Frontstalag 154, Fourchambault and Garchizy

The site: a wagon works turned military depot

The buildings had been put up in 1916 for the company Le Matériel Roulant to build railway wagons. In 1930 the State bought the works and turned them into the central railway material establishment of the 5th Engineer Regiment, with an annexe at Fourchambault. Local accounts describe the site as former buildings where railway equipment was stored when German troops arrived and requisitioned it for prisoners in the summer of 1940. The land was later transferred to Garchizy, which is why the camp is described both as the Fourchambault camp and as the Garchizy camp.

The camp in 1940 and 1941

The camp received the prisoners held at the temporary internment sites of Pouilly-sur-Loire and Saint-Saulge, a figure of about 8,000 men being quoted locally for the opening period; prisoners nicknamed it the Silesia camp. It was the largest prisoner of war camp in the Nièvre. The town of Fourchambault organised a municipal aid committee that became a departmental committee under the prefect, and Fourchambault and Nevers between them supplied some 600 kilograms of bread a day. In October 1940 a theatre troupe formed by prisoners was even allowed to perform in Nevers and Le Creusot.

Prisoners of European origin were moved to camps in Germany at the end of 1940 or early in 1941, after which the Frontstalags mainly held colonial soldiers. From the spring of 1941 the German authorities used the largely North African prisoners at Fourchambault for agricultural labour, and an agreement of November 1941 between Vichy and the occupation authorities allowed many of them to be released and sent home. Inhabitants of Fourchambault and Garchizy helped prisoners to escape across the nearby demarcation line, and the town received the Croix de Guerre for this in 1948, presented on 8 May 1949.

The German registers of the Frontstalags survive on microfilm at the Archives nationales. The roll covering the end of the Fourchambault register runs from matriculation number 5081 to the end of the series, followed by the beginning of the Dijon register. The inventory describes the registers; it does not give a total population, and the numbers cited by local historians should be read as approximate.

Ukrainian soldiers of the Polish Army

The history of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic eparchy in France lists, among the notable actions of the Ukrainian Catholic mission in Paris, pastoral work for Polish combatants of Ukrainian origin imprisoned by the Germans, with the possibility for priests to visit them. It gives Fourchambault near Nevers as its example, citing mission archive documents of 26 November and 31 December 1940. The mission history uses the word concentration camp; the facility was a prisoner of war camp under the German army. No figure for the Ukrainian prisoners is given, and none is offered here.

Later use and remembrance

The site remained a military establishment after the war, and a mess building of the 1960s survives there. Since 2021 the Conservatoire du patrimoine automobile et militaire has occupied part of the ground, and in May 2024 a stele was unveiled there, with the Souvenir français of the Nièvre, commemorating the help given by the people of Fourchambault and Garchizy to the prisoners of Frontstalag 154. The former mess is being restored to house a research and archive centre for a planned museum.