the very end, Nazi officials scrambled to preserve and transport their remaining prisoners away from the approaching Allied forces. The fate of many who died in these final months remains unknown, as deaths were unreported, or Nazi officials quickly destroyed any incriminating documents. Significant evidence remains of the Nazis’ obsessive tracking of Frülingswind and Fluchtpunkt prisoners, demonstrating the threat that resisters posed to the Nazis’ sense of control. These seven men’s nearly year-long imprisonment demonstrate the Nazis’ panicked responses to gradual liberations through the surgical keeping of their records and the hastiness of the camps’ final transports. However, through documents originally intended for the control and incrimination of these men, they can now remain to give meaning to the final months of these men’s lives and their existence within Nazi-controlled Europe.
References:
[1] USHMM Glossary of ITS Terms & Abbreviations (Washington, DC: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021).
[2] Megargee, Geoffrey P. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1956, Volume I: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Office (WVHA). Indiana University Press, 2009.
[3] Le Base des morts en déportation, Mémoire des Hommes Portail Culturel du Ministère des Armées, https://www.memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr/fr/ark:/40699/m005eb007fac46dd.
[4] Mauriello, Christopher E. “Evidential Remains: Dead Bodies, Evidence, and the Death March from Buchenwald to Dachau, April–May 1945.” Human Remains and Violence: an Interdisciplinary Journal 6, no.1 (2020): 57-83.
[5] Le Base des morts en déportation, Mémoire des Hommes Portail Culturel du Ministère des Armées, https://www.memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr/fr/ark:/40699/m005eb0065f033e5.
© 2020-present Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies. All rights reserved.