Brief History:

Montluc Prison, Lyon was built in 1921 as a military prison; after the armistice in 1940, the prison accommodated ordinary prisoners, soldiers and perpetrators of “anti-national activities”, essentially Gaullists and Communists. Following the invasion of Vichy France, in November 1942, the Germans requisitioned the prison and placed it under their exclusive control. Montluc then became the place for the internment of resistance fighters, hostages and victims of “racial measures”, awaiting their departure and deportation to the concentration and extermination camps.

The Gestapo also used Montluc as a prison and interrogation centre alongside the Gestapo headquarters on Avenue Bertholet, where interrogations took place on the premises of the army medical school. (The History of Resistance and Deportation Centre currently occupies the Avenue Bertholet address).

It is estimated that over 15,000 people were imprisoned in Montluc, and over 900 of them were executed within it.

Brief History:

The Royallieu Camp, Compiègne, was originally a military barracks built in 1913 for the French army.

Serving briefly as a military hospital before the German Invasion in 1940, the German army used it as a POW camp for British and French Soldiers. In June 1941, the camp became “Frontstalag 122”, where the Wehrmacht detained political hostages comprising nationals of allied countries and Jews.

In the summer of 1942, the Gestapo took over the administration. Within the Royallieu camp was the notorious Camp C, the Jewish Camp, where thousands of victims of anti-Semitic persecution passed through their deportation.

Almost 50,000 resistance fighters, a,d political prisoners and hostages, just like Jean Marie SONNERY, were interned there and then deported to the Nazi death camps.

The Royallieu camp was the second largest antechamber of the death camps on French soil after Drancy.

On 27 February 1944, Alice SONNERY received a letter from Jean-Marie; in his letter, he reassured her that all was well and asked her to send him some news.

Alice left a number of letters with the RED CROSS at Lyon. She does not know if these letters arrived. In fact, the Postal Card, shows that not only did Jean-Marie not receive any letters, but he did not send any either.

Brief History:

Buchenwald was one of the first and the largest Nazi Concentration Camps within Germany’s 1937 borders near Weimar, Germany, in July of that year. Built initially to imprison opponents of the German Reich and other German citizens deemed to be undesirable, but in the eight years of its existence, around 240,000 inmates from 30 nationalities passed through the camp – it is estimated that approximately 56,000 out of them were killed or died from the harsh conditions.

In 1938, around 2,000 Jews were brought to Buchenwald from Austria, and following the Kristallnacht², in November 1938, another 10,000 German Jews were imprisoned in the camp. They were subjected to brutal terror. Six hundred of them perished; the others were released after they committed to leave Germany.

During the war years, the camp held many political prisoners, and at the time of Mayor SONNERY’s incarceration at the beginning of 1944, numbered around 63,000 souls.

When the camp was liberated on 11 April 1945, there were 21,000 survivors, including 4,000 Jews and 1,000 children. There are unsurprisingly no photographs of Monsieur SONNERY during his time at Buchenwald. However, in the 1990s, eleven photos surfaced showing life in and around the Little Camp, where SONNERY had been incarcerated. The photographs, taken by a man called Georges Angéli and now copyrighted to the Buchenwald Memorial, were taken shortly after SONNERY had been moved on to Flossenburg. The story of how those photographs came to be taken is a story of a courageous act of resistance by Monsieur Angéli, a young French man from Châtelleraudais who was arrested by the Gestapo while fleeing to Spain to escape the STO.

Monsieur Angéli was a photographer, and so, upon arrival at Buchenwald Concentration Camp was assigned to the Prisoner Photograph Department, which, from 1943, utilised the skills of individual foreign prisoners. Despite having minimal access to the cameras stored in the department, Monsieur Angéli managed to steal one in June 1944.

One Sunday, when there were no SS in the camp, he took the photos in and around the small camp.

You can view all of the photographs on fotoarchiv.buchenwald.de.

Brief History:

Flossenbürg was a Nazi concentration camp built in May 1938. It was located in a remote area in Bavaria.
The camps were built around several quarries to produce Granite for Nazi architecture.

