Schwetzingen 1903 Langenfeld 1958
ABETZ Otto
Nazi politician
Born in 1903 in Schwetzingen, Otto Abetz continued his studies at the University of Karlsruhe and became a professor of biology. President of the central committee of youth movements in Karlsruhe, he organized from 1930 to 1934 German-French congresses for young people. This position earned him to meet French Germanophiles. At the same time, in 1931, he joined the NSDAP, the Nazi party, and in 1935, under the direction of Joachim von Ribbentrop, entered the German Foreign Service. The same year, he enters the SS.
From 1940 to 1944, Otto Abetz, SS-Standartenführer then SS-Brigadeführer on the 1942 count, held the position of German ambassador in Paris, responsible for representing the Reich’s policy towards Vichy. He is delegated to the Military Command. Hitler appointed him as the only person responsible for all political questions in occupied France as well as in unoccupied France. It thus coordinates, on the one hand, civil services in the occupied area; it manages security, propaganda and economic collaboration. On the other hand, he is responsible for putting pressure on the Vichy government to accept Berlin’s requests. He asks very early for anti-Jewish measures including the spoliation of Jewish property which he practices from his arrival in June 1940. He is a supporter of deportations in 1942. He maintains good relations with Admiral Darlan and Pierre Laval, Vice-President of the Council, both resolute supporters of collaboration with Germany.
He was arrested in October 1945, in the Black Forest, by the Security Inspector Richard Ezac (whose real name is Joachim Eisack, German refugee... Jewish... and French resistant then engaged in the French Army under his false French identity*). Sentenced in 1949 by a French court to twenty years' imprisonment, Otto Abetz was pardoned by the President of the Council René Cotty in April 1954, after three remissions. He died in 1958 in Langenfeld, Germany, the victim of a car accident, unsolved.
Born in 1919 in Warsaw (Poland) - Died in combat on May 8, 1943 in Warsaw (Poland)
ANIELEWICZ Mordechaï
Leader of the Jewish Resistance in Poland
Raised in a poor Jewish family, active member of the socialist Zionist youth movement Hachomer Hatzaïr. On 7 September 1939, a few days after the German attack against Poland, Mordechai Anielewicz left Warsaw for eastern Poland, then for Vilnius (now attached to independent Lithuania), where he recruits members of his movement to resume clandestine educational activities in Poland.
In January 1940, he himself returned to Warsaw, with his friend Mara Fuchrer, where he became a full-time manager. From the first massacres of Jews in the East in June 1941, he became concerned with the self-defense of the ghetto population. He makes contact, initially in vain, with the Polish resistance linked to the government in exile. he becomes one of the founders of the Antifascist Bloc with the other Zionists and the communists (March-April 1942).
On a trip to the southwest of Poland to transform youth movements into armed resistance groups, he returned to Warsaw after the large-scale round-ups in the summer of 1942, reorganized the Jewish Combat Organization (JCO), and became its commander in November 1942.
He obtains a small quantity of armaments from the Polish Home Army (AK). On January 18, 1943, he successfully led the first street fights intended to oppose a new large round-up carried out by the Germans.
Is at the head of the insurrection triggered on April 19. Folded with the ZOB staff in a bunker at 18 Mila Street, he died there on May 8 when this bunker was conquered by German troops. His last letter, addressed on 23 April 1943 to Itzhak Zuckerman, proclaims the "greatness" and the "glory" of the Jewish resistance in the ghetto. Kibbutz Yad Mordechai in Israel is named after him and has a monument to his memory.
1895
ANTIGNAC Joseph
Secretary General of the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs
Born in 1895, Joseph Antignac served in the French army and received two Croix de Guerre for his military achievements. Officer of the Legion of Honor, he joined the active army, after 1918, with the rank of captain. Retired due to illness, he leaves the army a year later. Until 1939, Joseph Antignac is an industrial entrepreneur.
One year after his demobilization in October 1940, he headed the Limoges constituency of the Police for Jewish Questions, responsible for monitoring the application of French anti-Semitic legislation. In November 1942, Joseph Antignac became the chief of staff to Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, then General Commissioner for Jewish Affairs. And from January 15, 1943, chief of staff of the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, he dealt with the field of "economic aryanization".
