Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
by Inge Marszolek
It was the same kind of labour as in Ancient Egypt, in Karnak or Luxor… Everything was done by hand!’ If we compare the seven gates of Thebes to the bunkers at Cap Ferret, we can answer the question posed by the ‘worker who reads’1 (this is the title of Berthold Brecht’s poem): it was Henri Lavrillat.
But he did not do it alone: thousands of other members of the Service de Travail Obligatoire (STO) and forced labourers from all over Europe were more or less forced to build the fortifications of the Atlantic Wall. German workers from the Todt Organisation, German engineers, local companies employed by the Wehrmacht or the Todt Organisation, as well as Wehrmacht and SS soldiers were involved in building the massive structure of the Atlantic Wall. After the naval war against Britain had been lost and the Wehrmacht forces had withdrawn to the Eastern front, Hitler decided to fortify the Atlantic coast (5000 km) in those countries that were occupied by the Wehrmacht. Thus, the construction of bunkers along some 5000 km of coastline had to be planned and implemented. All logistic support as well as the construction workers were transferred from the Siegfried Line to the Atlantic coast. Both Fritz Todt, who was Inspector General for German Roadways and, from 1940, Minister of Armaments, and his successor Albert Speer, Minister of War Production, decided to build small and medium-sized ports and bunkers for anti-aircraft batteries only. From 1943 onwards, huge bunkers were built, e.g. the bunkers in St. Nazaire and L’Orient, which were intended for the construction of submarines, and the La Coupole underground bunker, which was designed to launch the V2 ‘miracle weapons’ against Britain. Contrary to the opinion of many amateur historians, the majority of the workers who built these structures were forced labourers. They worked and lived under appalling conditions to help the Wehrmacht and Hitler achieve the ‘Endsieg’ (final victory).
Henri Lavrillat was not a volunteer, even though the STO did organize the employment of so- called civilian workers in Vichy France. After France had been occupied and the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the NS regime, had been established in the unoccupied zone, several recruitment campaigns were launched to attract workers. The German government gradually increased its pressure on the Vichy government, especially on Pétain’s foreign minister Henri Laval, to find workers. However, the 1942 volunteer recruitment campaign, an expensive propaganda exercise, did not live up to the high expectations and requirements of the NS regime. For this reason, the STO was founded in September 1942 to conscript workers on the national and regional level for services in Nazi Germany or for bunker construction at the Atlantic coast.
Henri Lavrillat was conscripted on 1st April 1943 after an amendment of the STO laws, which imposed a two-year obligation to work on all male French citizens. A campaign was organised to propagate the idea that the obligation was a ‘civic duty’ to support the joint fight of the French and the Germans against Bolshevism. At the same time, the French Resistance was gaining supporters and strength: one of the reasons for supporting the Resistance was the rejection of conscription. Quite a few conscripted workers escaped the STO by joining the Resistance, a fact also mentioned by Henri Lavrillat. Yet, after the war, STO workers were suspected of having been collaborators, not least because the strength of the Resistance had become a national myth. For this reason, many workers, maybe even Henri Lavrillat, have kept quiet about their time of compulsory work service to this day.
In the interview conducted by Markus Oberndorfer, Lavrillat gives an impressive description of the poor working conditions at the construction site, as well as of the supervision and harassment by the SS. These working conditions were by no means ‘ordinary’, but similar to those of forced labourers. For Henri Lavrillat, his memories are painful, and although they have become blurred with time, his experience of the poor working conditions, which included bad and insufficient food as well as the brutal supervision by the Germans, is forever burned into his mind. We can only guess that one of the reasons why he virtually blocked out that time of his life was that every STO worker was suspected of having been a collaborator in post-war France.
By documenting the disappearance of the bunkers at Cap Ferret, or at least their transformation by graffiti, with his photographs, Markus Oberndorfer managed to bring these memories back and, to quote from Foukauld 2, bring them into the realm of the speakable. To a certain degree, this photographic project is paradoxical: Markus Oberndorfer documents the disappearance of the bunkers in his photographs, while at the same time preserving the memories of those who built them. He lifts the burden of this memory from Henri Lavrillat’s shoulders: Lavrillat said that the painful memories ‘crumbled’ when he saw the bunkers ‘crumble’ in the photographs that show the bunkers just before they finally disappear into the sea. Frozen in time, the process of disappearing is preserved and seems to come to a halt. In Oberndorfer’s new project, it is not the bunkers that are saved from disappearing, but the people who were forced to work for Nazi Germany, and their memories.
This essay was written for “Autrement on devient fou…(OmdU)” and published in German & French as part of the corresponding book. Inge Marzsolek: Univ,-Prof.Dr., Institute for Cultural Sciences, University of Bremen, researched and taught history and memory in the 20th century, media-history, visual history and everyday history.
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