Pierre Villeminot

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Pierre Villeminot (born April 14, 1913 in Clerval , † April 17, 1945 in Koselitz ) was a French writer , poet and resistance fighter .

Life

Villeminot was born in the French community of Clerval and became a half-orphan due to the soon-to-start World War I. From 1933 he worked as an engineer for the car manufacturer Talbot . Villeminot did his military service with the 35e regiment d'infanterie in Belfort .

At the beginning of the Second World War and the associated declaration of war by France on Germany, Villeminot was called up for military service on September 2, 1939, where he was deployed in Alsace. After the collapse of the French front, he fled to Switzerland in June 1940, but returned to France in January of the following year, where he made contacts with the Resistance .

Pierre Villeminot initially stayed in the unoccupied zone in the south of the country, but soon crossed the demarcation line to get to his home village of Clerval. Here he organized and committed acts of sabotage and, on his own initiative, secretly set up an arsenal in which he used a small boat to pick up and then repair weapons that had been sunk on the bottom of the Doubs River after the defeat of the French army . He also hid persecuted resistance fighters and took care of their food. For this Villeminot was appointed lieutenant in the Groupe Valmy by Pierre Georges (alias Colonel Fabien ) in 1942.

Registration card of Pierre Villeminot as a prisoner in the National Socialist concentration camp Dachau

Finally, Villeminot and his wife Yvonne were arrested by the French police in October 1942 and handed over to the Gestapo . First, both were taken to the La Butte prison in Besançon . It was soon discovered that the resistance group around Villeminot was far larger than expected and the impressive arsenal that the troops had created was found. In the ensuing period there were more than thirty arrests and Pierre Villeminot was sentenced to life imprisonment. Villeminot was imprisoned at Fort Romainville in Romainville from February 28 to July 13, 1943 . He was then transferred to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace, from here in September 1944 to Dachau and shortly afterwards to a satellite camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Gröditz in northern Saxony .

Cenotaph for the victims of the April 17th, 1945 massacre in Koselitz, Saxony.

Pierre Villeminot was probably the victim of a massacre on April 17, 1945 shortly before the end of the war, which was carried out on 188 inmates of the camp in a quarry not far from the small community of Koselitz , when American forces were only about eighteen kilometers from the camp. Villeminot himself only found a jacket in Koselitz with his last prisoner number 28301.

His wife Yvonne, who survived the Second World War, visited the scene of the event with Fernand Traver (1906–1979) in June 1945. Fernand Traver was a surviving fellow inmate of her husband, who later testified at the Nuremberg trials about the Koselitz massacre .

Literary work

Yvonne Villeminot published the autobiographical novel "Nélida" in 1984, which her husband, who was interested in literature at an early age, wrote at the age of 20 and which was awarded the Prix ​​Louis Pergaud the following year .

The work "Si je reviens", published in 1985, contains excerpts from diaries and letters written by Villeminot, which were supplemented by memories from Yvonne Villeminot.

souvenir

In the Museum of the Resistance and the Déportation , which is located in the citadel of the French city of Besançon, exhibits such as letters, contemporary documents and photos commemorate the work and fate of Pierre Villeminot.

In Besançon, the "Rue Pierre Villeminot" was named after the resistance fighter.

Individual evidence

personal data
SURNAME Villeminot, Pierre
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer, poet and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH April 14, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Clerval
DATE OF DEATH April 17, 1945
Place of death Koselitz