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Heroic People Who Deserve to be Way More Famous

Khalid Elhassan March 31, 2021 36 min

A black GI and captured Germans in WWII. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

A closeup of Georges Blind’s death-defying smile. Pinterest

16. Georges Blind Paid With His Life for Refusing to Snitch on His Comrades to the Nazis

The photograph of the heroic Georges Blind calmly smiling at his executioners as they aimed their rifles at him became a powerful symbol of the antifascist struggle. Literally smiling in the face of death has to be one of the manliest ways to meet one’s fate. However, unbeknownst to Blind, he was not destined to die that day. It was a mock execution, used by the Germans as psychological torture in an attempt to scare him into snitching on his resistance comrades.

The building against which Georges Blind was stood for his mock execution. WWII Forums

Blind refused to snitch, so on October 24^th, 1944, he was sent to Dachau concentration camp, where he arrived on the 29^th. From Dachau, he was sent to Auschwitz, and arrived there on November 24^th. There, he was killed by lethal injection on November 30th, 1944. He was posthumously promoted to sergeant in the French Forces of the Interior. He was also posthumously awarded a Croix de Guerre, a Medaille Militaire, a Resistance Medal, and an Honor Medal for Fighters for exceptional services.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.