Pierre Georges

Colonel Fabien is a redirect to this article. For the Paris Métro station, see Colonel Fabien (Paris Métro) .

Pierre Georges (born January 21, 1919 in Paris , † December 27, 1944 in Habsheim , Alsace ), also known as Pierre Fabien or Colonel Fabien , was a French communist and member of the Resistance .

Pre-war period

Georges was born the son of the baker Félix Georges and Blanche Gaillourdet. His mother died in 1928. He began to work at a young age and learned the bakery trade; later he worked as a rail layer and most recently as a locksmith at the French national railway company (SNCF). At the age of fourteen he joined the Parti communiste français and at the age of seventeen he was already involved in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 . Sent to the officers' school in Albacete , he left it in January 1938 with the rank of sub-lieutenant . Wounded three times, he returned to France with pneumonia in June 1938 , attended a metalworking school and was again a worker at the Bréguet aircraft factory .

Elected to the Central Committee of the Jeunesses communistes , the Communist Youth , he married Andrée Coudrier , with whom he had a daughter in 1940. In November or December 1939, when a communist activist interned , he succeeded after the signing of the Armistice of Compiègne in June 1940 to escape by train to Marseille , where he recorded with his party contact and under the pseudonym Fredo was active in the underground. Ordered by his party to lead the Communist Youth in Paris, he was tasked with building up a first armed group.

Resistance

In 1941 he became adjutant to Colonel Albert Ouzoulias , head of the youth battalion , and a member of the Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP). This resistance group had a triangular structure for security reasons: cells made up of three people were flexible and well protected against infiltration. It consisted mainly of trade unionists who carried out industrial sabotage, but also attacks on the railroad and on electricity and telephone cables . On August 21, 1941, he himself undertook the assassination attempt on the officer candidate of the German Navy Moser in the Paris Métro station Barbès Rochechouart , which is regarded as the first assassination attempt on the German occupation troops and as a beacon both for the Resistance, as for the German occupation troops and the Vichy regime worked. It resulted in severe reprisals .

On March 8, 1942, he left Franche-Comté and became one of the first maquis of the FTP under the name of Colonel Fabien (= Colonel Fabien). He became a specialist in blowing up railroads. On October 25, 1942, he was seriously wounded in the head. The French police arrested him on November 30, 1942 in Paris and handed him over to the Gestapo . Interrogated and tortured, he survived three months in Fresnes before he was transferred to the prison in Dijon , from where he finally managed to escape to Romainville Castle in May 1943 . He immediately took part in the organization of the Resistance in the Vosges , in the Haute-Saône department and in the northern center.

liberation

Georges took part in the liberation of Paris in August 1944. He was at the head of a group of the Forces Françaises de L'Intérieur , which carried out an attack on the Palais du Luxembourg and later supported by a tank as the vanguard of the French 2nd Panzer Division . Colonel Fabien gathered a group of 500 men, mainly from Suresnes , to continue the fight against the Wehrmacht together with the French and Allied forces as Brigade de Paris . This brigade was initially under the Patton Division. It soon became the 151st Infantry Regiment in Jean de Lattre de Tassigny's army , which was used in the fighting in eastern France and later in Germany.

Georges was killed on December 27, 1944 by the explosion of a mine in Habsheim near Mulhouse , which he was about to investigate. The exact circumstances of his death remained largely unknown. His liaison officer, Gilberte Lavaire , a lieutenant colonel, two captains and a lieutenant were killed with him.

His father and father-in-law were killed by the German occupation.

Posthumous honor

In the 19th arrondissement of Paris , a metro station and the former Place du Combat , where the Parti communiste français ( PCF for short ) has its seat , were renamed Place du Colonel-Fabien - so the place and the party have the same initials.

The writer Alphonse Boudard , who had served in the Fabiens regiment, dedicated a portrait to him in the novel Le Corbillard de Jules .

Web links

• Kurzbiografie (English)