The liberation of Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen

The 80th anniversary of the liberation by the Red Army of the iconic concentration camps of Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin, was celebrated with fervour and dignity on 4 May by a thousand people from all over the world. A dozen survivors of the hell of National Socialism were there to bear witness, probably for the last time. The largest number of deportees to Ravensbrück came from Eastern Europe, more than a third from Poland, countries which, according to Nazi racial ideology, belonged to the category of ‘Slavic subhumans!’ While the Ravensbrück camp was immediately converted into barracks, Sachsenhausen, like Buchenwald, became one of ten ‘special camps’ set up in May 1945[01] in the Soviet occupation zone in Germany (SBZ). Officially, this was to ‘clean up the rear of the Red Army’s fighting troops of enemy elements’, but in fact it was to deport, without trial, any opponents considered potential enemies.[02] In these Spezlag camps, prisoners were slaves cut off from the world. In these ‘silence camps’ (Schweigelager), more than 1,100,000 people died and were buried in mass graves or cremated before the USSR transferred these camps to the GDR after its creation on 7 October 1949. Some, such as the concentration camp in Bautzen, would become, until the fall of the Wall, ‘the prison annex of the STASI’ (‘Stasi-Knast’).

by Joël-François Dumont — Berlin, 5 May 2025 —

‘You had to choose between war and dishonour; you chose dishonour and you will have war.’

(Winston Churchill addressing the House of Lords, referring to Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the man who advocated appeasement, returning from Germany after signing the Munich Agreement in 1938).

Introduction

How can we not begin by paying tribute to the considerable work done by the Germans to document the Nazi concentration camp system?

The same is true of the dictatorship of the unified socialist party (SED) in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) after the fall of the Wall: the impressive list of memorial sites and other specialised museums is proof of this, if proof were needed.

In both cases, the authorities in federal Germany have worked to ‘keep the memory of the Holocaust alive’.

The model of this ‘German culture of remembrance’ could usefully inspire other countries so that ‘the commemoration of the victims of wars, totalitarian regimes and ideological crimes of the 20th century plays a central role’.[03]

What can we expect from our military leaders and our governments?

From both, undoubtedly, lucidity and courage: in combat for some, political courage for others, if necessary.

We have a duty to expect two things from the former: that they have an army that is equipped and ready to play its role in defending the nation if it comes under attack, and that they have a high-quality military intelligence apparatus to inform the government in a timely manner about the nature and imminence of potential threats to our collective security.

From the latter, we expect them to take all necessary measures to safeguard the higher interests of the country and protect its population.

What happened? Who was at fault for France’s failure, in 1936, to finally put a decisive stop to Germany’s steady military build-up after Hitler decided, in violation of the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno agreements, to remilitarise the Rhineland?

The subject is not taboo, the question remains and the answers are vague…

It is now established that in 1930, French intelligence sounded the alarm. Our military leaders faithfully and fully informed the government of the situation and the growing dangers posed by Germany’s military build-up, convinced as they were that rearmament was continuing to accelerate, slyly but methodically, which could only lead to war in the long run.

The Treaty of Rapallo should have made us cautious. Signed on 16 April 1922 by Weimar Germany and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, it provided, among other things, that Germany and the Russian SFSR would renounce the war reparations they owed each other and decide to re-establish diplomatic and commercial relations by establishing most-favoured-nation status. Above all, it established secret military cooperation that would last until 1933, with secret German training camps in the USSR, including a combat gas school in Shikhany, an aviation school near Lipetsk and a tank research and training centre in Kazan. This is how Germany was able to secretly rearm and train. This agreement was a serious breach of the Treaty of Versailles.

While the military took responsibility in 1930, politicians made a series of mistakes. Tragically, this happened after the death of national leaders such as Raymond Poincaré and the withdrawal from political life of Aristide Briand, who embodied both stability and continuity of the state in dark times. France was then hit hard by the economic crisis of 1929. Nature abhors a vacuum, and political excess took hold.

Between May 1929 and May 1932, eight governments came and went. On 30 June 1930, on the military front, the decision was taken to repatriate French occupation forces from the Rhineland, even though they had been stationed there in 1919 for a period of 15 years! On 4 December 1930, economic priority was given to the implementation of deflationary policies that would delay the end of the crisis. As a result, between 1930 and 1936, nothing was done to avert the threat. France and Great Britain, overcome by a blissful pacifism, were content to remain guilty by inaction. Was it not urgent to wait?

Meanwhile, Hitler was elected in 1933 and, in less than three years, closed his borders, muzzled the press and put members of the opposition in concentration camps ‘as a preventive measure’ after transforming the Reich’s economy into a war economy.

In France, a collection of ‘armchair politicians’ governed the country. Some happily advocated a Franco-Soviet rapprochement to take Mr. Hitler in a pincer movement, as if the little father of the peoples were a reliable ally… Never mind that he had deported hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars, organised famine in Ukraine and had millions ofmen and women in forced labour camps in the Gulag archipelago, which was so reminiscent of the Nazi totalitarian infrastructure! Thus, on 27 February 1936, the parliament ratified the Franco-Soviet assistance pact. In response, Hitler reoccupied the demilitarised zone of the Rhineland to re-establish the Reich’s sovereignty over its western border.

