Cherche-Midi prison
The Cherche-Midi prison was a Paris military prison established in 1847 and operated from 1851 to 1947 . It was on the Boulevard Raspail at the corner of rue du Cherche-Midi.
In 1688, King Louis XIV bequeathed the property that belonged to the Calvinist Léonard Laudouin to the Sisters of Jesus, the Good Shepherd . After the French Revolution , a material warehouse for the French army was built in the monastery building. After the monastery was demolished, a military prison was built in 1847 based on the model of the prison in Auburn (New York) with 200 individual cells. The inmates also included political prisoners and conscientious objectors .
On June 12, 1940, just before the German troops marched in, the prisoners were taken to an internment camp in Mauzac ( Dordogne department ). In the period from 1940 to 1944 the prison was also used by the occupation forces as a collection point for French Jews before they were transported to the death camps.
After Paris was liberated, German war criminals were imprisoned there. Since 1947 all inmates were transferred to other prisons and the building served as the seat of the military tribunal until 1950 , after which the unused building was demolished in 1966 and in 1968 the seat of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales was built in its place .
The most famous inmates of the prison included a. the artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus , the hero of the French resistance Henri Honoré d'Estienne d'Orves , the resistance fighter Agnès Humbert , the physicist Paul Langevin , the painter Adolphe Feder , ambassador Otto Abetz and SS-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein .
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Coordinates: 48 ° 51 ′ 0 ″ N , 2 ° 19 ′ 37 ″ E