The story of a young German boy who escaped a Hitler Youth camp during World War II is at the heart of Auckland writer Karen Holdom's debut novel. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
May 21, 1945: a German boy pens a high-spirited letter to his family from a civilian internment camp in liberated France.
“You will be astonished to learn I am here!” writes Edmund Baton, 14. “I want to explain how it all came about.”
Edmund has been in the camp for just over three weeks, having fled a Hitler Youth-run evacuation camp in a bid to return home to the French border. His 1000km trek in the final apocalyptic weeks of World War II in Europe has taken him across his war-ravaged homeland, through the Western front and deep into French territory.
Yet Edmund is not out of danger. He is detained at a camp known as La Chauvinerie, where the atrocious living conditions and death rate will go on to trigger a national scandal.
The camp houses around 4000 civilians – both German and French – cleared from the borderlands as Allied troops pushed into Germany in March 1945, removing anyone considered “suspect” and a potential risk to the troops, ambulances, and supplies that would follow. Adolescent boys were seen as a particular threat because fascist dictator Adolf Hitler had repeatedly called on his indoctrinated youth to become “werewolves” – snipers, arsonists and saboteurs acting behind enemy lines.
“There is very little bread,” Edmund tells his family. “If it were not for the people of Spittel [delivering food packages] I would be dead of hunger … Do everything you can to free me ... If not, you mustn’t worry for me.”
I first learned of Edmund’s story after a chance visit to the German Military Cemetery at Mont-de-Huisnes in Normandy, France, 10 years ago. Among the remains of 12,000 German soldiers disinterred from battle sites all over Normandy and the Jersey Islands, the bones of old men, women, infants and children lie here in the ossuary (bone depositary) – all German civilians, many from La Chauvinerie.
One of them is Edmund Baton.
At the time of that first visit, the Volksbund (German War Graves Commission) told Edmund’s tale in a pamphlet of soldiers’ stories. Edmund and a school friend had run away from an evacuation camp in Bavaria in the final weeks of the war and made it as far as Ludwigsburg, north of Stuttgart, where they hid during heavy fighting as the Western Front passed through. They continued on foot to Karlsruhe, where they caught a lift across the Rhine with American GIs. The pair were arrested the following day at Strasbourg, France, and transported to the internment camp at Poitiers, where Edmund died on July 14, 1945 (Bastille Day) “of hunger”.
Back at home in New Zealand, I read and reread those lines (not all of them correct as it turned out) and knew this journey had to be a book, probably a novel, although I had never written one, because so much of the story would have to be imagined.
It seemed unlikely that anyone would hold living memories of a boy who died 70 years earlier. I made inquiries anyway and a few days later received the first of many emails from a French octogenarian by the name of Joseph Baton – Edmund’s first cousin and childhood friend.
“My family’s history is a cross-border story and it is with great pleasure that I will talk about it. There you are. Contact is made,” Baton, a retired French teacher, wrote (we corresponded in French though he had three native languages to choose from: French, German and the borderland patois known as the Platt). His next message included the name and address of Edmund’s sister Elisabeth (Lilli) Paulus in Germany.
A few weeks later I was back in Europe for the first of many meetings with Lilli, Joseph and his wife Jeanne. All were in their 80s and opened their homes and hearts to a stranger from the other end of the planet – a journalist yes, but with no track record on the fiction front. (“Je vous ai Googlé. Pas grande chose,” Joseph would say to me later in typically direct style. I Googled you. Didn’t find much.)
Yet everything was waiting for me – Edmund’s letters and postcards, maps, printed summaries of the region’s history, family photographs and, most precious of all, Joseph and Lilli’s own memories.
There was more to this story than I could have imagined. Edmund was born in 1931 at a time of raging nationalism yet his family were neither wholly German nor French. They were part of what Joseph Baton described as “un peuple” (a people) who shared a culture, religion (Catholic), language (the borderland Platt), and thousand-year history involving countless wars, regime changes and border shifts.
Edmund and Joseph’s fathers were German brothers, both married to French women. One family lived on one side of the border, one on the other. Both lived outside the defence lines of their respective nations, halfway between the French Maginot Line and the German West Wall. Both suffered persecution by the Nazis, including Edmund and Lilli’s father, who was jailed for “currency crime” and Joseph’s father (also Joseph), who died a political prisoner at Buchenwald concentration camp just days before it was discovered.