In May 1936, the Popular Front won the elections with the pacifist slogan ‘Bread, peace, freedom’. The General Staff was convinced that the new government did not take the Hitler threat seriously.

Léon Blum came to power in early June. Receiving General Gamelin, Chief of the General Staff, he said: ‘Have no fears, I am well aware of the dangers.’ Before receiving a certain Colonel de Gaulle, to whom he declared: ‘One changes one’s mind when one is no longer in opposition.’

Hitler continued to create new armoured divisions, contrary to the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. His troops now occupied the left bank of the Ruhr and the Saar.

Contrary to what has often been said, the Popular Front government did not sacrifice the country’s defence on the altar of paid holidays by extending two weeks of paid leave to all workers. The Popular Front government, following the proposal of its Minister of Defence, Edouard Daladier, increased the military budget: 14 billion credits were voted, spread over four years, exceeding even the proposals of the general staff. The government launched a major national defence loan. Unlike the navy, which was well equipped, the army and air force were in urgent need of renovation and equipment. Thousands of tanks and 1,500 combat aircraft had to be built.

But unlike German industry, the French military production apparatus is outdated, with machine tools that are sometimes obsolete. Not to mention rampant inflation — 7% in 1936, 25% in 1937 — which jeopardises the approved budgets. At the time, the French arms industry was mainly based on small family businesses that could produce ‘high-quality tank prototypes, but not in industrial quantities.’ The government nationalised part of the arms industry, including large groups such as AMX (Ateliers de construction d’Issy-les-Moulineaux), but the task seemed impossible. Production stalled, prompting the authorities to reverse one of the ‘great achievements of the Popular Front’, the 40-hour week, which was extended to 48 hours, then 50 hours and, in 1940, to 60 hours per week in the arms industry. Many of the orders placed in 1936-37 did not arrive in time to counter the German offensive, particularly anti-tank weapons and aircraft. The order for 490 90mm anti-aircraft guns resulted in only 17 being put into service in 1940.

To be more complete about these responsibilities, how can we fail to recall that our chiefs of staff in 1936 had demanded British support and general mobilisation as a prerequisite for any military intervention, which made it impossible!

The annexation of Austria in 1938, the Anschluss, further precipitated events. The French now knew that war was imminent. They had had ten years to prepare for it, but through their inertia and their conduct, many ensured that, once again, our country would suffer the humiliation of defeat and occupation, not to mention the many shadow warriors who were executed on the spot or deported to Nazi concentration camps.

In 1940, after the defeat, the French army lost 100,000 men in just a few weeks.

This had nothing to do with the Phoney War that took place between the declaration of war by the United Kingdom and France (the Allies) on Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939 and the German offensive on 10 May 1940 on the European theatre of the conflict, where people sang cheerfully, We’ll hang our washing on the Siegfried Line…

When the armistice was signed, Léon Blum and the Popular Front were accused of being responsible for this disaster. The truth lies elsewhere.

The tragedy of it all is that for the past 20 years we have been reliving a very similar period in which Adolf Hitler’s Germany has been replaced by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. We see the same inertia, the same lack of political courage and a certain taste for betrayal that totalitarian systems know how to exploit to perfection.

How can we explain, if not justify, that on the day French MPs were called to vote on the revival of military production, so many parliamentarians were absent? Was it a day off?

What are we to think of the French banks that slowed down the revival of shell production for a year and a half by refusing a €20 million loan? It’s a disgrace. As for the apostles of the famous ‘peace dividends’, they have lost their voices, preferring to enjoy a more than comfortable retirement! There is no doubt that France needs a renewal of its political personnel. And there is every reason to believe that in other European countries, with a few rare exceptions, the situation is hardly any better.

After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and two World Wars, in 1914 and 1940, how can we not listen or listen again to the words of General Mermet when, in the suburbs of Agen, he recalled the oath made at Bon-Encontre by the heads of our intelligence services, who preferred to leave Paris to avoid being disbanded after the armistice, taking their precious archives to a safe place a week before General de Gaulle’s appeal in London?

We now know that it was not the German fifth column but the NKVD that was pulling the strings in French political circles, taking advantage of the many who saw Stalin’s Russia as a model for improving the lot of French workers and peasants!

Russian disinformation did not begin with Vladimir Putin’s FSB in 2006, but with the ‘ Desinformburo’, created in January 1923 by the deputy director of the Guepeou, Joseph Ounchlicht, former head of the NKVD for Leningrad, to take advantage of the opening of borders and the influx of Soviet agents, the  » great illegals‘, who blended in with migrants from Eastern Europe after crossing the borders without passports, posing as refugees.

Holodomor and the genocide thesis in Ukrainian memory culture

The rich wheat-growing lands have always made Ukraine ’the breadbasket of Europe ». Determined to thwart the rise of Ukrainian nationalism fuelled by the growing desire of its population to break free from Soviet central power, Stalin and Molotov deliberately provoked a veritable genocide to prevent any contagion, putting a people to death by depriving them of food, organising an artificial famine and imprisoning a large part of the population in concentration camps.

