May 8th 2020 is the 75th anniversary of the end of Word War II. To mark this occasion, I’m posting a short tribute to Henri Perrin, a remarkable French worker priest who secretly helped French labourers
and others working in arms factories in Nazi Germany. Perrin landed in jail and
was eventually deported back to France where after the war he became a worker
priest alongside industrial labourers.
Perrin was one of a group of 26 Catholic priests who had
volunteered for a dangerous secret mission organized by the Catholic church in
France during the war. The mission was to give spiritual support to French people
brought as forced labourers by the Nazi regime to Germany to keep its factories
going.
I can’t squeeze into this short blog post answers to obvious
questions such as how this mission came about, what happened to the priests and
how it fits with the history of the French worker priest movement. I hope to
publish more on these aspects soon.
In the meantime: Before the coronavirus lockdown, I took the
train to Leipzig, to retrace the footsteps of Perrin, who lived there for nine
months between August 1943 to April 1944. I visited the industrial site near what is now
Leipzig’s exhibition centre where Perrin worked in an engineering factory. I drank
coffee with the helpful staff at Leipzig’s forced labour documentation centre.
Cover of Perrin’s Autobiography
And I visited the Leipzig prison where Perrin was held for
four months after being captured for his priestly work. Some notes from this part
of my trip:
The four-storey prison block the city’s central police
station is over a century old. The walkways are narrow, sounds echo around the
enclosed atrium. The narrow cells, with heavy wooden doors and thick walls feel
claustrophobic.
A larger cell for groups of prisoners is at the end of
the first-floor walkway. The entrance area is caged in, to stop inmates
attacking the guards. “We use this for drunken football fans” a woman police
officer tells me.
Seventy-seven years ago such a cell in this prison was
used to imprison Henri Perrin, a Catholic priest from France caught by the
Gestapo on a secret mission in Nazi Germany. He described entering the cell in
December 1943 thus:
“I stumbled over legs, and voices in the dark asked all
kinds of questions – “Who are you? What are you here for? Where have you come
from?” The cell was occupied by seven or eight Russians and Poles and three
little French lads of eighteen or twenty…I sat on the ground like the rest and
when in the darkness I explained that I didn’t know the reason for my arrest,
but “perhaps it was my activity as a Catholic”, I felt them all suddenly stop
short”.
Perrin was 29 at the time. A photo shows him as rather
reserved. But his activities in the months preceding his capture were those of
a risk-taker. A risk-taker for his Christian faith.
On his first night in captivity he lived through the heaviest
wartime Allied bombing raid of the city, in which 1,800 people were killed.
Perrin survived prison, and was lucky to be deported back to
France in 1944. At least six of his fellow priests on their secret mission died
or were murdered in Nazi concentration camps.
He recounted his experiences in Leipzig in his diary ‘Priest-Workman
in Germany’, published in 1947. This is in English, as is his autobiography
“Priest and Worker’, published in 1964.
Back in France, Perrin continued as a worker priest, among
other jobs helping build a major dam. Sadly he died very young, in 1954.
75 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, it’s good to
remember the small but important contribution Perrin and his fellow priests made
to this victory.