However, the first quarry shut down in May 1943, and its workers were reassigned to arms production, but half of the prisoner labour was still working in the quarries.

The quarries caused the death rate to be higher at Flossenbürg than at camps with less physically demanding industries, but the switch to armaments production in 1943 did lead to a decrease in the death rate. Prisoners also suffered from a shortage of fresh water due to the elevation and unusually cold and wet weather; their clothing was inadequate for these conditions.

Initially constructed for only 1,500 prisoners, the population of the main camp increased to around 10,500 before it was evacuated in April 1945.

RESOURCES:

Header Photo Source: Google Maps.

Photo Mémorial National de la Prison de Montluc  ©Martin Baker Feb 2019

Montluc History Source : Ministère des Armées, Secrétariat général pour l’administration, Direction des patrimoines, de la mémoire et des archives

Montluc Documentation and Map : Les Archives du département du Rhône et de la métropole de Lyon  3335W25 – Personnes internées dans la prison Montluc… SONNERY Sébastien (dit JEAN-MARIE) Producteur :Service régional de police judiciaire de Lyon (SRPJ)

Photos Camp de Royallieu, Compiègne : Source : ©Martin Baker July 2022

Photo “Arrivée d’un convoi au camp de Royallieu” Source : ©CDJC / Ministére des Anciens Combattants et Victimes de Guerre.

¹ : Statement of Madame Alice Adèle PFAENDER-SONNERY 51 years – Farmer and wife of the Mayor of Chamelet. 13h00 16 January 1945 by Claudius FARGE and Raymond VILDIEU, Gendarmes in residence Le Bois d’Oinght Rhône.

Photo Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. 1944 prisoners during Roll Call. No. 7 Source : Buchenwald Memorial

Buchenwald Concentration Camp history : Buchenwald concentration camp. (2023, September 22). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchenwald_concentration_camp and https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/buchenwald-historical-background.html

Photo Rock Breaking Flossenburg 1942 – NIOD Institut für Kriegs-, Holocaust- und Genozidforschung, Amsterdam

Note of Process Verbal, Chamelet 17 July 1943 – Source Archives Conseil Municipal Maire de Chamelet

Database: “Flossenbürg Documentation of the 3rd U.S. Army” (Schema “Flossenbürg-Dokumentation der 3. US-Armee”)

Photo of Valley of death – memorial in the former concentration camp Flossenbürg. Ash pyramid. Crematorium in the background SOURCE: Author Kritzolina Creative Commons.

NOTES:

International Centre on Nazi Persecution.

In 1943, the international section of the British Red Cross was asked by the Headquarters of the Allied Forces to set up a registration and tracing service for missing people. Initially named the Central Tracing Bureau on February 15, 1944, and was eventually located in Bad Arolsen, Germany. It was considered a central location among the areas of Allied occupation and had an intact infrastructure unaffected by the war.

It is now named The Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution (Service International de Recherches), an internationally governed centre for documentation, information and research on Nazi persecution, forced labour and the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and its occupied regions. The archive contains about 30 million documents from concentration camps, details of forced labour, and files on displaced persons.

It preserves the original documents and clarifies the fate of those persecuted by the Nazis.

Much of the documentation sourced directly from the various camps on this page is also available online at https://arolsen-archives.org/

² Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom, was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party’s Sturmabteilung paramilitary and Schutzstaffel paramilitary forces
(Last Edited: Oct 18, 2019
Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

With thanks to : Research Staff at Mémorial National Prison de Montluc, 4 rue Jeanne Hachette, 69487, Lyon

With thanks to : Julia MAITRE, Assistante à la régie des collections, Mémorial de l’internement et de la déportation, Camp de Royallieu, Compiègne.

With thanks to : Anita Ganzenmüller, Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, Buchenwald, 99427 Weimar, Germany

With thanks to :  Annabelle Lienhart, M.A. Département historique des employés, Mémorial du camp de concentration de Flossenbürg, Allée du Souvenir 5, D-92696 Flossenbürg.

With thanks back in 2019 to : Ms Floriane Bourrelly, a student at ISCOM, for her assistance in understanding the German documents used in this investigation.