Raymond Aubrac - Second World War

Second World War

Samuel was serving in the French army as an engineering officer on the Maginot Line at the outbreak of the Second World War. He met Lucie Bernard again in Strasbourg. They married on 14 December 1939 in Dijon. Samuel was taken prisoner by the German army on 21 June 1940, but he managed to escape from the internment camp with the aide of his wife. He and Lucie joined the French Resistance in October 1940. He also became an attaché to the staff of the French Army. He adopted several noms de guerre, among them "Vallet, Ermelin, Balmont and Aubrac". Their Resistance activities started off with buying boxes of chalk and writing graffiti on walls. They then moved on to writing tracts and putting them into people's letterboxes. In the autumn of 1940, they also formed one of the first underground Resistance groups - Libération-Sud - in Lyon. In May 1941, after the birth of their first child Jean-Pierre, they helped Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie to set up an underground newspaper called Libération to promote the French Resistance. Raymond Aubrac was arrested by the Milice on March 15, 1943 in a routine raid. He was operating with fake identity papers under the pseudonym François Vallet. His captors had no idea whom they had captured. He was eventually released two months later.

On June 21, 1943, Aubrac was one of eight senior Resistance leaders, including Jean Moulin, secretly meeting in a doctor's surgery in the Lyon suburb of Caluire when Gestapo officers, under the orders of Klaus Barbie, stormed the place and arrested all the eight leaders. The Caluire meeting was held to select a replacement for Charles Delestraint as the commander of the Armée secrète. Delestraint had been arrested twelve days earlier by the Gestapo in Paris on 9 June. Aubrac was arrested under the pseudonym Claude Ermelin. Taken to Montluc prison in Lyon, the eight leaders were interrogated and tortured under the direction of Barbie. Aubrac was sentenced to death by a Paris court, but the execution was not quickly carried out because the authorities still hoped to obtain intelligence from him. Lucie Aubrac helped to organise his escape from the prison. Lucie, who was then pregnant with her second child, met Barbie and claimed to be carrying Raymond’s child. She also lied that they were unmarried and that the child would therefore be born illegitimate unless the Gestapo would permit them to conduct a secret wedding. She mentioned a specific provision under French law called "marriage in extremis" - a person condemned to death may marry civilly before execution - applied to Raymond Aubrac. Barbie refused, but she managed to later persuade another Gestapo officer (holding the rank of lieutenant) after bribing him with a silk scarf and champagne, to grant them the permit to go ahead with the "wedding". However, Barbie allowed her to meet face to face with her imprisoned husband. During the meeting, she told her husband of the Resistance's plan to attack the German truck that was to transfer him back to prison from the scene of the "wedding ceremony". On October 21, 1943 Aubrac was taken from his prison cell at Montluc and driven to the “wedding ceremony” at the Gestapo headquarters. Right after the "wedding ceremony", Aubrac and thirteen other captured Resistance members were transported to the prison in a truck. En route, the truck was ambushed by a gang of Resistance fighters in four cars, led by the six-month pregnant Lucie Aubrac. Five Germans guards and the truck driver were killed and all the captured Resistance members, including Aubrac, were freed. It was now too dangerous for the Aubracs to carry on with their resistance activities, and they hid for several months in the French countryside. Hunted by the Gestapo, the couple was evacuated by the Royal Air Force to London in February 1944. A few days later, their daughter, Catherine, the second of their three children, was born. They later joined Charles de Gaulle's government in exile.

The Aubracs' wartime exploits made interesting movie material. Two French films, Claude Berri’s Lucie Aubrac (1997) and Boulevard des hirondelles (1992), have immortalized the Aubracs in the nation's collective memory.

Raymond Aubrac's parents, whom he had tried unsuccessfully to convince to leave for Switzerland, were arrested in France, deported to Auschwitz Concentration Camp by convoy No. 66 on 20 January 1944 and died there.

In August 1944, Charles de Gaulle appointed Aubrac to the post of commissaire de la république in Marseille. The mission of these commissaires was to establish some form of provisional authority in the areas of France just liberated from the Germans. Aubrac organised the purge of the police forces and oversaw the often brutal treatment meted out to suspected collaborators with the Nazis. He requisitioned a number of local industries, leading to allegations that he was really working in the interests of the Communists. Aubrac was dismissed from his post and recalled to Paris after only four months.