André Abel Coulaud was born in Paris on July 10, 1946, the son of Marcel Coulaud and his wife Helene, née Perot. He grew up at Rue Lallier 9 and became a chef by profession. After the German Wehrmacht invaded France, André was deported to Germany to perform labor. Starting in December 1942 he was a department chef for one month in the Gaststätten- und Beherbergungsgewerbe (catering and hotel industry) in Kempten. From 1943 to November 1944 he had to work in the Sonnenhof, Wolf and Continental hotels in Munich. The Gestapo detained him in the Dachau concentration camp from September 20 to October 25, 1944 as a “preventive custody inmate.” The Dachau SS erroneously registered him as René Coulaud.
Starting in late 1944, after his release from Dachau, André was lodged in the Gartenheim guesthouse in the rear building of Ohmstrasse 1. He presumably worked there as a chef. A large number of foreign forced laborers lived in the guesthouse, among them the Frenchwoman Renée Bellard. She gave birth to a daughter on November 3, 1944; the father was André. On February 12, 1945, some three months after the birth of his child, André had a fierce argument with a security policeman. The reason for the conflict has never been established. André may have been involved in an act of resistance against the Nazis or spoken out in defense of his partner Renée Bellard, who had not come to work and was therefore under threat of arrest by the Gestapo. At around 1:30 p.m., a policeman fired two shots at André. The twenty-eight-year-old died of internal bleeding. André Coulaud was laid to rest at the Perlacher Forst cemetery in Munich on February 14, 1945. His body was later taken to France. His daughter Liliane is still alive today. She did not learn her father’s name or story until she was thirty-three years old.(Text Ludwig Lohr,Editor C. Fritsche, Translation Judith Rosenthal )
