Jules Jaspar

Jules Jaspar

Jules Jaspar (born March 1, 1878 in Schaerbeek / Schaarbeek , † October 15, 1963 in Soudorgues , Languedoc-Roussillon region / France) was a Belgian consul and director of The Foreign Excellent Trench-Coat .

Life

Jaspar came from an old Belgian patrician family . His brother Henri Jaspar was Prime Minister of Belgium in the 1930s .

Jaspar worked for the Belgian Foreign Ministry for a long time and represented his country as consul in Indochina and later in Scandinavia .

Through his family's holdings in import and export companies and his commercial activities, he met the businessman and Comintern functionary Leon Großvogel , who then brought him to the trading company founded with Leopold Trepper in November 1938 , where Jaspar became commercial director. In the autumn of 1941 he and Großvogel became head of the branch in Marseille at the Simex trading company, which was also initiated by Trepper . Jaspar made numerous connections with the French collaboration government in Vichy , which he used for his own activities for the benefit of the Resistance ; but also to help resistance fighters and other people threatened by Nazi persecution to escape. Together with a Belgian senator, he organized escape routes via Algeria and Portugal.

Claire Legrand

On November 30, 1942, he and his partner Claire Legrand were arrested in Marseille by a special unit of the Gestapo . In a " night and fog " campaign, he was deported to Mauthausen concentration camp . After his liberation on May 5, 1945, he was recognized as a political prisoner on April 2, 1948 and as a civilian resistance fighter on March 7, 1957.

Claire Legrand was first deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp and then to Auschwitz in January 1944, where she was murdered in the gas chamber in November 1944.

literature

• Leopold Trepper : The truth. Autobiography; dtv: Munich 1978 ISBN 3-423-01387-7
• Gilles Perrault : In the footsteps of the Red Chapel ; Europaverlag, Vienna / Munich 1994, ISBN 3-203-51232-7