Laure Diebold

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Laure Diebold

Laure Diebold , sometimes also written Laure Diebolt , (born January 10, 1915 in Erstein , Reichsland Alsace-Lorraine , † October 17, 1965 in Lyon ) was an important, distinguished member of the Resistance during the Second World War . She was temporarily Jean Moulin's private secretary before she was arrested in 1943 and imprisoned in various concentration camps until 1945 . She was one of six female résistantes who were awarded the Ordre de la Liberation .

Life

Laure Diebold was born as Laure Mutschler in a French patriotic family when Alsace-Lorraine was part of the German Empire . From 1922 she lived with her parents in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines .

After completing her training, she became a bilingual (French-German) steno secretary in the Baumgartner Établissements from 1934, initially in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines and later in a plastic goods factory. During the Seat War , she worked as a secretary to an industrialist in Saint-Dié .

From 1940, the beginning of the German annexation of Alsace, she joined the resistance network "AV" ( Armée des Volontaires ; German: Volunteer Army) of Charles Bareiss (1904–1961). Under the code name “Mado” , she also acted as a liaison agent in another resistance network called “Mithridate” , which reached as far as Alfred Rebert in Alsace. After the armistice in Compiègne , she stayed in Alsace and set up an organization to help people escape. She took in French people who had broken out of war captivity more often , both in her parents' house at 4 rue Jean Jaurès and in the house of her future husband, Eugène Diepold, who was the mayor's secretary. When the Germans began looking for her shortly before Christmas 1941, she fled from Alsace to Lyon , hidden in a locomotive , in the unoccupied southern zone of France.

There she worked as a secretary for a service for refugees from Alsace-Lorraine. From May 1942, she began collecting information for the Mithridate Resistance network before encrypting it and sending it to London .

On January 31, 1942, she married Eugène Diebold, who had also fled to Lyon. Both were arrested in July 1942 but released for lack of evidence. She went underground in Aix-les-Bains under the code name "Mona" .

In September 1942 she worked for the regional delegation as a liaison and escape aid agent. From the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA) she was led under the code name "Mado" in the rank of lieutenant of France libre as a P2 agent.

In August 1942, Laure Diepold also met Daniel Cordier and Hugues Limonti in the service for refugees from Alsace-Lorraine . Cordier was already secretary to Jean Moulin . Through him, Laure Diepold became Jean Moulins' private secretary, with whom she developed a variety of activities. Moulin wanted to send the trio to Paris as early as March 1943 .

After Moulin's arrest in June 1943, Laure Diepold and her husband moved to Paris, where they worked with Claude Bouchinet-Serreulles and Georges Bidault . On November 23, 1943, the couple were arrested and transferred to the infamous Fresnes prison on the outskirts of Paris.

There she escaped torture because she managed to convince the Gestapo that she was just a secretary and not an important figure in a Resistance network. Initially interned in Saarbrücken and Strasbourg , she was deported to the Vorbruck-Schirmeck security camp in January 1944 , from where she was quickly transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp . There she saw her husband again. From there she was taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp , on to Altenburg , in order to be deported from there to a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Meuselwitz . On October 6, 1944, she was transferred to another subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp in Taucha . Seriously ill and close to death, she was rescued by a Czech laboratory doctor in the camp, who curled up his files and thus saved her from certain death.

In April 1945 she was liberated by the Americans and returned to Paris, very exhausted, where she arrived on May 16, 1945 and found her husband at the Hôtel Lutetia , who was also able to return from the deportation .

Until 1957 she worked in Paris for DGER , the intelligence service of the Fourth Republic . She then moved to a company in Lyon, where she worked as a secretary and librarian. Laure Diebold died in Lyon on October 17, 1965. Following her last wish, she was buried at the place of her childhood, Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines in Alsace.

Today a street in Lyon and a square in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines are named after Laure Diebold.

honors and awards

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Musée de la Résistance en ligne: Rue Paul Winter Mulhouse (Haut Rhin) . Retrieved December 28, 2018

See also

Women in the Resistance

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Diebold, Laure
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Diebolt, Laure; Mutschler, Laure (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French intelligence officer, member of the Resistance
DATE OF BIRTH January 10, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Erstein , Bas-Rhin department
DATE OF DEATH October 17, 1965
Place of death Lyon