At the end of May 1942, a German anti-aircraft (FLAK Luftwaffe) unit, presumably assigned to duty at a nearby airfield, bivouacked in Amiens, staying at one point at the Residence Hall (Pensionnat) of the Lycée Sacré Coeur, 2 rue des Augustins. The accompanying photos, taken by an unidentified photographer, formed part of a scrapbook that appeared with a collection of WW II memorabilia in an online auction in March 2021. The six small photos show the unit being read the orders for the day by an officer on the steps of the Pensionnat and parading through Amiens along the rue des Augustins, the rue Cormont (which flanks the south side of the Cathedral) and the Boulevard de Belfort.
While the unit seems to have been in Amiens only briefly and while there was a regular German military and police presence in the city, the photos stand out when juxtaposed against the deteriorating situation of the local Jewish residents.
The last week of May 1942 sees the issuance of the legislation imposing the wearing of the Yellow Star on all Jews above the age of six. Directed by the Occupying Germans, the Yellow Star program is completely administered by the French civil administration and the police. On the street in Amiens where the soldiers bivouack, at No. 17 rue des Augustins, live the President of the Jewish Community Association, Léon Louria and his family, their residence adjoining the Louria textile manufacturing facilities. On June 3 Mr. Louria appears at the Amiens police station to collect and sign for the yellow star badges for himself, his wife and their daughter; however on June 17, he is arrested in the nearby rue de l’Amiral Courbet by the German authorities and sentenced to two years of administrative detention in the camp of the Citadel of Doullens, for “not wearing his yellow star in the prescribed manner.”
The parade of German soldiers also passes through the rue Cormont, along the south side of the Cathedral, buttressed to protect against damage from war, past the famous statue of the Vierge dorée (the gilded image of Mary). Off to their left runs the short street, the rue Porion. It ends (though not in the photo) at a building on the rue du Cloître de la Barge which served the Jewish community as its synagogue, before being occupied by members of a French fascist group, the Parti Populaire Français. Two Polish Jewish sisters occupied an apartment on the second floor, but they have fled. On the rue Porion there lived several immigrant Jewish families who had smaller textile businesses : Khanane Levine and Taube Grinfeder, Jacques Aranias and Victoria Eli and their children. They evacuated or were forced to evacuate their homes prior to this date.
The photo taken of the soldiers on the Boulevard de Belfort shows the Hotel Carleton in the background as the marchers pass before a wallpaper and home decoration store and Chaussures André, a national chain of shoe stores which appears to have been the subject of an extensive “aryanisation” proceeding documented in the French National Archives.
On July 16-17, 1942, less than two months after the brief decorous sojourn of the German FLAK unit in Amiens, there occurred the terrible Vel d’Hiv roundup in Paris, followed almost immediately, on July 18 and 19, 1942, by the arrests of half a dozen foreign Jews in Amiens and Pierrepont-sur-Avre, and their eventual deportation from Drancy to Auschwitz. See 1942, Rafle
NB. One of the photos of the unit in the rue Cormont bears the date of 24-5-42 on the back, but another photo, showing the circle of German officers at the Pensionnat, has the date 31-5-42 on the back. It is unclear whether the photos represent two different stays by the unit or one continuous one.
I owe the identification of the unit as a “FLAK Luftwaffe” unit to the previous owner of the photos, Mr. Régis BONNERY, who made the identification on the basis of the insignia on the uniform of one of the officers.