This Ukrainian national tragedy claimed between 4 and 10 million lives.[04]

The term Holodomor (the great famine) was reserved specifically to describe this genocide. An artificial famine that added to so many other mass murders perpetrated with impunity in the USSR by ‘the little father of the peoples’!

Upon his election as President of Ukraine in early 2005, Viktor Yushchenko, one of the leaders of the Orange Revolution, placed the national debate on the Soviet totalitarian past at the heart of the Ukrainian state’s political and historical agenda, as he had promised. Beyond finally honouring the memory of the victims of theHolodomor in Ukraine during the winter of 1932-1933, the Law ‘On the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-1933’ aimed to recognise the Holodomor as a true ‘genocide of the Ukrainian people’, thereby making its denial a criminal offence, on the same footing as the Holocaust.

Only 17 countries have recognised the Holodomor genocide, now considered one of the greatest crimes against humanity.

A genocide silenced or the triumph of Soviet propaganda

It took more than two years before, in 2007, the 193 member states of UNESCO finally supported a resolution on the ‘Memory of the victims of the Great Famine (Holodomor) in Ukraine’, which cost the lives of millions of innocent Ukrainians, but also Russians, Kazakhs and other nationalities. It was a first step. However, following opposition from Russia and Turkey, the OSCE Ministerial Council rejected the same resolution. Ankara wanted to avoid the same request being made in the future for the Armenian genocide. Worse still, the UN opposed the consideration of any resolution due to the veto of the Russian Federation. Only Germany supported this proposal in 2007. But where was Europe in 2007, not to mention ‘human rights champion France’?

How could such a genocide be ignored for so long, as if it had never happened? To answer this question would be to acknowledge that Stalin’s USSR, like the Russia of the tsars, knew how to reward those who served them.[05]

Did we know – or did we not want to know – what the Third Reich was doing in its camps from 1933 onwards?

After the Soviet concentration camps in the early 1930s, the first camps were built on Reich territory as soon as Hitler came to power, before being set up in Poland and the occupied countries. In Auschwitz, a veritable extermination complex for the Jews of Europe was designed to eradicate 11 million inhabitants listed in Europe in the Marlier villa by Richard Heydrich at the Wannsee conference, which foreshadowed the implementation of the Final Solution.[06]

From the moment the first camps were built, all American and European governments ‘knew’, but none were willing to admit the unthinkable.

Although trains carrying deportees were hit during the Allied bombings, none of the 44,000 internment camps and subcamps of all kinds were targeted. The notable exception was designated targets such as the gas chamber at Birkenau.

‘Business as usual, indeed’ in the US until 1940-1941, some would say, cowardice elsewhere in Europe? Above all, one must not insult Mr Hitler. Everyone had their priorities. Some chose to turn a blind eye. How can we accept that such blatant crimes against humanity could be covered up?

Truths and half-truths

There can be no half-truths. Everyone knew that once Germany was divided between a Soviet zone in the East and three Allied zones in the West, the priority would be to arrest the guilty and restore the rule of law among the Allies while protecting the civilian population. Even the worst Nazis preferred to surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviets. They had no illusions about the methods and summary justice practised in the USSR. ‘In the Soviet and Allied sectors, things happened very differently, which was to be expected given the nature of the Soviet regime and its leader, Stalin.’ … ‘Neither Nazi crimes nor Stalinist crimes should be relativised or trivialised by pitting them against each other.’[06]

National Socialism and communism, in their systematic organisation of terror in concentration camps, have constantly rivalled each other in horror. The figures often cited are 8 million dead in Nazi extermination or concentration camps, 20 million in Stalin’s USSR and 50 million in Mao’s China. Beyond a certain point, numbers no longer speak for themselves; they become relative over the years and turn into statistics. Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbrück and so many others are not accidents of history. One only has to look at what is happening today in Russia in prison colonies that are no better than Nazi concentration camps.

The lessons of Ravensbrück

The first lesson I learned from this window onto hell is that there are women who showed exceptional courage in these tragic circumstances.

The survivors I met all told me that when they returned, no one wanted to listen to them for many years. While the men in the camps knew how to ‘show solidarity’, the women also knew how to ‘show tenderness and rise above themselves’, as Germaine Tillon once told me when she was visiting Rennes. She was the only French woman to attend several of the seven ‘war crimes’ trials held before a British military tribunal in Hamburg. Among the defendants were SS officers, camp doctors, male and female guards (Aufseherinnen), and a few former prisoners who had been promoted to officials and had tortured or mistreated other prisoners. In total, there were 38 defendants, including 21 women. 18 death sentences were handed down.

His regret is that justice was not served. The British have a justice system that is designed to judge individuals guilty on the basis of irrefutable evidence. In the camp, there was nothing to write with, no way to remember the crimes committed by so many organised murderers without being able to record their misdeeds on a daily basis. A collective of individuals should have been tried. As a result, most of them blamed each other for the crimes, and due to lack of evidence, only six of them were sentenced to death and executed!

850 babies were born in Ravensbrück. Six survived, including three French babies!

The rule for women was to have an abortion before the eighth month or to drown the baby if it was not strangled by a guard. The others were shot at their mothers’ feet, sometimes thrown into the air like pigeons and mowed down by machine-gun fire. It was recreation time for the guards. Twenty-five children of French mothers were born in Ravensbrück: three survived.

