FRANCAISComité inter-mouvements auprès des évacués - History
1939-1949
-September 1939, France: the CIMADE is created by a Protestant theologian, Suzanne de Dietrich, and an archivist, Madeleine Barot, to make easier the resettlement of Alsace and Lorraine people evacuated by the French army when the war against Germany broke out. Since the men are mobilized on the front, it is left to women and young Protestants to take the initiative and accommodate the displaced persons, sometimes using summer camps with the help of boy scouts. The CIM (Inter-Movement Comity), the first name of the CIMADE, relies on the FACE (Federation of Christian Students Associations), on the YMCA and YWCA (Young Men/Women Christian Association) and on the EU (Federation of Unionist Boy and Girl Scouts). Initially, the religious vocation plays an important part. The aim of the Comity, as published in the Official Journal on the 3rd of April 1940, is “to promote the Gospel to the French youth that have suffered from the war”. In minutes dated 10th of March 1950, the CIMADE says it “cannot help without evangelising”. Moreover, Marc Boegner, the president of the CIMADE between 1944 and 1955, is also the leader of the French Protestant Federation.
-1940-1943, France: the CIM officially becomes the CIMADE in April 1940 and temporarily transfers its headquarters to Nîmes after the armistice on June 22nd 1940, the invasion of the North of France by he German troups and the institution, in the Southern zone, of the Vichy regime. The Committee first focuses on the return of those evacuated in September 1939 who wish to return to Alsace-Lorraine, region annexed de facto by Germany. Then the CIMADE helps the persons interned in camps to the south of France in Gurs, Rivesaltes, Récébédou, Nexon and Brens-Gaillard: refugees from the Spanish 1936 war, Jews, Gypsies, communists and German intellectuals fleeing from the Nazis and, soon, Eastern Europeans exploited by the Wehrmacht to build the Atlantic Wall. Their imprisonment rouses passionate reactions. While Marc Boegner protests against the law on the status of Jews dated 3rd October 1940, Madeleine Barot takes part in September 1941 in the Pomeyrol meetings with Visser’t Hooft, a Dutch clergyman who helps organise the resistance against Nazism by providing a link between the free and occupied countries in Western Europe. The so called Pomeyrol theses, read in church from May 1942, declare that “the Church considers as a spiritual necessity the resistance to all totalitarian and idolatrous influences”. With financial help from America, Switzerland and Sweden, the CIMADE tries to obtain that the old aged persons, women and children detained in the camps in the South of France be moved to structures where they would be under house arrest, thus avoiding their deportation. In April 1942 the Vichy authorities give the go ahead for the opening of such structures in Coteau Fleuri near Chambon-sur-Lignon, in Mas du Diable near Tarascon, in Vabre in the Tarn and within the Foyer Marie-Durand in Marseille. Along with the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (Charity for aid to children), the CIMADE thus helps Jews escape from the camp of Vénissieux at the moment of the big rounding-up of Jews in Lyon on August 26th 1942. Organising rescue is legal when it is through sitting on an official board responsible for exempting some prisoners from deportation. But it is illegal and necessitates the uttermost secrecy when, thanks to the complicity of the local clergy, the CIMADE has adult prisoners sign acts of parenthood in favour of the Catholic association, Amitié chrétienne (Christian Friendship). At night the sabotage of the electricity supply in the Vénissieux railway station enables for example 84 children to escape: either to Switzerland or to hideaways in the CIMADE hostels, especially that of Chambon-sur-Lignon. With the German occupation of the Vichy zone in November 1942 and the radicalisation of the Vichy authorities, who ban the access to some camps in the South of France from June 1943 onwards, the Committee fully joins the Resistance, making fake IDs for Jews threatened with deportation and accompanying them all the way to Switzerland. In the Nexon Camp, a young volunteer for the CIMADE, Laurent Monet, facilitates the escape of three prisoners in May 1943. In the name of a duty of disobedience Protestant networks go so far as to help the maquisards and organise the escape of resistants, young persons refusing the Service of Compulsory Work (STO) and even an Austrian deserter. The CIMADE though rejects violence and bans its members from carrying weapons. Some of its members are arrested at the Swiss border and imprisoned: one of them, Jacques Saussine, dies in September 1942 because of a poorly treated appendicitis in the Récébédou camp.
-1944, France: while the allied troops are liberating France from the German yoke, the CIMADE brings aid to the victims of the bombings in Normandy and in the Northern region. At the request of the National Council of the Resistance in July, the CIMADE also works in Drancy, Ecrouves and Poitiers camps where civilian Nazi “collaborateurs” are jailed, as well as in the Noé and Clermont de l’Oise prisons where the German war criminals and prisoners are kept.
-1947, China: for the CIMADE, who’d received financing from the YMCA during the Second World War, Madeleine Barot takes part in an international meeting of YMCAs in Hangshow. Her trip is payed by the Foreign ministry in Paris which charges her with identifying the Russian refugees who want to quit the French concession in China and obtain political asylum.
-1947-1953, Germany: the CIMADE works in favour of reconciliation in the French-occupied zone. In October 1947 in Mayence, a town almost entirely destroyed by allied bombings, the Committee inaugurates a hostel which will close in 1951, the first in a series of similar operations in Ludwigshafen and Bonn. In April 1953 in Berlin the CIMADE also opens a hostel for Eastern European refugees.
