Marie-Claude Vaillant Couturier

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Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier in Regards magazine 1946

Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier (born November 3, 1912 in Paris , † December 11, 1996 in Paris; born Marie-Claude Vogel ) was a member of the Resistance and became known to a wider audience through her testimony at the Nuremberg trials .

Life

Work as a photographer

Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier was born as the daughter of Lucien Vogel, the owner of the magazine Vu (in English : "Seen"), and the fashion photographer Cosette de Brunhoff, whose brother was the creator of " Babar the Elephant ".

After finishing school, she went to Germany from 1931 to early 1933 to learn the language and study art history; During this time of the Great Depression she witnessed the rise of the NSDAP . In 1932 she witnessed a speech by Adolf Hitler in the Berlin Sportpalast , where, in view of the fanatical audience, she feared that she would be "lynched at the slightest gesture of rejection".

Then Vaillant-Couturier chose the profession of photo reporter, which at the time was male dominated. She quickly received the nickname “the lady in Rolleiflex ”. In her role as a photographer, but also as a German studies graduate , she and colleagues toured the German Reich in 1933 , just under two months after Adolf Hitler's " seizure of power " . There she reported on the Oranienburg and Dachau concentration camps . In addition, she published in the magazine Regards (in English "observations") mainly about the international brigades that fought in the Spanish Civil War.

In 1934 Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier joined the French Communist Youth Movement, two years later the French Girls' Union. In 1934 she married Paul Vaillant-Couturier , the founder of a republican-minded veterans' association. In 1937 Paul mysteriously disappeared. She worked for L'Humanité magazine , of which her husband had been editor-in-chief . Her activity began as a member of the photo editorial team and she soon rose to its leadership. There she met her well-known colleagues Gabriel Péri and George Cogniot personally.

In the course of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact , the French communists abandoned the “fight against German fascism”, so that L'Humanité was also discontinued. Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier therefore decided to go underground .

Resistance and deportation

Vaillant-Couturier continued her journalistic activities in the Resistance and published secret reports directed against the occupiers during the German occupation of France after the Blitzkrieg-like invasion of the country, for example l'Université libre ("Free University") of November 1940 . Sang et Or ( "blood and gold"), created under the direction of Georges Politzer , analyzed the ideological premises of National socialism , which mainly Alfred Rosenberg declined. In addition, in collaboration with Pierre Villon , whom she married in 1949, she succeeded in creating an unofficial edition of L'Humanité .

Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier played a certain role in organizing the resistance to the German occupation by coordinating civil and military resistance. Her work in the Resistance was discovered, so that the French police arrested Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier along with many of her colleagues on February 9, 1942. Among them were Jacques Decour , Georges Politzer , Georges Solomon and Arthur Dallidet , all of whom were executed by German troops on Mont Valérien .

Vaillant-Couturier herself was interned in the Dépôt de la Préfecture on March 15 and secretly taken to the La Santé prison in Paris on March 20 , where she remained imprisoned until August 1942. The German administration, which took over from now on, moved Vaillant-Couturier twice, to Romainville and Royallieu near Compiègne , until they were finally deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on January 24, 1943 .

The deportation trip to which Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier was forced is well documented. “The journey of the 31,000” consisted of 230 people, all women, who were all members of the French resistance, communists or the wives of supporters of Charles de Gaulle . A drawing published in the magazine La Marseillaise after the Second World War , in which a carriage drove through the gate to the warehouse, resulted in several literary publications. Among the 49 survivors of this transport was Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, who was involved in a secret, international resistance body of the concentration camp. She made conspiratorial notes during her concentration camp detention, her detention number was 31,683.

After 18 months in Birkenau, during which she observed the mass murder of European Jews and Roma , she was transferred to Ravensbrück in August 1944 . Initially assigned to earthworks, she was deployed in the camp area due to her knowledge of German.

Nuremberg Trials

In 1946, Vaillant-Couturier became the first woman to testify two months after the start of the Nuremberg trial and impressed the judges and many of the trial participants. Then she walked slowly past the accused and looked each one in the eye.

