A German soldier did the unthinkable with a French prisoner for eight days in a secret cellar

A German soldier did the unthinkable with a French prisoner for eight days in a secret cellar.

For h days, a French woman is remained locked in a basement under a house requisitioned by the army German. She was not tortured, she was not questioned and the 9th day, when she should have been dead or on the way to a prison camp, it simply disappeared from the records. The person responsible for his care was a Soldier of Vermarthe, Conrad Weiseman, logistics sergeant, 31 years old, originally from Stuttgart.

He wore the uniform of a regime that killed million people. He sported the badge of a war machine responsible for unspeakable crimes. And for 8 days he did something that no German military manual anticipated. He protected a prisoner of the very army he served. This story is not in the books of history.

There is no monument, no commemorative plaque. but she happened and I know it because my grandfather kept the test for sixty-year-old buried in a box metal in the garden of a house Marseille in central France. To inside this box I found photographs, written letters in archaic German, a newspaper of campaign with torn pages, falsified military documents and small silver brooch engraved with initials E V.

Élise Vaugrenard, the woman who should have die in this basement, but who survived because an enemy soldier chose to disobey. Before continuing, I need to clarify something. This is not a story of redemption. Conrad Weiseman was not a hero. He voluntarily served one of the diets the cruelest in human history.

Nothing he did erases that. But the war, as I discovered when studying these documents, is rarely made only of monsters and saints. It is also made of impossible contradiction, of men ordinary which at specific times have chose to silently disobey then that the world around them was falling apart. And it is perhaps precisely for this is why this story is disturbing so much because it forces us to confront a truth that we prefer ignore.

Even within the armies of the horror, there were actions which defied hell itself, not for change the course of the war but to save only one life. Occupied Marseille France April morning time. The sky was full of low cloud when the door of the small stone house on rue des aiglantiers was smashed. Three German soldiers entered without prevent.

Élise Vaugrenard sewed a child's dress near the window when she heard the crash. She doesn't have had time to hide anything nor to flee. According to the official report of the Vertmarthe, signed by the lieutenant Ernst Müller and archived in the military registers of Lyon, document which I was able to access via the archives French nationals in 2021, Éise has was arrested on charges of activity subversive and collaboration with terrorist elements.

In others In other words, helping the French resistance. The test, a radio hidden in the basement, fabrics used for line secret compartments and a letter intercepted 3 weeks ago sent by a close relative known to his involvement in networks clandestine. The accusation was serious. In occupied France in 1943, collaborating with the resistance meant summary execution or deportation to concentration camps.

There was no no half measures. Elise's destiny seemed to seal at the moment when the handcuffs touched his wrists. But something unexpected happened. Lieutenant Müller, responsible for arrest, received urgent orders that afternoon. His battalion would be transferred to the eastern front in the hours.

The war in the Soviet Union consumed men at a speed that no staff had anticipated. Müller had to organize the transport, inventory, distribution of ammunition. He didn't have time to take care of temporary prisoners. So he delegated. Conrade Weisemann was a logistics sergeant. Its function was to take care of supplies, coordinate stocks, ensure that soldiers receive rations and equipment in the deadlines.

He was not part of the Guestapo. He was not leading interrogation, he did not torture person. He was, in the words of his own diary found in the box, a bureaucrat in uniform, invisible, dispensable. But that day, Müller gave him a direct order. keep Élise under guard until that the transfer to Poitier be confirmed. Don't let her escape, don't let her don't cause trouble and don't lose time with her....

NEXT BELOW, IN COMMENT 👇