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Step 1: Place des Martyrs de la Résistance, Monument to soldiers without uniform and to the Resistance
The monument to soldiers without uniform and to the Resistance of Niort is located at Place des Martyrs de la Résistance (formerly: Place Saint-Antoine), at the bottom of the stairs leading to Rue des Remparts, near La Brèche and Rue Alsace-Lorraine. It consists of a stele from which emerges a hand holding a section of a sword and a flame. It is an illustration of a text by General de Gaulle inscribed above: "The Resistance clung to two poles on the slope that did not give way: one was the section of the sword, the other French thought." (October 31, 1943). On the base, are engraved the names of all the networks, movements and maquis that distinguished themselves in the Deux-Sèvres department. The monument is signed with the name of the sculptor Jean Dulau (1902-1968), winner of the Prix de Rome. The first stone of the monument was laid on November 11, 1949. Source: Wiki-Niort.
Step 2: 12 rue Alsace-Lorraine, Plaque on the facade of the “Gestapo house”
In each occupied city, the Germans had a branch of their political police, the Sipo-SD (Security Police and Intelligence Services of the SS), of which the Gestapo (Secret State Police) was a component. In Niort, the Sipo-SD detachment moved into this house, confiscated from the Léon family of Jewish origin. From June 1, 1942, the direction of repression in France passed from the army (Wehrmacht), considered too ineffective, to the Sipo-SD, led in Paris by SS General Carl Oberg. The Sipo-SD police officers, few in number, relied on the French police and gendarmerie, the collaborationist parties and on a large number of French auxiliaries called VM (Vertraumann, confidant), informers, double agents infiltrated into the Resistance. This house was also a place of detention and torture.
Step 3: Stele in memory of the victims of Vichy anti-Semitism and in homage to the Righteous
Place des Martyrs de la Résistance, the stele in memory of the victims of Vichy anti-Semitism and in homage to the Righteous was erected, as in each departmental capital, in application of the decree of February 3, 1993 establishing a "National Day of Remembrance of Racist and Anti-Semitic Persecutions Committed Under the De facto Authority Known as the "Government of the French State" (1940-1944), "organized each year on July 16 (anniversary of the Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup of 1942) if it is a Sunday, otherwise the following Sunday." By the law of July 10, 2010, the wording of the day commemorating the Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup was changed, becoming "The National Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Racist and Anti-Semitic Crimes by the French State and of Homage to the "Righteous" of France", actors of the Civil Resistance.
Step 4: 39 avenue de Paris, Plaque in the Hall of the Departmental Directorate of Territories.
This plaque bears the inscription: “In memory of our comrades from the Ponts et Chaussées des Deux-Sèvres, who died for France in combat, in captivity, in the resistance, in deportation, victims of German barbarity. Let us never forget 1939-1945.” Employees of the Ponts-et-Chaussées de Niort were active in the Resistance, particularly within the “Résistance” movement and the Franco-Belgian networks Zéro-France and Delbo-Phénix. They were seriously affected by German repression in the spring of 1944. Examples include Louis Michaud, known as “Petit Louis”, who survived the deportation, and Henry Darsaut, who was savagely tortured in Poitiers.
Step 5: OLD Cemetery, 31-35 Rue de Bellune, Grave of Edmond PROUST, alias Colonel Chaumette
Born on October 20, 1894 in Chenay (Deux-Sèvres), Edmond Proust became a schoolteacher. Mobilized in 1914, he ended the Great War with the rank of second lieutenant and the Croix de Guerre. Appointed schoolteacher in Saivres (Deux-Sèvres), he held this position until his retirement in October 1949. In 1934-1935, he founded the MAIF of which he became president. Captain in the 32nd Infantry Regiment, Proust was taken prisoner in June 1940. Released in August 1941 as a veteran, he resumed his position as a schoolteacher in Saivres. A member of the Resistance (pseudos: Gapit then Chaumette), he became departmental head of the Civil and Military Organization, then of the Secret Army, and finally, with the rank of colonel, of the FFI of Deux-Sèvres who liberated Niort on September 6. He commanded the 114th Infantry Regiment on the La Rochelle front. In 1947, he founded the CAMIF. He died on November 27, 1956 in Niort (Deux-Sèvres).
Step 6: Niort station, steles inside the station, on the left at the head of platform A.
The steles bear the names of 19 railway workers who were victims of the war. Among them were resistance fighters, such as the communists André Bernardeau, convicted and shot in Paris on October 5, 1942; Eugène Gréau, deported NN to the special camp of Hinzert, probably convicted by a special court in Cologne or Breslau, detained in the Sonnenburg penal colony where he died of illness on December 20, 1943 (Resistance Medal); Pierre Leroy, who died in Auschwitz on August 11, 1942 (Resistance Medal). Alphonse Renaud, Gaullist resistance fighter, deported NN, died in Dora on April 3, 1945. Also killed in deportation were Raymond Paquet, on July 15, 1944 in Bremen (Bremen)-Farge, Kommando of Neuengamme, and Henri Sorin, on January 31, 1945 in Neuengamme. The other names are those of railway workers killed by acts of war (machine-gunning of their trains, bombing of the station district on June 7, 1944).
