We went to the Citadelle this weekend and they had a special exhibit in their Museum of French Deportation and Resistance on a woman named Germaine Tillion. Let me tell you, Germaine Tillion was a total bad-ass and a new heroine of mine.
Germaine Tillion was a social anthropologist whose heart lied in ethnology. She obtained degrees from 3 highly prestigious schools; the École pratique des hautes études, the École du Louvre, and the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales. For four years between 1934 to 1940 (she returned home for short stints in between) she did fieldwork in Algeria studying the Berber and Chaoui people to prepare for her doctorate in anthropology. Her work, although not seen again until 1999, remains important to this day.
Why wasn't it discovered until 1999? Because in 1940, while Germaine was preparing to return home to France, France was defeated by Germany. She stashed her notes and pictures away, not knowing if they would ever be found again, and immediately plunged into the aid of the Resistance. She started by giving her family's papers to a Jewish family. She quickly became one of the leading commanders of the Musée de l'Homme, a French Resistance network in Paris. She helped Jewish families and prisoners escape and organized intelligence for the allied forces. She had a trunk (like picture the largest size carry-on you can take onto a plane) full of fake official stamps to forge any type of document needed to get a family into safety.
Betrayed by a priest who had joined her resistance and gained her trust, Germaine was arrested in August of 1942 and interrogated endlessly. In October of 1943 she was sent to Ravensbrück, a woman's concentration camp near Berlin reserved mainly for political imprisonments (rather than religious, social, or racial) and to conduct pseudo-scientific experiments. Her mother, Émilie, was also imprisoned and sent there due to her efforts in the Resistance (bad-assery must run in the family). The conditions were harsh. The SS officers, all women, were known for being particularly inhumane and sadistic. Labor included strenuous outdoor work, building V-2 rocket parts, textile production, and electrical component production.
While in the camp, Tillion's resistance efforts did not cease. She aided in secret educational programs, wrote an operetta describing camp life called Le Verfügbar aux Enfers (The Disposables of Hell), kept precise ethnographic analysis of the camp, and wrote a recipe book that was actually a cryptogram listing all the officers of the camp. A lesser form of resistance also included her textile labor; while making socks for the German soldiers, she and other laborers made the heels and toes of the socks thinner in hopes that they would wear out faster and give the soldiers sore and blistered feet.
In 1945, Germaine Tillion escaped Ravensbrück, just months after her mother's execution, thanks to a rescue operation from the Swedish Red Cross. Her accounts led to the trial and execution of the priest, Robert Alesch, who betrayed her and over 80 other Resistance members. Robert Alesch was found in Brussels, enjoying the fat stacks of cash the Germans had paid him. They also disproved the previous beliefs that there were no gas chambers in the Western camps and gave insightful in-depth analysis of the escalation of executions, the automated nature of the Nazis, the profits of slave-labor, and the operation and execution of increasingly bizarre and inhumane Nazi mandates.
After the war, Tillion published Ravensbruck, detailing not only her personal experiences but also her post-war research into the functioning of the camps, movements of prisoners, administrative operations and covert and overt crimes committed by the SS. She worked on the history of the Second World War, the war crimes of the Nazis and the Soviet Gulags from 1945-1954 and started an education program for French prisoners.
Outside of her WWII efforts, she also undertook 20 scientific missions to North Africa and the Middle East, and returned to Algeria to observe and analyze during the Algerian War of Independence. She believed the principal cause to be the pauperization of the public and launched "Social Centers" to make higher education and vocational skills available to rural Algeria.
In her lifetime she also spoke out about the French use of torture in Algeria, the emancipation of women in the Mediterranean, and torture in Iraq. She published 9 works on WWII, Algeria, and the Mediterranean. She remained vocal until her death in 2008, one month before her 101st birthday.
She has received 8 honors in her lifetime including the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur - the Legion of Honor and the highest decoration in France. Of the almost 100,000 orders awarded since 1802, only 5 were awarded to women. She is interred in the Panthéon, although only symbolically as this was announced 6 years posthumous and her family did not wish for her body to be uncovered. Interment in the Panthéon is severely restrictive and considered only for national heroes of France. There are 82 interred or commemorated people in the Panthéon, of which only 4 are women. Sophie Berthelot was the first woman interred. She was interred at the request of her husband, chemist Marcellin Berthelot, who was interred but wished to have his wife buried with him. The second woman, and first of her own merits, was Marie Curie. Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, another heroine of the French Resistance, were interred posthumously in 2014.
