Germaine Tillion in the Panthéon: Ethnologist, Resistance Fighter and Survivor of Ravensbrück

Tillion arrived back in Paris from Algeria in June 1940, just as the German army was reaching the city. Her first act of resistance was to give her family’s papers to a Jewish family. She then joined a group formed around the retired colonel Paul Hauet and the ethnologist Boris Vildé, the network later known by the name of the Musée de l’Homme.

From 1940 to 1942 she helped prisoners to escape and gathered intelligence for the Allies. The circle she worked with was infiltrated by Robert Alesch, a priest who was an agent of the Abwehr, and on 13 August 1942 he handed her over at the Gare de Lyon.

She was held at La Santé, then at Fresnes, where in January 1943 she learned that her mother, Émilie, had been arrested too. She kept working on her thesis in prison.

On 21 October 1943, classed as a Nacht und Nebel prisoner, Tillion was deported without trial to Ravensbrück, north of Berlin. Her mother was deported there in 1944 and killed in the camp in March 1945.

Classed among the Verfügbar, prisoners available for the worst chores, Tillion studied the camp as an ethnologist would, and secretly wrote Le Verfügbar aux Enfers, an operetta that set the horrors of camp life to popular tunes to make her fellow prisoners laugh.

In April 1945 she was among the French women evacuated by the Swedish Red Cross after negotiations with Himmler. The group smuggled out documents, including photographs of medical experiments and the text of the operetta, and her study of the camp later appeared as Ravensbrück.

Tillion went back to Algeria in 1954, as the war of independence began, and blamed the conflict above all on the impoverishment of the rural population. In October 1955 she launched social centres offering education and vocational training.

On 4 July 1957, in the Casbah of Algiers, she met the FLN leader Yacef Saadi in secret to try to stop the cycle of executions and bombings, and she was among the first to denounce torture by French forces.

She died in 2008, aged 100. On 21 February 2014 President François Hollande announced her entry into the Panthéon; her family wanted her to stay at Saint-Maur, so soil was taken from her grave, and she entered the crypt on 27 May 2015.