French Resistance Leader Dies

[Sheilbh]

Interesting story:

Raymond Aubrac
Raymond Aubrac, who has died aged 97, was among the last surviving leaders of the French Resistance in the Second World War and central to the most celebrated, and controversial, incident in the history of the clandestine organisation.



On June 21 1943 Aubrac was one of eight senior résistants meeting in Caluire, a suburb of Lyons, to discuss what was to be done following the arrest of Charles Delestraint, Aubrac's commander in the so-called "Secret Army" – an affiliation of several Resistance groups including the Libération-Sud network, which Aubrac had helped found.

The task of unifying the notoriously disputatious Resistance factions had been allotted by Charles de Gaulle to Jean Moulin, one of the most charismatic and romantic figures of France's wartime history. Parachuted into France at the beginning of 1942, Moulin quickly became a top target for the Nazis, who realised that, under the code name "Max", he was engaged in forging a unified Resistance command for the whole of the country.

Moulin's efforts were brutally curtailed, however, when Gestapo officers, under the orders of Klaus Barbie, stormed the house in Caluire. The eight men were arrested, but one, René Hardy, was not put in handcuffs. As Moulin, Aubrac and the other detained men were led away, Hardy made a break for it. The incident seemed suspicious, and for the rest of his life Aubrac was convinced that Hardy had betrayed the meeting. "From all the Germans with their submachine guns, there were only a couple of scattered shots," he said, recalling Hardy's unmolested dash for freedom.

The effects of the raid on the Resistance were catastrophic, with the leadership of the Secret Army crippled at a single blow. The fate of those arrested would be even worse. Taken to Montluc prison in Lyons, the prisoners were beaten or tortured. The last time Aubrac saw Moulin was through the peephole in the door of his cell. "He was being carried down the stairs by two SS men," said Aubrac. "He was in a very bad state." So severe was Moulin's torture that he did not survive his journey to Paris.

All the prisoners were transferred to the capital – with the exception of Aubrac, who remained in Montluc, where over the next few months a young woman presented herself to his captors. The woman, named Lucie, claimed to be carrying Aubrac's child. This was true. But she also claimed that they were unmarried and that the child would therefore be born illegitimate unless the Germans would allow them to conduct a secret wedding.

This was a complete fabrication. But Lucie was used to telling lies, for she was already Aubrac's wife, and a fellow founder of Libération-Sud. Thus, as her husband whiled away the time before his inevitable execution, his captors and Lucie made arrangements for his "marriage".

On October 21 he was taken from his cell at Montluc and driven to the "ceremony" at police headquarters. On the way, the convoy was ambushed by a heavily-armed gang; three Germans were killed as Raymond Aubrac was freed. Soon afterwards the couple was evacuated by RAF Lysander to London, where Lucie Aubrac gave birth to their child at Queen Charlotte's hospital.

The romantic story of the Aubracs' heroism was to become one of the most glorious legends of the Resistance, and was twice turned into a feature film. But more than 40 years after the dramatic escape, Klaus Barbie came back to torment the couple once again.

Barbie had taken refuge after the war in South America but was tracked down and extradited to France in 1983. At his trial he was sentenced to life in jail from where, in 1990, shortly before his death, he issued his "testament".

In it Barbie said that it was not Hardy who had betrayed Moulin, but Raymond Aubrac. Aubrac, Barbie noted, had been arrested by the Gestapo in March 1943, but then released. It was while in detention, Barbie alleged, that Aubrac had been turned. It was not Hardy's dramatic escape that should seem suspicious, he insinuated, but that of Aubrac.

The claims of a bitter, dying Nazi might have been easy to dismiss. But the charges were then repeated in a book by an amateur historian, Gérard Chauvy. Outraged, the Aubracs submitted themselves to a "jury" of French historians led by Moulin's secretary and biographer, Daniel Cordier.

Their report made mixed reading. While the Aubracs were cleared of collaboration, their stories were revealed to be inconsistent and even contradictory. While the Aubracs simply blamed old age and failing memories for such conflicts, the story of their wartime exploits had been irrevocably tarnished.

Raymond Aubrac was born in Vésoul, in eastern France, on July 31 1914. His courage in the war was all the more extraordinary because he was Jewish, and his family name was Samuel. His parents, Albert and Hélène, were both to die at Auschwitz.

After school he studied Engineering in Paris, graduating in 1937. Active in Left-wing student politics, he met a fellow young radical, Lucie Bernard. In 1937 he spent a year in Boston, where he acquired impeccable, if accented, English. On his return he began seeing Lucie again, and they married in 1939.

He was doing his military service, posted on the Maginot Line, when the Nazis invaded. As French forces crumbled he headed south to the unoccupied zone, where his wife rejoined him. There they began their campaign of insurrection, with Raymond adopting the nom de guerre "Aubrac", which he would keep ever after.

"I never 'joined' the Resistance because at the beginning there was nothing to join," he said in an BBC interview earlier this year. "It started off with us buying boxes of chalk and writing graffiti on walls. Then we progressed to writing tracts and putting them through people's letterboxes.

"And then the third stage was our newspaper, Libération. It's when you have an underground press that you can first talk of an organisation – because you need a proper structure for it to work."

By 1942, when Moulin arrived, Libération-Sud was, with Combat and Franc-Tireur, one of three major clandestine networks operating in the south of France. These groups formed the basis of Moulin's Secret Army.

After their evacuation to London, the Aubracs did not return to France until the Liberation. Aubrac was appointed to an official position in Marseilles, where he oversaw the often brutal treatment meted out to suspected collaborators as well as, later, mine clearance and reconstruction.

A self-declared "fellow traveller", in the 1950s Aubrac founded a nebulous institute, known as the Study and Research Group for Modern Industry, to encourage trade with Communist countries in the Eastern Bloc. For a decade from 1964 he was head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, based in Rome.

In the early 1970s, as America sought to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War, Aubrac proved a useful go-between between the parties. Ho Chi Minh, it turned out, had stayed in Aubrac's house for several months in 1946 while negotiating independence from France – the pair were close friends.

Lucie Aubrac died in 2007. Raymond Aubrac is survived by their three children.
Raymond Aubrac, born July 31 1914, died April 10 2012

[CountDeMoney]

Fascinating life.

[DGuller]

  Nothing will stop Merkel now.