Antoine Charmet

Antoine Charmet (born December 26, 1912 in Saint-Martin-la-Plaine , † April 2, 1945 in Buchenwald concentration camp ) was a French Catholic clergyman. In 1945, shortly before the end of the war, he died in Buchenwald concentration camp.

biography

Antoine Charmet came from a family of Christian farmers. After completing his military service in Algeria from 1927 to 1929 and completing his studies at the seminary in Lyon, he was ordained a priest in 1932. He taught French , Latin and Greek at the Montbrison seminary . When war broke out in 1939 , he was drafted as a soldier and promoted to staff sergeant . On June 21, 1940, his battalion was taken prisoner of war . As a prisoner of war, he was given the number 34 676.

After a short stay in Neu-Breisach , Charmet was moved to the main camp VI G in Bonn-Duisdorf . There he was initially used in the post office's parcel service. In May 1941 he was assigned as a nurse and pastor to Command 211 in Cologne-Ehrenfeld . Charmet told his family that he held masses there on Sundays, and at Christmas 1941 a midnight mass by candlelight and accordion music . The camp there was destroyed in a bombing raid on May 31, 1942, and Charmet lost all of his belongings, including all of his books.

Antoine Charmet held masses in 1943/44 in the church of St. Cornelius in Rath / Heumar.

Charmet was transported back to the camp in Duisdorf. There he came into contact with other Catholic pastors, and it was decided to set up an Action catholique , in which he is said not to have been actively involved. But he followed their agenda of holding study groups on religious and social issues and masses in German churches and visiting sick workers. After staying in a camp in downtown Cologne, which was also destroyed by bombs on July 31, 1943, the prisoners of war, including Charmet, were transferred to the outskirts of Cologne, to Rath / Heumar . There he got the opportunity to hold masses on weekdays in the church of St. Cornelius . Pastor Leuken later noted in the chronicle of 1943: “A risk that could be dangerous was that a French priest (Dioz. Lyon) would worship St. in the church every day from July 1943 to April 30, 1944. Read mass and received the scholarship for it (both strictly prohibited) ”. However, there is no other evidence for this subsequent presentation. As a pastor, Charmet, who incidentally was not released from his exhausting work, not only stood up for the prisoners of war, but also for the forced laborers . In doing so, he violated the strict separation of the two groups. In April 1944 another relocation took place within Cologne, where exactly is not known. At that time, his family tried to get Charmet back because he was part of the Service du santé . He refused, however, because he wanted to continue to perform his duties in the prisoner of war camp.

On December 3, 1943, the Reich Main Security Office issued the decree “Activities of French Catholic Action among French Civil Workers in the Reich”, signed by Ernst Kaltenbrunner . Hundreds of French clergymen and seminarians came to Germany who had concealed their actual profession and were doing "religiously disguised disintegration work" in the camps of French forced laborers, "whereby they were often actively supported in their illegal endeavors by German Catholic clergy". In fact, the French Catholic Church had smuggled priests into Germany as forced laborers in order to ensure the pastoral care of their compatriots, which the German government had prohibited them. According to the decree, these should be exposed and, in the worst case, deported to concentration camps.

In July 1944, Charmet was arrested for “espionage” and taken to the Gestapo prison in Brauweiler . As other members of the Action catholique later reported, the prisoners were severely ill-treated there. On September 16, 1944, a transport with 1,000 prisoners, including Charmet and 46 other French priests, went to Buchenwald via the Cologne exhibition center. From the local warehouse in Langensalza , he was used in the aircraft production of the Junkers works . In mid-January 1945, however, he had to be taken to the sick camp in Buchenwald, completely exhausted, but he did not recover. Eventually he developed heart disease and became dehydrated from permanent diarrhea. Antoine Charmet died on April 2, around a week and a half before the arrival of US troops in Buchenwald.

Honor

In 1950 Antoine Charmet was posthumously awarded the Croix de guerre .

literature

• Liselotte Berschel: "... just a village". Rath-Heumar in the time of National Socialism . Self-published. Cologne 2012.

Web links

• Dominique Morin: Antoine Charmet. In: - Mémoire et Espoirs de la Résistance. Retrieved October 1, 2016 (French). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Berschel: "... only one village" , pp. 211/222.
2. ^ ^{A b} Dominique Morin: Antoine Charmet. In: - Mémoire et Espoirs de la Résistance. Retrieved October 1, 2016 (French). 
3. ↑ ^{a b} Berschel: "... only one village" , p. 211.
4. ↑ Berschel: "... only one village" , p. 212/213.
5. ↑ Arnoud Boulligny: Among the arrested in the Reich French concentration camp prisoners . In: Janine Doerry / Alexandra Klei / Elisabeth Thalhofer / Karsten Wilke (eds.): Nazi forced camps in West Germany, France and the Netherlands. History and memory . Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2008, p. 27 f .
6. ↑ Berschel: "... only one village" , p. 215.
7. ↑ Berschel: "... only one village" , p. 215.
8. ↑ Berschel: "... only one village" , p. 216.
9. ^ ^{A b} Activity of the French Catholic Action among the French civil workers in the empire (PDF file)
10. ^ Inge Steinsträsser: Wanderer between the political powers. Böhlau Verlag Köln Weimar, 2009, ISBN 978-3-412-20429-7 , p. 192 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
11. ↑ Berschel: "... only one village" , p. 217f.