Present at the Saleich Christmas market, Arbasien Jacques Fontas presented his book on the maquis of Baderque, a hamlet in the commune of Herran; a book written collectively with members of the Mémoire de l'Arbas association.
This book traces the attack of the Das Reich division on August 11, 1944 against the Baderque maquis. On the morning of the 11th, a column of around 1,500 men, SS and Mongols, engaged in combat against the maquis. Significant losses followed: 52 killed and 62 wounded for the Germans, 5 killed (4 soldiers and one civilian) for the maquis. The inhabitants had taken refuge in their forest from where they could only observe the looting and burning of their homes.
“I consulted public but also private archives of families, resistance fighters, people who had correspondence, documents relating to this tragic period,” explains Jacques Fontas. “I collected information on the four resistance fighters who died as well as on the civilian, and I wrote the biography of these people. I also recounted the context of the time, the German occupation, the attack itself, who the soldiers were and what they did, the burning of Baderque with the pillaging”.
The author also speaks in the work of the dramatic consequences for the population with testimonies of resistance fighters written by themselves, unpublished documents, such as those of Antonin Gomez in Salies who was a resistance fighter of Spanish origin and whose Memoirs remained in the family.
Why was the maquis called Bidon V (five)? “They gave this name because it corresponds to a stage in a Saharan route between Oran and Niger in the 1920s. To cross a desert you need stages with fuel and water, and they called that of the “cans” there were 16 “cans” and the most important was Bidon 5. And one of the resistance fighters who founded this maquis knew Bidon V and when he arrived in these places at Baderque he said: “It's like in Bidon V”, it was very quiet, there was no radio, no electricity and this name stuck.
It was a maquis that lasted a very short time, from June to August 1944, it included around a hundred men. It was made up of several groups: Spaniards, anarchists, the Salies maquis with Doctor Linzau and the main node was the RAP, the oil of Saint-Marcet and Peyrouzet: “They were the ones who were at the “Originally, because they were diverting petroleum products for the Resistance, without the knowledge of the Germans. But they were burned and then they created this maquis to protect themselves.”
Related News :