Among other things, she testified during the trial:

“I was part of a transport (to Auschwitz) of 230 French women. Among us was Danielle Casanova , who died in Auschwitz, Mai Politzer , who died in Auschwitz ... only forty-nine came back to France ... During the great typhus epidemics in the winter of 1943 and 1944 there were 200 to 350 (deaths) a day, depending on the situation ... We got 200 grams of bread, depending on the case, three quarters or one half liter of carrot soup, a few grams of margarine and a slice of sausage in the evening. That every day. ... regardless of the work required of the prisoners ... I saw experiments in the police station ... I saw and knew several women who had been sterilized ... Jewish women. If they arrived pregnant, and if the pregnancy had lasted a few months, an artificial birth was initiated. When the pregnancy came to an end, the children were drowned in a bucket of water after their birth ... But one day an order came from Berlin ordering the murder of the Jewish children again. Thereupon the mothers and the children were called to the station; they got on trucks and were then taken to the gas chamber. ”On punishments:“ Especially in physical abuse. One of the most common punishments was 50 blows with a stick to the kidneys. These strokes of the cane were administered with the help of a machine ... "For selection:" Those who had been selected for the gas chambers, that is, the old people, children and mothers, were led into a red brick building ... on which the inscription "Bad" was written. There they were told to undress and given a towel before they were shown into the alleged shower room. Later, at the time of the great transports from Hungary, there was no time left for camouflage measures. They were pulled out roughly, I know about these details because I knew a little Jew from France who lived with her family on Republikplatz. "On methods:" There were eight cremation ovens in Auschwitz. But from 1944 these were no longer sufficient. The SS had the prisoners dig large pits in which they set fire to sticks that had been doused with gasoline ... One night we were woken up by terrible screams. The next day we learned from men who worked in the Sonderkommando, the gas command, that they had thrown living children into the stake the previous evening because there was no longer enough gas. "

Politician after 1945

Around 1946 Vaillant-Couturier became a member of the French Communist Party (PCF). In 1945 she was a member of the Provisional Consultative Assembly , an assembly founded in 1943 for resistance movements and political parties in France. She then belonged to the National Assembly from 1945 to 1958 and 1967 to 1973 . As an executive member, she was active in the National Association of Deported and Interned Patriots and Members of the Resistance (FNDIRP) since 1945 and became vice-president and co-chair in 1978.

In 1946 she became general secretary in the anti-fascist International Democratic Women's Federation ( Fédération démocratique internationale des femmes , IDFF). From 1979 she was Vice-President of the Union of French Women , later Femmes Solidaires (Women's Solidarity).

She was twice (1956-1958 and 1967-1968) Vice-Chairwoman of the National Assembly and was eventually elected Honorary Vice-President. In 1964, before the National Assembly, it defended the concept of borders for crimes against humanity and paved the way for France's 1968 ratification of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the statute of limitations for these crimes.

In 1987 she was a witness in the trial of the SS war criminal Klaus Barbie ("butcher of Lyon").

Honors

literature

  • Benoît Cazenave: Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier . In: Here was the whole of Europe . Brandenburg Memorials Foundation , Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2004. ISBN 3-936411-43-3 .
  • Dominique Durand: Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier. Une femme engagée, you PCF au procès de Nuremberg . Biography. Editions Balland 2012, ISBN 978-2-353151943 .
  • Tomas Fitzel: A witness in the Nuremberg trial . In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Hrsg.): National Socialism in front of a court. The allied trials of war criminals and soldiers 1943–1952. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13589-3 .

Movies

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tomas Fitzel: A witness in the Nuremberg trial . In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Hrsg.): National Socialism in front of a court. The allied trials of war criminals and soldiers 1943–1952. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1999, p. 63 f.
  2. ↑ emroll.fr ( Memento of September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Tomas Fitzel: A witness in the Nuremberg trial . In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Hrsg.): National Socialism in front of a court. The allied trials of war criminals and soldiers 1943–1952. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1999, p. 64
  4. ↑ Tomas Fitzel: Testify and translate . In: Berliner Zeitung , November 19, 2005.
  5. ↑ Nuremberg Trial, forty-fourth day. Monday, January 28, 1946
personal data
SURNAME Vaillant-Couturier, Marie-Claude
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vogel, Marie-Claude (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French journalist, member of the Resistance
DATE OF BIRTH November 3, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris , France
DATE OF DEATH December 11, 1996
Place of death Paris , France