RAYMOND AUBRAC:RAYMOND AUBRAC, who has died aged 97, was one of the great figures of the French resistance. He was the last survivor of the dramatic events of June 21st, 1943, when seven resisters, including De Gaulle's representative Jean Moulin, were arrested by the Germans in Caluire, a district of Lyon. Moulin died of torture soon afterwards, while Aubrac, after several months of imprisonment, escaped thanks to an audacious operation mounted by his wife.
Born at Vesoul, in the eastern region of Franche-Comte, Raymond Samuel (Aubrac was the resistance pseudonym which he continued to use after the war) was from a middle-class French-Jewish family. He trained as an engineer at Paris’s prestigious École des Ponts et Chaussées, at the same time discovering Marxism and rejecting the conservative opinions of his parental milieu. In December 1939 he married Lucie Bernard, who he first met as a student in Paris. From a modest rural background very different from his own, Bernard shared similar political convictions. Their destinies were linked for more than half a century.
Taken prisoner as an army engineering officer in June 1940, Aubrac escaped before being transferred to Germany. In the autumn of that year he and Bernard were founding members of Liberation-Sud, which was to become one of the three biggest resistance movements of the non-occupied zone. In July 1941 he helped produce the first issue of its underground newspaper, Libération. Aubrac’s organisational skills made him the obvious choice to oversee the setting up of the movement’s underground paramilitary branch in 1942.
On March 15th, 1943, Aubrac was arrested by the French police in a routine raid. He was operating with false identity papers under the name Francois Vallet. His captors had no idea who they had in fact apprehended, and he was released two months later.
Crucial talks took place to unify the military arms of the different resistance movements into a single secret army. Its designated commander, Gen Charles Delestraint, had been arrested by the Germans in Paris and the purpose of the fateful meeting at Caluire was to select a replacement.
Among those arrested was René Hardy, a member of Combat – a rival organisation to Liberation-Sud. He was suspected, but after the war acquitted, of betraying his comrades. Aubrac was arrested under the pseudonym Claude Ermelin. Klaus Barbie, his Gestapo interrogator, quickly worked out that “Ermelin” was the same person as the “Vallet” who had been arrested some months earlier. But Aubrac, who lost consciousness several times under the beatings administered to him, managed to keep his real identity secret.
While he was being transferred from a military hospital back to Montluc prison, Bernard carried out her bold rescue. It was now too dangerous for the Aubracs to continue with their resistance activities and they hid for several months in the countryside until they could be flown to London in February 1944. Meanwhile, his parents had been deported to Auschwitz, where they died.
In August 1944, De Gaulle appointed Aubrac to the post of commissaire de la république in Marseilles. The mission of these commissaires was to establish some form of provisional authority in recently liberated areas of France. Aubrac organised a purge of the police forces and requisitioned a number of local industries. This led to accusations that he was really working in the interests of the Communist Party at a time when many believed – wrongly – that it was bent on seizing power in France. Aubrac was sacked and recalled to Paris after only four months.
Between 1945 and 1948 he carried out important work for the ministry of reconstruction, including clearing French territory of the millions of unexploded mines that remained.
He left public administration and founded a company promoting civil engineering projects in 1948 which established close links with eastern Europe. This led to later allegations it was really a front to raise funds for the Communist Party. Whatever the truth, Aubrac was certainly very close to the party in this period. Another sign of this was the relationship he formed in 1946 with Vietnamese independence leader Ho Chi Minh, who was in Paris attempting unsuccessfully to negotiate independence for Indochina. Ho lodged with the Aubracs for several weeks and even became godfather to their third child.
Thanks to this contact, Aubrac was to be used in the late 1960s by Henry Kissinger as a secret intermediary between the Americans and the North Vietnamese at the height of the Vietnam war. By this time Aubrac had distanced himself from communism and was interested in the developing nations. He worked as a technical adviser to the government of newly independent Morocco from 1958 to 1963, and then for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
After Aubrac’s retirement in 1976 the events of the second World War came back to haunt him. Extradited for trial in France in 1983, Barbie threatened to reveal proofs that it was actually the Aubracs who betrayed Moulin in 1943. These proofs were never produced, but they were followed by similar insinuations by a French journalist in 1997.
The Aubracs proposed that a group of leading historians question them about their past to give them a chance to clear their names. The idea rebounded terribly. Although the historians in no way accredited the slanders, they identified minor inconsistencies in the memoirs that Bernard and Raymond had written. The couple found themselves almost on trial: the fragility of memory came up against the rigour of historical method.
Despite the shadow cast by this affair, and then the death of his indefatigable companion Bernard in 2004, Aubrac remained combative until the very end. He saw it as his duty to keep ideals of the resistance alive for future generations. Although increasingly frail, he would refuse no invitation to offer his testimony. Londoners were able to witness his passion when he spoke at the city’s Institut Francais in June 2010.
Only a week before his death, he signed an article in Le Monde invoking the left-wing spirit of the resistance against the economic policies of President Sarkozy. Not everyone would share Aubrac’s political positions, but he deserves to be remembered as one of that small band of men and women who saved the honour of France between 1940 and 1944. His son and two daughters survive him.
Raymond Aubrac: born July 13th, 1914; died April 10th, 2012