This was the case for Jean-Claude Passerat, still a fighter, born in the camp on 13 December 1944. His mother, a member of the Resistance, was 24 years old. Unable to breastfeed, a Russian woman and a gypsy took over… As was the case for Ingelore, whose crime was that her German mother had had an illicit relationship with a Polish man under the Nuremberg racial laws.

The story of Ingelore Prochnow

Ingelore Prochnow’s testimony on 4 May in Ravensbrück is deeply moving. Her story is almost unbelievable. She recounts it once again, her heart filled with emotion.

She was born on 5 April 1944. Her mother, Renate Rohde, a German, was five months pregnant when she was deported at the age of 19 after being denounced for having had an illicit relationship with a Polish man, Jan Gawroński. Jan was taken prisoner in 1942. The SS subjected him to tests to see if he could be Germanised (‘Eindeutschungsfähigkeit’)… Declared positive, his life was spared and he found himself enlisted in the STO, on a farm near Magdeburg. There he met Renate. Arrested, he was deported to several successive camps. Miraculously, he survived and returned to Poland without any news of Renate, who was also released from Ravensbrück in 1945, only to be interned again by the Soviets until 1947…

Ingelore was placed in a children’s home and adopted at the age of five by a childless family. On 24 April 2002, she gained access to her adoption file in Detmold. It was there that she learned she had been born in Ravensbrück. She traced her father to Poland. She travelled there to discover that he had been buried in 1995, never knowing he had a daughter.

For this rendezvous with history, perhaps her last, Ingelore, like Jean-Claude, is a witness who cannot leave us indifferent, a unique encounter that allows us to measure the horror of these concentration camp systems where human beings are dehumanised and life is worth very little.

An abomination that no atonement or forgiveness can ever repair, as emphasised by Xaver Doucet, president of the Union des Français de l’étranger (UFE Berlin), who came to lay a wreath at the monument facing Lake Schweedt, where the ashes of the deportees burned in one of the crematoria built in the camp to relieve the Fürstenberg crematorium were scattered.

Ravensbrück or hell for women

Between May 1939 and May 1945, 123,000 women from 40 countries were deported to Ravensbrück. Thirty per cent were from Poland, 20% from Germany and Austria, 15% were mainly Hungarian, and 15% were French. That’s 6,000 women!

The first convoy of French women arrived in 1942 with 237 prisoners. But from 1943 onwards, the convoys multiplied with the arrival of women arrested for acts of resistance. At first, the French women were poorly received by the Polish women, who blamed France for betraying them and even suspected that there were informers among them. But their attitude softened when they realised the spirit of resistance that drove them.

Among them were many young women who had decided to do everything they could to avoid working in arms factories. Some, such as Germaine Tillon and Geneviève De Gaulle, quickly became role models.

Among the French women in the Ravensbrück resistance, we must also mention the names of some exceptional women, such as Marie-Berthe Sérot, wife of Commander André Sérot, an emblematic figure of the French 2nd Bureau, and Jeannette L’Herminier, who was deported in February 1944.

Jeannette L’Herminier, armed with two small pencils, rallied her fellow prisoners

Marie-Altée ‘Jeannette’ L’Herminier was the sister of Lieutenant Commander Jean L’Herminier, commander of the submarine Casabianca, who, refusing to scuttle his vessel, decided on 27 November 1942 to set sail under enemy fire to join the Free French Forces.

After her art history studies were interrupted by the war, Jeannette joined the Resistance, hiding Allied pilots who were repatriated to England via Plouha.

On 19 September 1943, she was arrested with her mother-in-law in Paris by the Gestapo: the two women were hiding an American airman. where she ‘sketched’ the silhouettes of her fellow prisoners, showing them ‘as they should have been’. She secretly produced more than 150 drawings, which were saved by Elisabeth Barbier!

Invited aboard the aviso Commandant L’Herminier in 1989, she shared her war memories with the crew before signing her book, Pardonne, n’oublie pas (Forgive, don’t forget).

Women are sometimes called upon to play an exceptional role during wartime, for which most are unprepared. Circumstances, courage, determination and faith led many of them to sacrifice themselves. Few countries pay tribute to their actions and commitment.

Except perhaps the British, as they did in Whitehall.

Better late than never, of course! This is what happened in France for the ‘Merlinettes’.[07]

There were several types of prisoners at Ravensbrück:

• The ‘political prisoners’ imprisoned for acts of resistance or for the acts of resistance of their relatives. Like Laure Diebold, Companion of the Liberation, Geneviève De Gaulle-Anthonioz, niece of the general, Marie-Altée L’Herminier, sister of Lieutenant Commander Jean L’Herminier, commander of the submarine Casabianca, who escaped from Toulon during the scuttling of the fleet on 27 November 1942…
• the prisoners of war, who belonged to the Red Army’s health and communications services, but also to the French services: the Merlinettes.
• the Jewish, Gypsy and Roma racial prisoners and, finally,
• the common law prisoners and prostitutes.

