Edouard Troupenat
A resistance fighter deported to Buchenwald
Edouard Troupenat was born on 31 August 1924 in La Chapelle, a small village in the French Alps. He was one of three sons of the farmer Louis Henri Troupenat and his wife Agathe. After leaving school, Edourd Troupenat became a farm laborer.
In 1943, at the age of 18, he joined the Résistance and participated in underground military actions against the German occupiers. In May 1944, the German field gendarmerie arrested him. In mid-August, he was deported from the Compiègne camp near Paris to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. From there, the SS transferred him to the Holzen subcamp (southern Lower Saxony) in September 1944, where he was a forced laborer in an underground facility of the Volkswagen company.
In April 1945, he survived a death march from Holzen to the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, but died there on 5 May 1945, three weeks after it was liberated by British troops. He was 20 years old.
Personal effects file from the Buchenwald Concentration Camp for Edouard Troupenat, 22 August 1944.
The items indicated on the card were confiscated from Edouard Troupenat upon arrival at Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
(Arolsen Archives)
Buchenwald Concentration Camp work card for Edouard Troupenat, September 1944.
The entry for “KDO.” ((Arbeits)kommando, work detail) is “Hecht,” the codename for the subcamp and armament project near Holzen in the Weserbergland.
(Arolsen Archives)
Portrait of Edouard Troupenat, drawn by fellow prisoner Camille Delétang in the Holzen subcamp, 12 March 1945.
A few weeks after this portrait was drawn, Edouard Troupenat was dead. The drawing is the last sign of life for him.
(Mittelbau-Dora Memorial)
