René Gineste, a young resistance member, was only 23 when he was caught in a Gestapo raid in the Jura.
Bernard Laveran was trying, for his part, to cross the Spanish border to join the Free French Forces when he was stopped by the German police.
Jules Rietmann, a 30-year-old digger, was in Orleans when he was accused and then tried for distributing leaflets.
Simone Jacob, future Simone Veil, was living in Nice when her family was arrested and then deported because of their Jewish religion.
Different origins and backgrounds, but all of which have one thing in common.
René, Bernard, Jules and Simone all experienced the hell of Mittelbau-Dora, one of the deadliest concentration and extermination camps of the Third Reich.
It is in this place, an outbuilding of the Buchenwald camp, located in central Germany, that thousands of convicts dug tunnels to install an industrial site and assemble the V2 rocket parts supposed to wipe out England.
"
8,971 lives crushed"
These destinies are now grouped together in a single biographical dictionary published on September 10.
In more than 2,400 pages, the book of the deportees from France of Mittelbau-Dora tells the story of "8,971 crushed lives" including those of seven women, registered in this camp between 1943 and 1945. This project of colossal scope was created about twenty years ago.
It was born out of the commitment made to the survivors gathered at the time within the Dora-Ellrich association and has since been carried by the Coupole d'Helfaut museum, in Pas-de-Calais, located in a gigantic concrete bunker built by the Nazis from which these famous V2 rockets were to be fired.
"In 1998, after the publication of André Sellier's book, 'Histoire du camp de Dora' (Ed. La Découverte) and the inauguration of the exhibition 'Images of Dora' at La Coupole, a census of deportees from France passed through the camp was still missing, ”explains historian Laurent Thiery, who supervised the production of this book.
"On the model of Maitron, the dictionary of the workers' movement, the Center d'Histoire de la Coupole launched the idea of producing a biographical dictionary".
"The impression of reviving someone"
To overcome this titanic task, Laurent Thiery has succeeded in mobilizing more than 70 writers all over France: historians, teachers, archivists or even simple volunteers.
Each was responsible for writing one or more biographical files from documents collected in various archive centers or families.
One of the pages of the dictionary of the 9000 deportees from France to Mittelbau-Dora.
© La Coupole Resource Center
For nearly five years, Claude Favre, a history and geography associate, plunged headlong into this project.
On her own, she wrote more than 840 notices including that of her grandfather Marcel Petit, one of the survivors of Dora, member of the Eugène-Prunus / Buckmaster network in Toulouse.
"I knew he had made resistance. He had bad sleep and had nightmares. He had pain following the interrogations and the beatings, but he did not speak about it", says this woman who lives in Meurthe- and-Moselle.
Upon learning of the making of this book from the Association of Friends of the Foundation for the Memory of the Deportation of which she is a member, Claude did not hesitate for a second: "When I was in the best position to write the my grandfather. It was up to me to do it. And I finally discovered details about his career when I realized his biography ".
Encouraged by Laurent Thiery, the former teacher got involved and wrote the course of other deportees, in particular from her region.
"It invaded my life. It became an obsession," she confesses.
"Each time, I felt like I was bringing someone back to life."
The dictionary of the deportees of Mittelbau-Dora weighs 4.2 kilos and has more than 2,400 pages.
© La Coupole Resource Center
Thanks to Claude and the other contributors, families are now discovering the result of this long and meticulous historical work.
La Coupole is in fact in contact with the relatives of 900 deportees.
Among them, Mathias Hosxe, journalist at France 24, was upset when he discovered the file devoted to his grandfather Pierre Hosxe, survivor of Dora.
This engineer by training had put his technical knowledge in radio as well as his business at the service of the Resistance and had been arrested in Lyon in 1943. "I really cried when I read his biographical note. I understood that what was wrong with him. had moved me, it was first the story of his career and his stay there and secondly the emotion of seeing the public recognition of what he had undergone as a resistance member ", confides he.
This deportee's grandson knew little about his grandfather.
During his childhood, he had only bits and pieces of his past.
Seventy-five years later, he has the feeling of having returned to this family history: "It is a kind of appeasement and confirmation by the facts that what had been told in a family and restricted circle, belonged to the big story, too ".
A photograph of the deportee Henri Guet.
Railway worker at the SNCF, he was arrested in November 1941 by the French police in Le Mans as a former member of the Communist Party.
Sentenced to five years in prison, he served his sentence before being handed over to the German authorities and then deported in May 1944 © Center de ressources de La Coupole
"Their name will not be erased a second time"
Martine Erbs also learned a lot of things on the course of her father Louis Erbs, a resistant student from Alsace: "I did not know anything at all except the fact that it was at the faculty of Clermont that he had been rounded up and deported ".
For her, it is a question of shedding light on individual stories, but also of highlighting Mittelbau-Dora: "It is important that the general public can be informed of all the Nazi barbarities. We know the extermination camps of the Jews. , but one knows much less the camps of extermination by the work. That of Dora is quite remarkable for its underground factory which allowed the development of aeronautics after the war ".
Photos of Dora's camp and its crematorium.
© La Coupole Resource Center
For the historian Laurent Thiery, this memory erasure can in fact be explained by the specificity of this place.
"He is more attached to the link between the history of this camp and the Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun. Responsible for the crimes committed in Dora to have deportees fabricated the V2 rocket he had developed for Hitler, von Braun became after the war he was protected from the United States. Father of the Apollo project and of the mission which led the first men to the moon in July 1969, the Nazi's past was largely obscured and Dora's history with it, "he said. .
"May this book make it possible to recall that the most beautiful hours of the space conquest draw their origins from this dangerous connection between the Nazis and scientists".
But above all, this dictionary will make it possible to record for history the commitment of these thousands of deportees.
Of the 3,979 survivors of Dora, La Coupole is in contact with about fifteen deportees still alive.
Laurent Thiery has already been able to personally give some of them a copy.
"They are very proud of this work, impressed by its size and weight. But above all, their emotion is perceptible at the idea that their missing comrades are now inscribed in this paper monument and that their name will not be erased once. second time ", describes the historian.
"Finally, the presence of members of their family, sometimes great-grandchildren, confirms them in the idea that this book will serve as a transmission belt for the generations deprived of witnesses".
#dictionaryDora.
A lot of emotions this morning during the meeting with André Faveuw when he evokes his comrades who died in the camps pic.twitter.com/dD3j9oKXfQ
- Laurent THIERY (@Laurent_Thiery) August 19, 2020
The Coupole Museum invites the families of deportees from France to Mittelbau-Dora and its Kommandos to come forward to it.
Its objective is to give them a numbered copy during commemorative ceremonies planned throughout France.
For more information: lthiery@lacoupole.com
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