Each prisoner wore a coloured triangle according to her ‘category’, with a letter in the centre indicating her nationality: red for political prisoners, yellow for Jews, green for common criminals, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, black for Gypsies and prostitutes, etc. Some had their heads shaved on arrival, but this was never the case for the ‘Aryans’. In October 1942, all Jewish prisoners were deported to Auschwitz, as Himmler had decided to make the German camps ‘Judenfrei’, i.e. free of Jews.[08]

In Ravensbrück, as in other camps, those considered unfit for work were executed on the spot. ‘No useless mouths’!

The hell of Ravensbrück lasted until the very last day. Several thousand prisoners were killed just before the camp was liberated. The last executions took place on 25 April: the eleven prisoners employed in the crematorium were poisoned by their guards.

When the Danish and Swedish Red Cross teams arrived on site, there were still 3,500 women and 300 men left. Twenty thousand people who were still able to walk had been taken out onto the roads the day before for a forced march, the ‘death march’, singing this song of the marshes. Fortunately, they were intercepted en route and their lives were saved by a Soviet detachment.

Le Chant des déportés or Chant des marais is the French adaptation of the German song Wir sind die Moorsoldaten. This song was added to the repertoire of our regiments a long time ago and is performed by the Chœur-Orchestre de la Garde républicaine de Paris, the official choir of the French Republic, at official ceremonies in honour of the victims of Nazi barbarism.

The Poles present on 4 May sang this same song several times alongside us, in German, led by their bishop. The Chant des marais or ‘Song of the Deported’ is the French adaptation of the German song Wir sind die Moorsoldaten…[09]

Resistance fighters one day, resistance fighters forever…

For this 80th anniversary, in addition to the national committees bringing together a handful of survivors and the presence of the Souvenir Français, which is firmly established in both Germany and Poland,[10] on the French side, behind the French ambassador, François Delattre, there was a delegation from the UFE-Berlin, the Union des Français de l’étranger (Union of French People Abroad),[11] a patriotic association created after the First World War, and several representatives of the Amicale des Anciens des Services Spéciaux de la Défense Nationale (AASSDN) (Association of Former Members of the Special Services of National Defence),[12]

The AASSDN delegation was led by Air Force General François Mermet (2s), former DGSE, who, like his predecessor Colonel Henri Debrun, was committed during his presidency to supporting the work of remembrance undertaken by its members. This is how the Merlinettes case, after that of Josephine Baker, became a priority. The aim was to obtain national recognition for the actions of these 3,000 women who threw themselves into the war with admirable courage.

Thanks to the meticulous research of Jean-Georges Jaillot-Combelas, at the Defence Historical Service and in French and German archives, a dossier was put together so that the State could take into consideration the heroic actions of this unit, whose memory had never been publicly honoured.

J-G. Jaillot-Combelas spent 20 years of his life documenting this elite female unit to which his aunt belonged, who was parachuted into the Massif Central and did not suffer the same fate as her Merlinettes comrades in the hell of Ravensbrück and Buchenwald.

The fact that it took nearly 70 years to obtain recognition for these acts of bravery shows that we still have a long way to go to complete the work of remembrance that has not been done or has been done only partially.

Mission accomplished on 6 October 2023: Patricia Miralles, Secretary of State for Veterans and Remembrance, unveiled a memorial in Lorris (Loiret) with  Jean-Georges Jaillot-Combelas, at the Departmental Museum of the Resistance and Deportation. For the first time, the government paid tribute to Eugénie-Malika Djendi and Élisabeth Torlet, who were parachuted into the heart of occupied France before being murdered by the Nazis. Agents of the French services, they were only 21 and 29 years old.

« These second lieutenants of the North African women’s communications corps created by General Merlin, which had a thousand young women nicknamed the “Merlinettes”, Élisabeth Torlet and Eugénie-Malika Djendi were among the thirty volunteers selected by Paul Paillole, head of Military Security and Counter-Espionage. Their mission? To be parachuted into the heart of occupied France in 1944 as radio operators and code breakers. After rigorous training in coding and encryption techniques, shooting and combat, and life in hiding, a dozen were chosen to be dropped into France from bombers taking off from Algiers or London. Six lost their lives during their perilous missions. Eugénie-Malika Djendi, betrayed by a member of the network responsible for welcoming her, was arrested as soon as she landed on French soil on 10 April 1944 and transferred by the Gestapo to Paris. »[13]

Christophe Cornevin in Le Figaro continues: « Before being deported to Ravensbrück, where she died on 15 January 1945, she shared her cell with three “Merlinettes”, who had also been parachuted in before being captured. Among them was Pierrette Louin, aged 24, who was executed in Ravensbrück and left behind a moving letter: ‘I am not going to fight against words, ideas and other people, but to save something that cannot disappear, a way of life, an ideal: France. (..) One night, in the moonlight, a plane will take me over France. I will jump out with a parachute and carry out my mission. (…) If I die, it will be the rules of the game, without regrets, without bitterness, because my soul will be intact. »

The unsung heroes

The second heroine to be honoured on Friday was Elisabeth Torlet, who was parachuted into the Doubs region on 30 August 1943, arrested and found murdered on 5 September 1944 with a bullet in her face while trying to resupply a nearby maquis.  » This is the first time that the French Republic has paid tribute to the Merlinettes through the presence of a member of the government,‘ said General (2S) François Mermet at the time. ’It is a strong signal to all women, female veterans, intelligence agents, and all those who are more or less anonymous and whom the misogyny of history has deliberately or unconsciously forgotten. »

Two years after Joséphine Baker, who was recruited by the French services even before the declaration of war in 1939, was welcomed to the Panthéon in 2021, the artist remains the most famous intelligence agent, and there seems to be growing interest in women who fought the enemy with weapons in their hands.

