Conference of barbed wire dans l'Eure-et-Loir

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Origin and history

The barbed wire seminar, located at Coudray in the southern suburbs of Chartres, occupies a former prisoner camp (Bloc 1 of Camp 501) built during World War I. At the end of the Second World War, this site passed under American command before being transferred to the French army in June 1945. He was then transformed into a seminary for German priests prisoners, under the spiritual direction of Fr Franz Stock (1904-1948), former chaplain of Paris prisons (Health, Fresnes, Cherche-Midi) who became a voluntary prisoner for the Liberation.

Between 1945 and 1947, nearly 950 German priests were trained in a reinforced concrete hangar in a chapel. The latter's murals, made mainly by Franz Stock, evoke the Passion of Christ and today constitute the only vestige of the seminary. These works symbolize the rebirth of the German Catholic clergy, decimated by the Nazi regime, and embody one of the first reconciliation initiatives between France and Germany after the war.

The building housing the former chapel, classified as Historic Monument in 1995 (arranged on 13 March), is the only protected element of the site. Integrated today in the Army's Mobilizing Center 101, it bears witness to an unknown episode of Franco-German history, where spirituality and memory intersect in a place marked by confinement and then hope.

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