Germaine Tillion was a social anthropologist whose heart lied in ethnology. She obtained degrees from 3 highly prestigious schools; the École pratique des hautes études, the École du Louvre, and the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales. For four years between 1934 to 1940 (she returned home for short stints in between) she did fieldwork in Algeria studying the Berber and Chaoui people to prepare for her doctorate in anthropology. Her work, although not seen again until 1999, remains important to this day.
Why wasn't it discovered until 1999? Because in 1940, while Germaine was preparing to return home to France, France was defeated by Germany. She stashed her notes and pictures away, not knowing if they would ever be found again, and immediately plunged into the aid of the Resistance. She started by giving her family's papers to a Jewish family. She quickly became one of the leading commanders of the Musée de l'Homme, a French Resistance network in Paris. She helped Jewish families and prisoners escape and organized intelligence for the allied forces. She had a trunk (like picture the largest size carry-on you can take onto a plane) full of fake official stamps to forge any type of document needed to get a family into safety.
Betrayed by a priest who had joined her resistance and gained her trust, Germaine was arrested in August of 1942 and interrogated endlessly. In October of 1943 she was sent to Ravensbrück, a woman's concentration camp near Berlin reserved mainly for political imprisonments (rather than religious, social, or racial) and to conduct pseudo-scientific experiments. Her mother, Émilie, was also imprisoned and sent there due to her efforts in the Resistance (bad-assery must run in the family). The conditions were harsh. The SS officers, all women, were known for being particularly inhumane and sadistic. Labor included strenuous outdoor work, building V-2 rocket parts, textile production, and electrical component production.
While in the camp, Tillion's resistance efforts did not cease. She aided in secret educational programs, wrote an operetta describing camp life called Le Verfügbar aux Enfers (The Disposables of Hell), kept precise ethnographic analysis of the camp, and wrote a recipe book that was actually a cryptogram listing all the officers of the camp. A lesser form of resistance also included her textile labor; while making socks for the German soldiers, she and other laborers made the heels and toes of the socks thinner in hopes that they would wear out faster and give the soldiers sore and blistered feet.
In 1945, Germaine Tillion escaped Ravensbrück, just months after her mother's execution, thanks to a rescue operation from the Swedish Red Cross. Her accounts led to the trial and execution of the priest, Robert Alesch, who betrayed her and over 80 other Resistance members. Robert Alesch was found in Brussels, enjoying the fat stacks of cash the Germans had paid him. They also disproved the previous beliefs that there were no gas chambers in the Western camps and gave insightful in-depth analysis of the escalation of executions, the automated nature of the Nazis, the profits of slave-labor, and the operation and execution of increasingly bizarre and inhumane Nazi mandates.
After the war, Tillion published Ravensbruck, detailing not only her personal experiences but also her post-war research into the functioning of the camps, movements of prisoners, administrative operations and covert and overt crimes committed by the SS. She worked on the history of the Second World War, the war crimes of the Nazis and the Soviet Gulags from 1945-1954 and started an education program for French prisoners.
Outside of her WWII efforts, she also undertook 20 scientific missions to North Africa and the Middle East, and returned to Algeria to observe and analyze during the Algerian War of Independence. She believed the principal cause to be the pauperization of the public and launched "Social Centers" to make higher education and vocational skills available to rural Algeria.
In her lifetime she also spoke out about the French use of torture in Algeria, the emancipation of women in the Mediterranean, and torture in Iraq. She published 9 works on WWII, Algeria, and the Mediterranean. She remained vocal until her death in 2008, one month before her 101st birthday.
She has received 8 honors in her lifetime including the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur - the Legion of Honor and the highest decoration in France. Of the almost 100,000 orders awarded since 1802, only 5 were awarded to women. She is interred in the Panthéon, although only symbolically as this was announced 6 years posthumous and her family did not wish for her body to be uncovered. Interment in the Panthéon is severely restrictive and considered only for national heroes of France. There are 82 interred or commemorated people in the Panthéon, of which only 4 are women. Sophie Berthelot was the first woman interred. She was interred at the request of her husband, chemist Marcellin Berthelot, who was interred but wished to have his wife buried with him. The second woman, and first of her own merits, was Marie Curie. Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, another heroine of the French Resistance, were interred posthumously in 2014.