Step 7: Stele in memory of the Jews arrested in Deux-Sèvres and deported
This stele in memory of the Jews arrested in Deux-Sèvres between 1941 and 1944 and deported was inaugurated on February 3, 2012. It is located near 92 rue des Trois Coigneaux, the site of a now-defunct slipper factory, a transit center for Jews from Deux-Sèvres rounded up on January 31, 1944. The list contains 143 names, including those of 33 children aged 3 to 14. A new, updated stele will soon be created, and 153 names will be inscribed on it, including 78 who lived in Niort. The extermination of the Jews of Europe, today called the Shoah, was decided and carried out by the Nazis, but the roundups in Deux-Sèvres (October 9, 10 and January 1942, 31) were carried out by the authorities of the French State. While the Germans arrested 01 Jews, 1944 were arrested by the French police and gendarmerie. There were four survivors, including Ida Fensterszab [Grinspan] (16-137).
Step 8: 2 rue du Palais Court of Justice: Delphin DEBENEST sign (inside) and roundabout nearby
Delphin Debenest (1907-1997) was one of the few resistance magistrates. Deputy Prosecutor in Niort before the war, he became Ernest Pérochon's son-in-law. Mobilized in 1939, he lived through the debacle. Appointed to Poitiers, he contacted the Resistance in 1941, then became an intelligence agent for the French Combatant in 1943 within the Delbo-Phénix network and in contact with the Mousquetaire network. Arrested by the Sipo-SD on July 27, 1944, deported to Buchenwald then to the Holzen Kommando, he escaped in April 1945 during a transfer and was taken in by the British. He was appointed attorney general in the French delegation at the Nuremberg trials. He became a prosecutor in Niort until his appointment to Paris in 1954. In 2016, during a conference dedicated to his memory, a plaque was placed at the Niort courthouse. In April 2017, his name was given to the roundabout located on Avenue du Général Largeau.
Step 9: Boulevard Main, Niort War Memorial
This monument, initially located at the foot of the Keep, leaning against the wall of the Prefecture, was moved to Boulevard Main in 2006. Inaugurated on July 22, 1923 by André Maginot, Minister of War, it is the work of the sculptor Pierre Marie Poisson (1876-1953). It consists of a large stele that frames a woman standing with her arms outstretched on the list of soldiers. She is wearing a Phrygian cap and wears a breastplate closed by a belt bearing the initials RF (French Republic). It is an allegory of the Republic. The monument is inscribed: "To our Dead". To the list of 518 dead in 1914-1918 were added the victims of 1939-1945, numbering 54, and those of the Indochina and Algerian wars, for a total of 705 names. It is appropriate to take into account the names inscribed on the monuments of the municipalities since attached to Niort, i.e. a total of 1032 names including 103 for 1939-1945.
Step 10: Mail Lucie Aubrac, Commemorative stele “HONOR AND HOMELAND”
This stele in memory of the tortured, condemned and deported resistance fighters was inaugurated in June 2008 in the grounds of the Departmental Council. It bears the motto “Honneur et Patrie” which is that of the Legion of Honour, of the French flags and which was adopted by General de Gaulle in London for Free France. When, on 15 November 1941, General de Gaulle addressed the French people present in Great Britain during a demonstration organised at the Albert Hall in London, he declared: “We say: ‘Honneur et Patrie,’ meaning by this that the nation can only live again in the air of victory and survive only in the cult of its own greatness.” Finally, the daily broadcast of Free France on the BBC was entitled “Honneur et Patrie”. A plaque commemorates the imprisonment of the Resistance fighters before their deportation.
Stage 11: Chizon de Sainte-Pezenne (D 743), Stele in memory of the nine shot by the Germans
The place called Chizon de Sainte-Pezenne is a dry valley that is accessed by a path on the right of the D743 road towards Parthenay. To the south, a farm overlooks the valley. The shooting range was "created in 1942 in the valley. This place, specially designed for executions, consists of: a covered shooting range and a shooting mound in the center of which a post has been placed. Several tons of earth were brought in to create this mound, which is 4 meters high and 10 meters long. The shooting distance between the range and the mound is 25 meters." (Report of the Commissioner of General Intelligence of Niort dated November 4, 1945). The Germans shot nine people there, five after conviction in 1942 and 1943 (stage 3) and four others summarily executed on August 19, 1944 (stage 5). The stele was inaugurated on September 28, 2019.