Why was Lorient released until May 10, 1945?

In France occupied by the German army, from the summer of 1940, Lorient was awarded a particular role: to shelter a base of submarines which will hinder America-Royame-UNI. It is a question of isolation as much as possible this last country, the only one then at war against the third Reich.

Then this base, protected by huge blockhouses, was integrated from 1942 in the gigantic program of the Hitler’s “Wall of the Atlantic”, intended to protect the ribs.

“Finally,” explains Christophe Deutsch-Dumolin, host of the city’s architecture and heritage, Lorient will become the largest German fortress outside Germany, sheltering 26,000 soldiers and 15,000 French workers responsible for incessant work. »»

A martyred city under the Allied bombs

Obviously, this base makes this port a strategic target for allied aviation: between January 14 and May 17, 1943, 4,000 tonnes of bombs are released on Lorient, then destroyed at 85 %.

After the landing, the Allied forces are blocked in their progress to the west. On August 10, the territory was locked and forms an irreducible “pocket” over 54 km around the city, still ultra defended because of its underwater base. The war of position will still last eight months, with several thousand French civilians who have remained trapped until the capitulation of the third Reich.

“We can say that it was one of the most busy and destroyed French cities in the Second World War,” observes the specialist, for whom celebrating this complicated memory of occupation and liberation is all the more essential. “There was so much pain, mourning linked to massive destruction which, moreover, were caused by the Aaliés: it was all the more difficult to accept,” he explains.

Opposite, the liberated Lorientais initially aroused distrust: had they not supported the Germans by building and bringing this military base to life? Finally, the reconstruction started here until 1949 when else, we had already drawn plans in early 1945!

Shared memories on the resilience of a territory

All these reasons undoubtedly explain the importance given to commemorations since the end of the war with many collections of testimonies from Lorientais and their neighbors. They wanted to explain that if they had not built for the Germans here, they would have left for compulsory labor (STO) across the Rhine.

And if, as everywhere, there have been collaborators and violent settling of accounts, “there have also been many acts of resistance”, insists Christophe Deutsch-Dumolin, who quotes the industrial and military spying led by Jacques Stoskopf an engineer of the base, so in the confidence of the Nazis that it was wrong with collaboration. He was denounced and died murdered at the Alsatian camp of Natzweiler-Struthof.

Twelve testimonies of inhabitants who knew this dark period are thus available to the public in a traveling exhibition (read elsewhere). But the agglomerations of the Lorient pocket also planned a major rejoicing program to illustrate the resilience of this territory which was able to reinvent itself, not only after the war, but also after the disarmament of its military base in 1995.