For Hedy Belhassine, « this tribute to our elders is a duty, but how can we not spare a thought for all those men and women in the shadows, those “honourable correspondents” who never had a legal existence, echoing Pierre Brossolette’s words about these “stokers of glory” … ‘ these fighters are all the more moving because they have no uniforms or banners. »

Among these women in the shadows who fought against Nazi barbarism, how can we fail to mention Eugénie-Malika Djendi, whose father was Algerian and mother Corsican, who enlisted on 11 January 1943 in the Women’s Signal Corps.

After the Tunisian campaign, she joined the army’s counter-intelligence services in the autumn, led by Commander Paul Paillole. She was trained in Staoueli, near Algiers, where the shock battalion training centre and an Anglo-American training centre involved in the liberation of Corsica (‘Mission Massingham’) were located.

Eugénie arrived in England on 20 March 1943, where she was reunited with Marie-Louise Cloarec, Pierrette Louin and Suzanne Mertzizen. On 9 April 1944, she boarded a Halifax aircraft of the RAF’s 161st Squadron at Tempsford to be parachuted into France during the ‘Syringa’ mission with Georges Penchenier (alias Lafitte, alias Le Gorille, who would later become famous for his spy novels in the Série Noire series) and Marcel Corbusier (alias Leblond) in the Sully-sur-Loire region of the Loiret.

Arrested by the Gestapo in possession of their radio equipment, interrogated in Orléans and then in Paris, they were imprisoned in Fresnes prison, except for Georges Penchenier, who managed to escape. Transferred from Fresnes to Fort Romainville, they were put in a cattle car to Ravensbrück after a brief stay at the Neue Bremm camp. The four women were executed on 18 January 1945, their bodies burned and their ashes scattered in the nearby forest. Eugénie Djendi was 21 years old.

The French Merlinettes and their British sisters in arms

It is not surprising that a British detachment of the FANY was sent to Ravensbrück. These young women volunteers, like the Merlinettes, had special status as auxiliaries.[14]

General Mermet saw the presence of this British detachment as ‘a British nod to history’ with our Merlinettes…

Originally, the FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) was a corps of volunteer nurses, considered elite auxiliaries. The Corps was founded by Edward Baker, a warrant officer in the 21st Lancers, wounded at Omdurman in 1898 in Lord Kitchener’s army. ‘Lying on the ground, wounded in the left shin, he thought how wonderful it would be if a group of women could administer first aid to the men on the battlefield before they were evacuated to the aid stations.’ What a thought!

In 1940, the FANY’s primary mission was to form a reserve force in case of invasion, while providing administrative and technical support to special training schools. Given their talent and courage, these young women were quickly incorporated into the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and granted security clearance. Most were assigned to Section F, which was responsible for operations in occupied France.

After initial training in Arisaig, in Scotland, where they learned how to kill silently, handle weapons and carry out sabotage, they underwent parachute training at Ringway. The best were sent to Beaulieu, the advanced training school for secret agents, where they learned espionage techniques, including complex coding and message transmission.

During the war, 3,000 of them took part in operations behind enemy lines for the SOE, while the others were responsible for communications and encryption after intensive training in Morse code at the Grendon listening station.

Thirty-nine of the fifty women sent on missions to France were FANY members. ‘They had to have a perfect knowledge of France, a very good level of French and few family ties.’

Before leaving on their missions, they received a small gift, ‘a powder compact, a lipstick or a bottle of perfume, not forgetting, of course, their cyanide capsule.’

What a discovery to meet this detachment at Ravensbrück, in the freezing cold, to bow and lay a wreath in memory of the British women deported to Ravensbrück. Two of them were qualified parachutists in France. This intrigued us on our return…

One can imagine that these young British women in Ravensbrück had a thought for their elders. With a special thought for Eileen Nearne, decorated with the French Croix de Guerre…

Among the most famous are:

• Noor Inayat Khan (Prosper Network in the Paris region), the only female SOE radio operator in Paris, who met a tragic fate. Arrested and tortured, she remained silent under torture. She attempted to escape twice before being sent to Dachau, where she was shot in September 1944.
• Odette Sansom-Churchill: Arrested and tortured (a red-hot poker was thrust into her back and her toenails were torn out). She managed to convince the Gestapo that she was married to Peter Churchill, another agent with whom she had been arrested and a close relative of Winston Churchill. She was sent to Ravensbrück, where she was held in solitary confinement in a room next to the ovens. She survived and became a revered figure in the FANY.
• Violette Szabo was one of the SOE’s best markswomen. Running out of ammunition, she was captured after a major shootout. She was shot in Ravensbrück in January 1945.
• Lise de Baissac was part of the scientific network near Poitou and travelled through the countryside on her bicycle looking for fields suitable for drop zones, with her radio hidden in pieces in her skirt and bra.
• Nancy Wake, the most decorated woman of the Second World War, known to the Gestapo as the ‘White Mouse’. She travelled several hundred kilometres by bicycle from Auvergne to the Pyrenees to bring a single radio to her unit in the Maquis, where she commanded some 1,500 men single-handedly.