In June 1944, Joseph Antignac succeeded Charles du Paty de Clam as head of the C.G.Q.J., with the title of Secretary General. He displays a very violent anti-Semitism and seeks to "regenerate" the C.G.Q.J. increasingly disorganized by the approach of the outcome of the war.
Arrested on November 6, 1944, Joseph Antignac is released on May 28, 1946. It is on this date that he flees and disappears. No trace of him gives any information about the place of his escape.
On 9 July 1946, Joseph Antignac was sentenced to death in absentia.
Born in Pitesti in 1882- Died in Jilava prison in 1946
ANTONESCU Ion
Marshal and Romanian politician
Chief of Staff of the Romanian army in 1933, Antonescu is excluded from it in 1937. In 1938, the king of Romania offered him the position of Minister of War. His political ideas are openly anti-Semitic. He became Prime Minister on 4 September 1940. Two days later, he declares that Romania is voluntarily entering the zone of influence of the Third Reich and Italy. Antonescu then proclaimed himself Conducator. In the autumn of 1940, he issued a series of decrees confiscating property belonging to the Jews.
On October 7, 1940, the German troops entered Romanian territory and 15,000 SS troops settled in the ports and oil zones of the country. In June 1941, the Conducator meets Hitler in Munich. On the 23rd, Romania declares war on the USSR. The Romanian and German armies invade Bessarabia and northern Bukovine and massacre the Jewish population. On November 23, 1941, Antonescu ordered the pogrom of Odessa, which cost the lives of nearly 25,000 Jews.
The arrest of Mussolini and the Italian capitulation on September 8, 1943, and the Allied bombings on the city of Ploiesti encourage Antonescu to withdraw from the conflict. He was arrested on August 23, 1944, by order of King Michael of Romania. On the 31st, the Soviet troops entered the capital Bucharest. On September 12, 1944, the armistice is signed and the Romania then becomes the USSR’s ally. The former Prime Minister is then handed over to the government in Bucharest. A death sentence issued by a people’s court follows. Ion Antonescu was executed on January 1, 1946.
Born in Paris in 1904- Died in December 1943 at Auschwitz
BAUR André
Jewish community leader in France
Son of a Jewish banker very committed to the Jewish community life in Paris, he is the nephew of the chief rabbi of Paris Julien Weill, but also of the secretary general of the Consistory of Paris, Albert Manuel and the professor of medicine Benjamin Weill-Hallé. He is also known to have family ties with the industrialist André Citroën and the lawyer Raymond Lindon. Himself a banker and president of the Jewish Liberal Union (synagogue on rue Copernic in Paris), André Baur is very much aware of the study of Jewish religious texts and Zionist militancy (he was also treasurer for France of the National Jewish Fund - Keren Kayemet and Israel).
André Baur stayed in Paris under the Occupation with his wife and four children, he agreed at the end of May 1941 to take over the presidency of the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Charities of Paris and the department of the Seine then, in January 1942, thevice-national presidency of UGIF, in charge of the board of directors for the northern zone. He then established relations of trust with the Committee of Immigrant Jews of Rue Amelot. In mid-March 1942, faced with a request from the SS Dannecker to ensure the supply of the first deportation convoy planned in France, André Baur protested in a letter addressed to Xavier Vallat dated 26 March 1942.
On 29 May 1942, he wrote to the president of the French Red Cross asking him for information about the Jews deported to Auschwitz in order to provide them with 'moral and material' support. Informed of the imminent roundup
of the Vel d'Hiv, he transmits the information to the officials of the Central Consistory in Lyon, through his brother living in the southern zone. He then meets with Marcel Stora and the officials of the Amelot Committee on July 13, informs them of the imminent round-up and suggests that they provide protective documents to their employees. André Baur went to the Vel d'Hiv during the roundup of 16 and 17 July to see the state of abandonment of families rounded up. Striving to meet the assistance needs of the Jewish population in the northern zone, he maintained a regular and detailed correspondence with his uncle Albert Manuel, who had become secretary-general of the Central Consistory in Lyon. At the beginning of 1943, he leads a difficult negotiation with the Germans to preserve the foreign personnel of the UGIF North. He carried out in February 1943 a two-week trip to the southern zone with his secretary Armand Katz, as part of a project for national reorganization of the UGIF. On April 28, in Grenoble, he participated in the constitutive meeting of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC).
