Pierre Jeanson
French résistant who survived the Dora labour camp and went on to be a successful industrialist
PIERRE JEANSON, who has died aged 94, was a French résistant who survived the infamous Dora labour camp in Germany, where he was forced to work on the assembly of V2 rockets. Having first been sent to the Vichy regime’s chantiers de jeunesse (paramilitary youth camps) in the Jura region, the young Jeanson became a member of the Organisation de résistance de l’armée (ORA), a network established by former officers of the disbanded French army following German occupation of the southern “free zone” in November 1942.
ORA’S aim was to establish clandestine military structures in advance of liberation, operating separately from partisan Resistance groups. In due course Jeanson realised he was in danger of conscription for work in German factories.
He escaped southwards, hoping to reach England via Spain, with the aim of joining the RAF, but was arrested in Toulouse, having been sold to the Germans by a traitor in the Resistance group that was to guide him over the Pyrenees.
Under interrogation he refused to identify comrades-in-arms, and in May 1944 he was deported by train to Buchenwald in Germany – one of more than 600 ORA members to be sent to the concentration camps.
Organisation of the thousands of French prisoners in Buchenwald was delegated by SS commanders to a committee led by the communist Marcel Paul, later a minister in De Gaulle’s interim government. Jeanson blamed Paul for listing him, within 10 days of arrival, for transfer to the Mittelbau-dora camp near Nordhausen in Thuringia, which had the reputation of a place from which no one returned; Jeanson’s industrialist uncle Marcel Michelin, also in Buchenwald, was sent by the committee to his death at another labour camp, Ohrdruf.
Dora was one of the Nazis’ darkest secrets. Manufacture of V2s had been moved there after the original site at Peenemunde in the Baltic was bombed by the RAF in August 1943. As the lethal projectiles rained down on London and other Allied targets, Heinrich Himmler ordered that no one should leave the camp alive lest its location be discovered.
Conditions were inhuman; of 60,000 men who slaved in dank tunnels dug deep into a mountainside, at least 20,000 died.
It was a soul-searing experience for Jeanson, who three times believed he was being marched off to be shot. He was allocated to a kommando (work unit) made up chiefly of Russian Pows, labouring 12 hours a day unloading trains and on assembly lines.
One who befriended him, called Ivan, took to sabotaging rockets by urinating into their gyroscopes, causing some to malfunction in flight and crash into the North Sea. Once discovered, Ivan was hanged in front of the assembled camp – winking at Jeanson as the noose was placed round his neck.
Jeanson also witnessed the execution of a priest prisoner who refused to work on Sundays. Given a count of three with a gun to his head, the priest would not relent – but the bullet failed to kill him and some months later he was ordered back to work.
When Sunday came the same officer raised his pistol: “Shall I count to three?”
“Count,” said the priest, and died without another word.
Production of V2s continued until the end of March 1945, when the SS abandoned Dora and forced its survivors to march to the Ravensbruck and Bergen-belsen camps, many dying en route. Jeanson believed himself the last survivor of his 50-man kommando.
Tall and powerfully built when he was fit, he returned home weighing seven stone – and for the only time in his life, was brought breakfast in bed by his mother.
One of nine siblings, Pierre Jeanson was born in Paris on July 6 1923 into two industrial dynasties. His father’s family were in textiles and electrical components; his maternal grandfather was André Michelin, co-founder of the tyre company.
Much of his childhood was spent on family estates in the Auvergne and at Marquenterre on the Somme estuary, now a national nature reserve.
Immediately after the war, Jeanson recuperated by working as a cowboy on a Montana ranch. He returned to join his brothers in the family business, to which he brought a distinctive management philosophy that valued people above systems and won loyalty in an era of widespread industrial unrest; in May 1968, the Jeansons’ Paris factories were among the few not to be halted by strikes.
A man of great energy and spirit, Jeanson was also a pilot, yachtsman, rally driver and skilled mechanic, and in later life a keen photographer and music lover. In the early 1950s, his modest Citroën 15CV gave Stirling Moss’s winning Sunbeam-talbot a run for its money in the Coupe des Alpes.
Contemptuous of modern French politics as “la démocratie des imbeciles”, Jeanson retained an affectionate regard for the British and their wartime spirit – as well as for their Scotch whisky, which he referred to as “French tea”.
When one of his English grandsons was about to pass out of Sandhurst, to be commissioned into a Guards regiment, the proud grandfather inquired whether it would be appropriate to wear decorations for the parade. “Would that be the Legion d’honneur?” he was asked. “Yes,” came the reply, “and the Croix de Resistance, Croix de Guerre and Croix Militaire.”
Pierre Jeanson married, in 1947, Nelly Knocker, daughter of the French yacht designer Jean Knocker; she survives him with their three sons and a daughter.