Article published on France Bleu on 20/05/2025.
A museum dedicated to prisoners of war is to be built a stone’s throw from Foucarville. This small village housed over 100,000 German prisoners from June 1944 to 1946-1947. The camp was run by an American lieutenant-colonel, Warren J. Kennedy.
It’s a little-known story in the Cotentin region. And yet, from June 9, 1944 until its dismantling in 1947, the camp at Foucarville, a small commune in the Manche region with just 240 inhabitants at the time, housed over 100,000 German prisoners: it was in fact one of the main camps for Wehrmacht soldiers in Europe. It is on this basis that the Warren J. KennedyAssociationis carrying out a project for a “museum of captivity in liberated Europe not far from the Foucarville site, in the new commune of Sainte-Mère-Eglise.
Hospital, bakery and soccer field
The project was born after the publication of a book in 2017 Prisonniers allemands en Normandie, un camp américain à Foucarville, by Anne Broilliard and Benoît Lenoël.**** The book looks back at the history of this detention camp “which saw Reich soldiers arrive from all over Europe, as the Allies fought and advanced,” explains Maya Duburch, Executive Director of the Warren J. Kennedy Association. “This camp was under the authority of a commandant, Warren J. Kennedy, who was a great democrat and who wanted to manage his prisoners in the most humane way possible.”
“It turns out that Anne Broilliard, when she wrote her book, got in touch with Colonel Kennedy’s daughter,” details Maya Duburch. They became such good friends that one morning Alice Kennedy sent Anne a violin, telling her it had been made by prisoners for the colonel’s birthday. Gradually, Alice donated her father’s archives, which were collected in a trunk. So we saw all these extraordinary documents arrive, and that was the starting point for the project”, says Maya Duburch. The idea of a museum was soon born.
The camp stretched over a hundred hectares in the fields. There was one entrance at Foucarville, for Americans, and another at Ravenoville, for German prisoners. Originally intended for 20,000 men, the camp received no less than 60,000 inmates on a continuous basis. This CCPWE 19 – for Continental central enclosure n°19 – was a veritable town with electric lighting, sidewalks, a railway line, a church with chimes, a 1,000-bed hospital, a bakery with five ovens making 18 tonnes of bread a day, a hairdressing salon, cinema, theaters and even a soccer pitch!
Educating young people about democracy
In 1945, 13,000 Hitler Youth teenagers arrived at the camp. “And then Kennedy said to himself: ‘What am I going to do with all these young people?’ First of all, they had to be educated in democracy, after years of being bottle-fed Nazism. Academically, there were courses given by Germans in French, English, mathematics and so on. These young people were also trained in trades, as the camp included carpenters, locksmiths, dressmakers… Kennedy’s wish was that these young prisoners should be trained so that, when they returned to Germany, they wouldn’t have wasted four or five years of their lives with no education, with nothing at all”.says Maya Duburch.
The museum will be located on a plot of land just opposite the Ravenoville entrance to the camp. “It’s an ecological project, which will respect local architecture, and will be very landscaped, with wooden exterior buildings”, emphasizes the general manager. It will cover some 1,500 m2 and offer a tour of around 850 m2 organized around three buildings, from captivity to liberation. On November 7, 2024, the jury selected TRACKS architects, accompanied by a team of scenographers, landscape architects, designers, graphic artists and engineers. The museum is intended to be a “coming out of war” museum, with echoes of current events (Ukraine, Middle East).
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By Pierre Coquelin
