Pierre Brossolette
Pierre Brossolette (born June 25, 1903 in Paris , † March 22, 1944 ibid) was a French politician and journalist and a leading member of the Resistance .
Life
youth
Pierre Brossolette, son of the Paris primary school inspector Léon Brossolette and Jeanne Vial, graduated from the elite university Ecole normal superieure in 1922 after finishing school and the preparatory class at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and received his diploma in history in 1925 . In 1926 he married Gilberte Bruel . He then did his military service in the 5th Infantry Regiment in Paris as a second lieutenant . In the radical tradition of his father, he joined the socialist party SFIO as early as 1929 .
Politician and soldier
As a militant socialist, he became Deputy Chief of the Cabinet of Colonial Minister François Piétri , where he dealt with communication and press issues for a few months in 1930. He ran for election to the National Assembly in the Aube department , but failed. In October, Léon Blum commissioned him to write the foreign policy column on the national radio station PTT. After criticizing the Munich Agreement in a live broadcast, he was dismissed by Édouard Daladier .
At the outbreak of the Second World War , he joined the French army and achieved the rank of captain when Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain signed the Compiègne armistice with the Third Reich .
Resistance
Brossolette rejected the armistice, organized the resistance groups Libération Nord and Organization civile et militaire (OCM) in the occupied northern zone and joined the Comité d'action socialiste , a resistance group founded by Daniel Mayer in March 1941.
When he was banned from teaching by the Vichy regime , as a legend he and his wife founded a bookstore at 89 rue de la Pompe in Paris, which served as a mailbox for members of the Resistance. Introduced by Agnès Humbert to the Resistance group Musée de l'Homme , he worked on the publication of the Resistance newspaper and eventually became its editor-in-chief. After the Musée de l'Homme group was broken up, Brossolette integrated into the Confrèrerie Notre Dame group of Gilbert Renault (also known by the name of Colonel Rémy ), where he soon became head of press and propaganda and wrote his articles with Pedro . In April 1942, as a representative of one of the Resistance groups, he met General Charles de Gaulle in London. There he began working with André Dewavrins military intelligence Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA) of the Free French , who worked with the SOE .
In January 1943, Brossolette jumped under the code name Philippe Bernier together with André Dewavrin (code name Colonel Passy ) and Edward Yeo-Thomas (code name le lapin blanc , dt. The white rabbit ) with the parachute over France. They had received the order Brumaire-Arquebuse from General Charles de Gaulle , after which they should achieve the unification of all Resistance groups active in France with Jean Moulin . Jean Moulin managed to get the eight most important Resistance groups, i.e. Jean-Pierre Lévys Franc-Tireur , Henri Frenays Combat , Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigeries Liberation Sud , Pierre Villons Front National , Pierre Brossolettes Comité d'Action Socialiste and Charles Delestraints Armée secrète formed the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR), the National Resistance Council.
On June 7, 1943, René Hardy , an important member of the Résistance-Fer , the resistance group of railway workers in the SNCF , was arrested, tortured by Klaus Barbie and the Gestapo , interrogated and then released. Whether he provided the Gestapo with information during the interrogation of Brossolette, Jean Moulin and Charles Delestraint (which he emphatically denied) or whether the Gestapo followed Hardy inconspicuously cannot be clearly determined. In any case, Delestraint was first arrested during a secret meeting with Hardy in Paris on June 9th. On June 21, 1943, Jean Moulin was arrested along with eight other high-ranking members of the Résistanc in Caluire-et-Cuire on the outskirts of Lyons in the practice of Doctor Frédéric Dugoujon .
This was a great loss for the Resistance, and the SOE sent Edward Yeo-Thomas to France to rescue the men. However, that failed, and Yeo-Thomas was arrested by Vichy police.
Arrest and death
Brossolette escaped arrest several times. During a second trip to England, his fishing vessel Jouet des flots capsized in the Bay of Audierne . Brossolette was able to take refuge with a local resident in Plogoff . The next day, February 3, 1944, he was arrested under the name Boutet during a routine check without his real identity being immediately recognized. The occupiers transported him to Paris on March 19, where he was severely tortured by the Gestapo at the Gestapo headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch. In order not to reveal the names of his comrades, on March 22, 1944, in a moment of inattention on the part of his guards, he jumped out of a window in the Gestapo building. He died of his serious injuries at around 10 p.m. in the Hôpital de la Pitié without having spoken. Two days later, his body was cremated and buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery.
Honor
On May 27, 2015, the remains of Brossolette, along with those of Germaine Tillion , Jean Zay and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, were transferred to the Panthéon . This is the highest posthumous honor in France, May 27th has been the Journée nationale de la Résistance since 2014 , a national day of remembrance.
Web links
- Literature by and about Pierre Brossolette in the catalog of the German National Library
- Biography (french)
- Short biography
Individual evidence
- ↑ Documents - Documents. Journal for the German-French dialogue. H. 2, Sommer / Éte 2014, ISSN 0012-5172 p. 109
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Brossolette, Pierre |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Pedro (pseudonym); Bernier, Philippe (alias); Boutet (alias) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French member of the Resistance, victim of National Socialism |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 25, 1903 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 22, 1944 |
| Place of death | Paris |