Violette Szabo, Odette (Churchill) Hallowes and Noor Inayat Khan were all awarded the George Cross, Violette and Noor posthumously. All these FANY women lost their lives in the line of duty.

Fighting tyranny is a never-ending battle

The tribute paid in the morning at Ravensbrück and in the afternoon at Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp set up as a model by the SS, was fitting for a period that, until recently, was considered over after 80 years of peace on our continent. During some of the speeches, several references were made to the Third Reich and the terror it spread across Europe, and to the war of aggression being waged by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, like Stalin before him, to eradicate Ukraine of its inhabitants who refuse to renounce their nationality. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s fight against a certain evil empire does not seem to be that of Donald Trump, who is suspected of overturning alliances for his own gain.

‘Never again’

The memory of these exceptional women and all those anonymous women whose lives were shattered, often separated from their husbands and/or children and sent to other camps, will be evoked by the director of the Ravensbrück Memorial, Dr Andrea Genest.

For several days, once again, perhaps for the last time, former deportees returned to Ravensbrück to talk to young people and pass on their message. We must fight against this tyranny, always and forever.

‘Places of memory with a dual past’

In France, no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find a single article in the newspapers of the time about these special Soviet camps. This is hardly surprising, I am told, in a country where the Communist Party won 28% of the vote in 1946 and 21.27% with Jacques Duclos in the first round of the presidential elections in 1969, which perhaps explains it.

My impression in Sachsenhausen on the afternoon of 4 May, even though the ceremony in the camp took place in front of Gate Z, the crematorium, was that the atmosphere and the audience were different. In Ravensbrück, the martyrdom of women from 40 countries was being commemorated. In Sachsenhausen, tens of thousands of victims of the Nazi Third Reich were honoured first, followed by the Soviets before they passed the baton to the GDR, whose institutions were modelled on the Soviet model, with the STASI replacing the NKVD.

Side by side were the descendants of the victims of the Nazi regime, alongside a few rare survivors, but more numerous were those who had succeeded them, arrested by the Soviets and also imprisoned preventively in May 1945. This is how nearly 300 young Germans were rounded up and deported to this camp, which was set up as a model by the SS, by political commissars who wanted to ‘make numbers’ and get noticed by their superiors in Moscow. As can be seen when visiting the camp barracks, which have been converted into a museum, the same striped pyjamas, the same mess tins and the same combs were used. This was done with total impunity because, although denazification took place in East Germany as in the former USSR, there was no decommunisation. Those who were proven torturers were simply retired and banned from working in the newly reunified Germany. This was done in silence, not to say indifference, because the perpetrators were never prosecuted. The only tribute paid by the country was the laying of a wreath by the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship (Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur) (Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur).

Joël-François Dumont

Reading notes

[01] See ‘The 10 Soviet special camps in East Germany’ — (2025-0506) —

[02] For the Soviets, the initial accusation was always the reason for imprisonment. « When an officer in Soviet uniform asked a prisoner, “Why are you here?”, the prisoner had to answer, “Suspected of…”. And to top it all off, “prisoners in special camps could not be rehabilitated under this law because there had been no conviction prior to their imprisonment”.

« The procedure was based on a Stalinist conception of law, according to which it was not important to determine individual guilt, but rather to remove alleged opponents of the Soviet system from public life. Soviet law was therefore applied retrospectively, using Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The general term “counter-revolutionary activities” covered almost anything that could “weaken the power of the workers” and peasants’ councils’ or could be directed against the “fundamental economic, political and national achievements of the proletarian revolution”. In the usual fast-track proceedings, which lasted 15 to 20 minutes, 25 years of hard labour was a common sentence. Neither defence lawyers nor witnesses for the defence were allowed, and there was no possibility of appeal. Guilt did not have to be proven; the ‘accusation’ was sufficient to be deported to the USSR, shot immediately or interned in one of the Soviet penal institutions on German soil. These were located on the sites of the special camps in Bautzen, Sachsenhausen and Torgau until 1948 or 1950. From 1947 to January 1950, the death penalty was abolished in the USSR, so that death sentences handed down during those years were commuted to life imprisonment or 25 years’ imprisonment in the Soviet zone. From 1945 to 1947, a total of 1,797 death sentences were handed down and carried out, and from 1950 to 1953, there were 606. Source: Wikipedia.

[03] In 1996, 27 January, the date of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, was declared ‘Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism’, becoming an ‘important part of German remembrance culture’ …  » In German culture of remembrance, commemorating the victims of wars, totalitarian regimes and ideological crimes of the 20th century plays a central role. Learning from its criminal past is a founding principle of the Federal Republic of Germany, often summarised by the phrase “Never again”. In this context, it is particularly important to collect the testimonies of contemporary witnesses so that the Nazi crimes remain a tangible reality for future generations. Throughout Germany, numerous memorials and museums dedicated to the various groups of victims help to keep their memory alive. Among the most important are the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Jewish Museum in Berlin. » Source: German Foreign Office.