The letters Edmund wrote from La Chauvinerie were the most precious documents I held in my hands. You don’t need to understand German to read the story they tell.
The first is in his usual strong, meticulous hand, the tone exuberant. He has survived a great adventure. He is full of news, hope, and questions. He writes of the comrade with whom he has travelled “this long road” and begs his parents to get in touch with the boy’s family. (Sadly I could find no trace.)
The second is faint, unsteady, illegible in parts, written during the blistering July of 1945. “I am still alive and doing everything to stay that way … The situation is deplorable. Since [illegible] they have given us only some carrots in cooking water. Many internees have diarrhoea and die of dysentery. Last week we had no water for five days and there are 3500 [sic] internees! …You could also speak to the priest of my situation. Perhaps he can do something for me.” He was already in the grip of a fever.
A few days later Edmund is dead, of “dysentery and weakness of the heart” according to camp records. In a bitter irony, camp officials at Buchenwald had recorded an almost identical cause of death for Edmund’s uncle Joseph a few months earlier.
The Baton family believe it was spoiled food that killed Edmund. There were many witnesses to the fetid mountain of rotten vegetables outside the camp kitchens, delivered by corrupt merchants happy to offload spoiled produce in exchange for a portion of the money the Republic had provided to feed internees. Camp officials pocketed the balance.
Investigating the scandal of La Chauvinerie took me deep into the French Archives both national and regional, where detailed records revealed everything from daily camp life to the political fallout, prolonged investigations, and trials.
The overall death rate at La Chauvinerie was seven times higher than other civilian internment camps in France. Around 55 babies were born there. Not one survived. The camp director himself sold milk intended for infants into the black market. Internees were starved, stripped of their possessions, and there were reports of torture – such as an escapee who was blasted with a firehose, had his body covered with nettles and thistles, and was “revived” by having the soles of his feet burned with hot coals.
All that said, La Chauvinerie was no death camp. The violence was not murderous. The suffering and deaths were mostly caused by corruption, embezzlement, indifference, neglect. It was the principle that scandalised the nation.
At least one national newspaper questioned the Republic’s right to stand in judgment of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg with this outrage in her own backyard. A returned French deportee who had survived a Nazi train de mort (death train) to German labour camps declared that the methods at La Chauvinerie were “more or less the same as we suffered at Buchenwald and Dachau”.
Behind the scenes, politicians in the fragile post-Vichy provisional French Government were panicking. They intended to use German labour to rebuild their shattered nation but how would their Western Allies react if this was how the Republic treated German civilians, let alone the prisoners of war it had already put to work?
Despite protracted and thorough investigations, the worst offenders received nominal penalties. The disgraced camp commander fought for years to avoid paying his paltry fine.
It is important to note that La Chauvinerie also had a Nazi history. It was first built by German authorities in 1940 after France’s capitulation. For three years it held French Colonial troops from Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, the Caribbean, Madagascar, Indochina and Tunisia who, under fascist ideology, were considered unsuitable for German slave labour camps and suffered appalling living conditions.
About seven years after I started work on this project, the Volksbund approached to ask if I had any information about Edmund Baton. It wanted to feature his story in a new permanent exhibition at Mont-de-Huisnes but held nothing more than those few lines in the brochure that set my book in motion. A retired history professor from Poitiers who had brought the La Chauvinerie scandal to light in the 21st century, and been a particular help to me, had put them in touch.
It felt beautifully circular to hand over my research (with the family’s blessing) – the photographs, copies of letters and postcards, Edmund’s certificates of admission and death from the camp, the witness statements and reports of the investigations.
That exhibition opened at Mont-de-Huisnes in June 2024 as part of the 80-year D-Day commemorations. I was there to take part, then travel to the German border to share the stories and photographs with the Baton family.
Edmund’s sister Elisabeth Baton died three years ago but her son and his family, and Joseph Baton, then 94, were pleased to see part of their family history, and the extraordinary story of an ordinary boy, afforded the honour it deserves.
Joseph died last year and I am happy to say did live long enough to finally hold a copy of the book I had been promising him for years. He emailed immediately. “Your perseverance has been rewarded! …Bravo Karen!” It was the last message I received from him.
The End and the Beginning, by K.J. Holdom (Simon & Schuster), is out on March 31.