On 11 July 1943, Baur asked to meet Pierre Laval to oppose the brutal policy carried out by SS Brunner at the Drancy camp. On 21 July, the escape of two internees from Drancy, one of whom is André Baur’s cousin, serves as a pretext for Brunner to arrest him. In reality, it is his indocility, manifested by his higher-level approaches from the French authorities, that seems to be the real reason for his arrest. Despite requests for his release made on his behalf by the chief rabbi of France, the president of the Central Consistory, the deputy president of UGIF, and even by Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, André Baur is deported to Auschwitz, by the same convoy as Marcel Stora, Fernand Musnik, Rabbi Elie Bloch and the family of the latter.
In this convoy were also the wife of André Baur, Odette then aged 33 and their four children: Francine, 3 years old, Myriam, 9 years old, Antoine, 6 years old and Pierre, 10 years old.
Born in Plonsk (Russian Poland) in 1886 - Died in Sdé Boker (Israel) in 1973
BEN GOURION David
Founder of the State of Israel
In Palestine from 1906. Expelled by the Ottomans in 1915, returns in 1918 as a combatant of the Jewish Legion. Historical leader of the Labor Zionist party (Mapai from 1930), he was elected to the presidency of the Zionist executive in Jerusalem in 1935 and remained so until 1948, when he proclaimed the independence of the State of Israel and led its government until 1953, then again from 1955 to 1963.
Made a long stay in the United States during the Second World War, marked by the adoption on May 12, 1942 of the Zionist program of Biltmore (claim for a Jewish sovereignty in Palestine). Concerned about the defense of Palestine against the danger of a German invasion (1942), then by the creation of a Jewish Brigade in the British army (obtained in 1944), he rarely mobilized to put pressure on the Allies for a more effective rescue action for the Jews of Europe, which sparked controversy among historians.
From the end of the Second World War, he came into contact with the survivors in camps for displaced persons and actively devoted himself to organizing their illegal or legal immigration to Palestine.
Darmstadt 1903 - 1989
BEST Werner
Chief of the Administrative Staff at the military command in occupied France
Born in 1903 in Darmstadt, Werner Best founded a group of the German National Youth League in Mainz after the First World War. During the Ruhr crisis in 1923-1924, he was twice imprisoned by the French for his nationalist activity. Two years after his doctorate in law in 1927, he became a judge in the department of justice of the Land of Hesse, a position he had to leave in 1931 for his involvement in the "Boxheim affair" (the preparation of a putsch by the National Socialists after an alleged communist revolution). Member of the NSDAP, the Nazi party, in 1930 and, a year later, of the SS, Werner Best became prefect of police in Hesse and, from 1933, legal advisor for the Gestapo and deputy to Heydrich, head of the Reich Sipo-SD. In 1939, he was at the command of an «Einsatzgruppe», a mobile unit of the security police of the RSHA, Central Office of Reich Security, in Poland.
Due to a dispute with Heydrich, he leaves this position and becomes, in 1940, head of the administrative staff at the military command in occupied France. His main tasks are the fight against the Resistance and, with Helmut Garantit, head of the Sipo-SD in France, and Otto Abetz, German ambassador in Paris, the implementation of anti-Jewish measures: "aryanization" of Jewish property, the introduction of the Status of Jews and the establishment of internment camps, a preliminary stage in the deportation of French Jews. Reich Commissioner in Denmark between 1942 and 1945, Best continued the policy of oppression and deportation of Jews. The project fails thanks to the Swedish government which announces by radio the planned deportations. The majority of Danish Jews manage to escape to Sweden.
Imprisoned in Denmark and sentenced to capital punishment in 1949, Best managed to return to Germany in 1951 thanks to pressure from the German government. He works there as legal advisor for the company of Hugo Stinnes, an industrial empire since the twenties that had also financed the Nazis. In 1969, he is accused of complicity in a massacre before the German courts. Three years later, he was released in 1972 for medical reasons. Werner Best died in 1989.
1881 - 1970
BOEGNER Marc
French pastor
Born in 1881 into a republican and patriotic Protestant family, Marc Boegner became a pastor after studying theology and law.
In 1940, he became head of the Cimade, a Protestant relief organization that seeks to help Jews interned in French camps. In May 1941, the pastor Marc Boegner, president of the Protestant Federation of France, is the first French religious leader to clearly and officially condemn the anti-Semitic legislation of the Vichy government. He encourages his followers to save Jews and to facilitate their illegal crossing to Switzerland.