[04] See Sergei Skliarov in Nezavissimaïa Gazeta: ‘Great Famine: a deathly silence in Moscow’ quoted in Courrier international on 23 November 2007.

In 1922, Joseph Stalin became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. After Lenin‘s death in 1924, he patiently played a game of underground intrigues and successive alliances with various factions of the Party, supplanting his political rivals one by one, forcing them into exile or ousting them from the leadership.

Relying on the growing bureaucratisation of the regime and the omnipotence of the police apparatus, the GPU and then the NKVD, he gradually imposed absolute personal power and transformed the USSR into a totalitarian state. The cult of personality built around him, the systematic secrecy surrounding his actions, the distortion of reality through the incessant use of propaganda, the falsification of the past, the delusional denunciation of conspiracies, saboteurs and traitors, the organisation of show trials, and the physical elimination of political opponents or disgraced figures were permanent features of his regime.

He carried out the complete collectivisation of land, decreeing the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’, and industrialised the Soviet Union at a forced pace through five-year plans with unrealistic objectives and at an exorbitant human and social cost. His long reign was marked by a regime of extreme terror and informing, and by the killing or sending to Gulag labour camps of millions of people, particularly during the collectivisation of the countryside and the Great Purges of 1937. He carried out both massive population transfers, including the complete deportation of some fifteen national minorities, and the no less disastrous forced sedentarisation of nomads from Central Asia. He also denied the existence of the deadly famines of 1932–1933 (Holodomor) and 1946–1947, after having partly caused them through a ruthless policy of forced requisitioning of agricultural products in the countryside, where an organised blockade prevented the starving rural population from fleeing and deprived them of all aid.

[05] See ‘When France’s Russian dream turns into strategic torment’ by Laure Mandeville in Le Figaro — (2023-0127)

[06] See ‘The 10 Soviet special camps in East Germany’ — (2025-0506) —

[07] See ‘A morning in Ravensbrück’ — 2025-0511) —

[08] Source: Wikipedia.

[09] The ‘Song of the Marshes’ was written by three German communists: a miner, Johann Esser, an actor and director, Wolfgang Langhoff, and Rudolf ‘Rudi’ Goguella, the composer, all three of whom were interned in the first contingent of German political prisoners deported to Börgermoor. Performed for the first time on 27 August by 16 prisoners, some of whom were members of the Solingen workers’ choir, it was quickly banned by the SS.

The Börgermoor concentration camp, opened in June 1933, was originally intended to house a thousand prisoners temporarily sentenced to forced labour in the moors. Most were released at Christmas after promising never to speak of their time in the camp. Those who could chose exile… The song, passed on by prisoners transferred from camp to camp, quickly became the anthem of all deportees after being translated into several languages.[09]

[10] The Souvenir Français is a patriotic association, founded in 1887 and recognised as a public utility on 1 February 1906, whose purpose is to honour the memory of all those who died for France, whether French or foreign.

[11] The Union des Français de l’Étranger (UFE) was founded in 1927 to maintain links between French expatriates. A recognised public interest organisation, the UFE is a network that brings together French people and Francophiles around the world to ensure a special link with France, defend their interests and provide them with support and mutual aid on a daily basis. The UFE has volunteer-run offices in around 100 countries and has been present in Berlin since the late 1950s.

[12] The Amicale des Anciens des Services Spéciaux Français de la Défense Nationale (AASSDN) was created in 1953 by Colonel Paul Paillole. The Amicale was born out of the desire of senior officers in counter-espionage (SSM and TR) and then in the intelligence service (SR) to support bereaved families and members of the services who had been traumatised by the conditions of their combat after the war.

[13] See ‘Les Merlinettes, ces héroïnes oubliées de la seconde Guerre mondiale enfin honorées par la République’ (The Merlinettes, forgotten heroines of the Second World War finally honoured by the Republic) by Christophe Cornevin in Le Figaro (2023-1010) —

[14] The young recruits were trained in four areas: motorised transport, wireless telegraphy, codes and general service. They worked on coding and signals and served as drivers for agents. Not to mention their initial training as nurses, which had been their raison d’être in 1907, when these horsewomen went out into the field to rescue and bring back the wounded.

[15] Source: Interview with Jean-Georges Jaillot-Combalas in 2021. See also: ‘Disappearance of Eileen Nearne, war heroine’ by Olivier Cadic, senator representing French citizens living outside France — 2010-0916).

On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps and the surrender of Nazi Germany, see:

• « Le système concentrationnaire nazi » — (2025-0117) —
• « 80 Years after Auschwitz – The Kremlin’s manipulative use of the Holocaust » — (2025-0425) —
• « La libération de Ravensbrück et de Sachsenhausen » — (2025-0505) —
• « The liberation of Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen » — (2025-0505)
• ‘Die Befreiung von Ravensbrück und Sachsenhausen’ — (2025-0505)
• « Les 10 camps spéciaux soviétiques en Allemagne de l’Est » — (2025-0506) —
• « 1945-2025 : Berlin se souvient » — (2025-0510) —
• « 1945-2025: Berlin erinnert sich » — (2025-0510) —
• « Un matin à Ravensbrück » par Hedy Belhassine — (2025-0511) —