Thefts in the Museums of the Landing: Vierville's testimony in 2009

A clipping from La Renaissance, annotated on September 25, 2009, relates the placing under formal investigation in Cherbourg of a couple suspected of jointly committing thefts in several museums related to the Landing, between Calvados and the Manche. Michel Brissard's D-Day Omaha Museum in Vierville-sur-Mer is among the establishments affected. The article describes an ongoing investigation and does not report a conviction.

Peggy Laronche, an employee of the museum, had discovered an open display case on a Monday morning: two screws had been removed and two objects were missing, a German cap and a dagger. Absent on the day of the theft, she explains that her colleague, yet a few steps from the display case and near the cash register, had not noticed anything. The sixty-fifth anniversary of the Landing then attracted many tourists. The museum presented radio and optical equipment, machines and around ten mannequins from both sides.

According to the employee, it was not the first theft of the season, but these facts remained unparalleled with the attack of the previous year: hooded men had then forced entry, held an employee captive and took away several objects, including the Enigma. Peggy recalls that a German cap had already been found, like the coding machine. This background had transformed the daily work: at the slightest noise, the staff went to check and sometimes followed the visitors, at the cost of a loss of confidence regretted by the employee. The display cases had been reinforced, a video surveillance device was mentioned and the team wondered whether photographs and backpacks should be banned.

The article questions the perpetrators of these thefts: amateur collectors or people stealing to order for others? Peggy believes that we must at least know the value of these objects. The newspaper recalls that Michel Brissard had been constituting his collection for about forty years and planned to expand the museum. Among the places mentioned in this series are Quinéville, Sainte-Marie-du-Mont and Sainte-Mère-Église. In Arromanches, Frédéric Sommier, director of the Landing Museum, thought that the suspects had probably passed without stealing anything; he considered theft difficult because all his objects were in display cases.

A box signed by Briac Trébert specifies that the fifty-two-year-old woman and the forty-eight-year-old man, from the North, had been reported to the places of memory after the disappearance of medals, uniforms and books from the Second World War. They had been arrested the previous weekend at the door of the Ouistreham museum; a German dagger was reportedly found in their car. They were reported to have admitted around twenty offences, for an estimated damage of four thousand euros, and had been placed under judicial supervision. The main body of the article is signed V. T.

Reconstructed or uncertain passages:
- The suspects are described at the stage of formal investigation and judicial supervision. No subsequent verdict accompanies this clipping.
- The possibility of thefts commissioned by others is a question raised by the article, not an established finding of the investigation.

Archive image: https://vierville.cordelle.eu/Photos2008/2009-25sept-VolMusee.jpg