From the summer of 1941, he was in contact with the leaders of the Vichy government, including Marshal Pétain, Xavier Vallat and later Pierre Laval. In all these discussions, the pastor Marc Boegner condemns the anti-Semitic policy and advocates for an annulment of the anti-Jewish decrees. In 1942, the pastor Marc Boegner became honorary president, with Cardinal Gerlier, of the association Amitié chrétienne created to help the Jews of France. On 6 September 1942, after a violent denunciation of the deportation of Jewish children to the East, the pastor Marc Boegner preached before sixty pastors by exhorting them to save Jews.
He personally takes care of the rescue of a hundred German Jewish children interned at the camp of Gurs. Thanks to the influence of his early and firm commitment against the anti-Semitic policy, thousands of Jews could be saved from the Nazi machine.
On 21 June 1988, Yad Vashem awarded Pastor Marc Boegner the title of Just of the Nations.
Montauban 1909- Paris 1993
BOUSQUET René
French prefect
Born on 11 May 1909 in Montauban, René Bousquet, doctor of law at the faculty of Toulouse, becomes at 20 years old the chief of staff of the prefect of Tarn-et-Garonne. In 1941, he is regional prefect of Champagne. He takes the oath of loyalty to Marshal Pétain, and gains the trust of Pierre Laval.
State Councillor in extraordinary service, René Bousquet became Secretary-General of the Police from 18 April 1942. On 2 July 1942, René Bousquet reached an agreement with the chiefs of the German police (Oberg-Bousquet agreements) so that the French police would carry out the arrests of foreign Jews. In the free zone, he ensures that, according to Pierre Laval’s wish, "children, including those under 16 years old, are allowed to accompany their parents" during deportation. No doubt becoming aware of the probable outcome of the war, he resigned from his position in December 1943.
After 3 years of preventive detention, placed under house arrest in Germany, and a few months of provisional release, Bousquet is brought to justice. During his trial, the former Secretary-General of the Police claims to have "systematically refused to deal with Jewish issues". On June 23, 1949, he is acquitted and recognized as a resistant.
Returning to civilian life, René Bousquet embarked on a brilliant career at the Bank of Indochina. In 1989, following a complaint, he is charged again. After 4 years of proceedings, the indictment concludes with his indictment for crimes against humanity.
On 8 June 1993, three days before the notification of his indictment, René Bousquet was shot dead in Paris by Christian Didier. He had already attempted to assassinate Klaus Barbie.
1904-Landsberg 1948
BRACK Viktor
Nazi, one of the main officials responsible for implementing the euthanasia program
Viktor Brack was born on November 9, 1904. Son of a doctor, he studied economics in Munich. Already in 1923 he enrolled in the SA. Before becoming a liaison officer between the SS and the Führer’s chancellery in 1936, he maintained good relations with Himmler and worked as a driver for him. Rising to the ranks of SS-Oberführer and SS-Sturmbannführer, he became section chief at office II of the Reich Chancellery, which was responsible for implementing the euthanasia program, nicknamed T4, in 1939. The code name comes from the address of the office, from where Viktor Brack’s team operates with the help of Doctor Karl Brandt, under the direction of the head of the Führer’s chancellery, Philipp Bouhler.
Officially, the program aims to provide "a merciful death" (Gnadentod) to the incurable sick. In reality, it is about the systematic and secret elimination of mentally and physically handicapped people with the aim of lightening the social system and "purifying the Aryan race". During the period from 1939 to 1945, an estimated total of 300,000 people were victims of these medical killings.
Viktor Brack is mainly responsible for ensuring the clandestinity of the action, by carefully selecting the medical staff. From 1941, the staff of the T4 department actively prepare the implementation of the "Final Solution", having already used, among other things, gassing as a method of human extermination. On several occasions, Brack places his team at the disposal of Globocnik, head of the SS and police in Lublin, for the extermination camps of the "Aktion Reinhard". In 1942, Brack recommended to Himmler the sterilization by X-rays of two to three million Jews and Jewish women "usable" for forced labor.
At the trial of "German doctors, war criminals", which takes place from 1946 to August 1947 in Nuremberg, before an American court on the sidelines of the great trial of the Nazi leaders, Viktor Brack is one of the three non-physicians accused. Like his former colleague, Dr. Karl Brandt, he was sentenced to death and hanged in Landsberg in 1948.
