It was the largest French prison camp in Berlin during World War II. And yet, he had fallen into oblivion. Its last traces were to disappear forever with the launch of a huge real estate project. But citizen initiatives have mobilized to ensure that history is not erased forever. An exhibition “Do we forget the past? dedicated to this camp has just opened in Berlin.
With our correspondent in Berlin,
Joseph Baby was 22 when he was mobilized in 1939. The young Frenchman was taken prisoner of war after the defeat of France a few months later. He arrived at the Lichterfelde camp, south of Berlin, in August 1940; it bears the registration number 28 468. In total, 1.8 million French people will be prisoners during the war in Germany. The Soviets will be three times more numerous and will have to endure much harsher conditions. The young Germans are at the front; the workforce of the occupied countries must enable Germanic industry to operate.
Joseph Baby will remain five years in the capital of the IIIᵉ Reich where innumerable camps of prisoners and forced laborers are created. He returned to France in the summer of 1945 and hardly ever spoke of those years in Berlin.
Former prisoners do not necessarily talk about their past in Germany. The country turns the page. The US Army uses the site of the former camp for a training center and razes what remains of it in the 1990s. Small businesses use former camp buildings. Since the 1950s, French soldiers stationed in West Berlin have paid tribute to their 400 comrades who died in detention during the war in the German capital. Their remains are transferred to France.
It was very late, five years ago, that citizens’ initiatives, engaged in remembrance work in this part of Berlin, took steps to save the site after it was bought by an investor who is planning a vast real estate project of 2 500 dwellings. The commitment of these groups with the company and the borough has made it possible to find a compromise: two buildings of the former camp will be saved. One of them will be used in the next few years as a meeting center for young people; the second will become a place of memory recalling the existence of the French prison camp.
Thomas Schleissing-Niggemann leads one of the initiatives on site. The commitment of the indefatigable septuagenarian is intimately linked to his family history: ” My father was a member of the Nazi party and the Todt organization. My own biography is linked to history with a capital H. I am committed to ensuring that this dark past is not forgotten. Memory work remains central “.
During the opening of the exhibition “The past, we forget? “, Thomas Schleissing-Niggemann challenged the deputy mayor for Culture of the city of Berlin present, declaring to him ” Adopt this child. Make sure that our commitment to preserving this memory does not remain a flash in the pan “. Once the real estate project has been completed, it will be necessary to know who manages this place of memory and with what means.
Agnès Tanière, the daughter of the prisoner of war Joseph Baby, was able to meet those who allowed the camp not to be forgotten, and who contribute in some way to ensuring that her father’s past does not disappear: ” I was very moved to learn that these people had committed themselves so that the memory of the camp would not disappear. It warms the heart to see that they feel a responsibility in the face of history; they understood the suffering of all these prisoners who were in these campss”.
The temporary exhibition, launched and hosted by the Documentation Center on Forced Labor under the IIIᵉ Reich and visible until the end of May 2023, is also intended as a means of making this rediscovery public and helping to perpetuate a project that is still in its infancy.
The exhibition presents the lives of prisoners whose living conditions were perceived as decent during the first inspections by the Red Cross. They deteriorated thereafter. Inmates worked in businesses or cleared damage from Allied bombing. They had their basic accommodation in the camp, but also a library. Classes were organized as well as theatrical performances. René Duverger, former Olympic champion in weightlifting, participated in the activities of this troop. The magazine “Matricule X” will have about 50 issues between 1941 and 1945. The publication produced by the prisoners was subject to strict censorship and took up the collaborationist propaganda of the Vichy regime.
French artists made the trip to “ raise the morale of the troops like Edith Piaf who sang in front of prisoners of war in Germany, also in Berlin twice. We see her in the exhibition in a photo with other artists at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate. After the war, the artist will be able to prove that his trips to Germany had been used to help prisoners escape.
Agnès Tanière will undoubtedly have learned a lot through the research of historians on the camp where her father was interned and on his daily life in Berlin between 1940 and 1945. Joseph Baby’s daughter had already discovered upstream, after the death of her father , a hundred letters that the latter had written during his captivity. ” When I read the first one, I had to stop and cry. It was really too hard to discover this past that he never talked about “.