Remarkable Heroes and Heroines of the French Resistance in World War II

22. Organizing Combat

In late 1940, Henri Frenay began to organize one of the first resistance movements in the unoccupied zone: Combat. The Combat movement began as an underground network that spread anti-German propaganda and information. It did so chiefly through the secret publication of the newspaper Combat, which became one of the most influential Resistance publications.

As the movement grew, Frenay helped establish a structured underground army that conducted intelligence operations, recruitment, and coordinated with other resistance groups. Frenay tried to unite the various resistance movements, and worked closely with Jean Moulin, who was sent by Charles de Gaulle to organize the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR). Their politics differed – Frenay leaned right while many in the Resistance were leftist – but they managed to work together. Nonetheless, tensions and ideological differences often caused friction.

21. Frenay After the War

After the liberation of France in 1944, Frenay served briefly in de Gaulle’s provisional government as Minister for Prisoners, Deportees, and Refugees. He eventually gave up on politics, and turned his energies to writing and preserving the history of the Resistance. His memoir, La Nuit finira (“The Night Will End”), published in 1973, is one of the major works about the Resistance period.

Henri Frenay died on August 6^th, 1988. Today, he is remembered a pioneer of the French Resistance – an organizer, writer, and patriot who helped lay the foundation for the larger, coordinated efforts that contributed to France’s liberation. His efforts demonstrated that early resistance, even in isolation, could grow into a national movement.

20. France’s Youngest Prefect and the Nazis

Jean Moulin was one of the most important French Resistance figures, and remains a symbol of unity, courage, and patriotism in France. Born on June 20^th, 1899, in Béziers, southern France, Moulin came from a politically active republican family. He studied law, became a civil servant, and rose quickly through the ranks to become France’s youngest prefect by age 38. Moulin was the Eure-et-Loir department’s prefect when Germany invaded France in 1940.

Early in the occupation, he was asked to sign a falsified document that blamed French Army Senegalese soldiers for atrocities committed by German soldiers, but refused. For that, he was imprisoned and tortured so badly that he attempted suicide by cutting his own throat with a piece of broken glass. A guard found him and he was taken to a hospital, where he recovered. That left Moulin with a scar that he often hid with a scarf.

19. The Resistance’s Unifier

Jean Moulin’s early act of defiance marked was the start of his involvement in resisting the German occupation. In 1941, he made a dangerous journey to London via Spain and Portugal, and met with General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Forces. De Gaulle recognized Moulin’s integrity and organizational skills, and directed him to unify the various, often competing, resistance movements within occupied France.

Moulin returned to France under the alias “Rex” and began the difficult task of coordination and unification. His greatest accomplishment was the creation of the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR) in May 1943, a body that brought together multiple resistance factions under a single political leadership aligned with de Gaulle. Such unity was essential for the often fractious resistance movements to become the French Resistance, an effective force against the Nazis and one able to help prepare for France’s liberation.

18. Success and Martyrdom

Moulin’s success made him a target. In June, 1943, he was arrested by the Gestapo during a meeting near Lyon. He had most likely been betrayed by a Resistance member. Moulin was interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo’s Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon”, but revealed no vital information. He was ordered transported to Germany, but died from his injuries en route, likely around July 8^th, 1943.

Jean Moulin’s legacy lives on in France. He is commemorated as a national hero, and in 1964, his ashes were symbolically interred in the Panthéon. It was a moving a powerful ceremony that honored Moulin as the embodiment of the Resistance spirit: a man who, in France’s darkest hour, chose unity over division, and sacrifice over submission.

17. The Revocation of Jews’ French Citizenship

Charlotte Sorkine was born in Paris in 1925 to a Romanian mother and Belorussian father. One of her grandfathers was an anthropology professor, and she was raised in an intellectual household. Her home hosted a weekly salon frequently attended by French luminaries of the arts, letters, sciences, and academia. Sorkine’s life took a drastic turn for the worse after the Nazis defeated France in 1940.

The collaborationist Vichy government enacted discriminatory laws that revoked naturalized Jews’ French citizenship, and authorized the internment of foreign Jews or the restriction of their residence. When out in public, Sorkine and her family had to wear yellow stars of David sewn on their clothes to identify themselves as Jews. By 1942, her father was in hiding. Later that year, her mother was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Sorkine’s father and brother fled to Nice in southern France, and she followed soon thereafter.

16. A Teenager Blowing up the SS

Sorkine joined the local Resistance at age seventeen. Her father stumbled upon her stash of weapons, so she arranged false identity papers to get him out of the country and out of her hair. She told him she would go with him to Switzerland, but at the border, bid him adieu, handed him over to a guide, then turned around and returned to the fight.

As part of her resistance work, she stashed and transported weapons and money, often beneath the Germans’ noses, and created and supplied fake documents. She also guided fugitives to the French border and safety beyond in Switzerland or Spain. Her charrges included freedom fighters and opponents of the Nazis, as well as Jewish children. Sorkine also participated in direct actions, such as planting explosives – one of her bombs went off in a Paris movie theater attended by SS members.

15. Sorkine’s Postwar Career

Sorkine also fought in the 1944 Paris Uprising that preceded that city’s liberation. For her wartime services, she was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance, the Croix du Combattant Volontaire de la Resistance, the Médaille des Services Volontaires Dans la France Libre, and the War Commemoration Medal. Sorkine resumed her education after the war. She studied psychology at the Sorbonne and art history at the Louvre, as well as languages.

She sailed to America to further her mental health studies, and to examine a model treatment center in Kansas in order to establish a similar one in Paris. During a rough crossing of the Atlantic, she met and befriended Ernest Hemingway. After her return to France, she married in a ceremony attended by her Resistance compatriots, and settled into family life and a rewarding professional career.

14. The French Resistance’s Best Forger

After France’s defeat and occupation by the Nazis, a teenaged Adolfo Kaminsky (1925 – 2023) joined the Resistance. He was a precocious and self-taught gifted chemist, who had a talent for forgery. He used those skills to make himself perhaps Europe’s best underground forger. He specialized in identity papers, and forged documents that helped save the lives of thousands of Jews.

Kaminsky continued his forgery career after the war, to help liberation movements around the world. He was born in 1925 to Russian Jewish parents who had emigrated to Argentina, then relocated to France in 1932. He dropped out of school at age thirteen to help support his family, and worked for a dry cleaner. The job introduced him to various compounds, which led to a familiarity with, and subsequent passion for, chemistry.

13. A Teenager in the Resistance

Kaminsky began to read up on chemistry, and took a part time job working for a chemist on the weekend. That came in handy during his subsequent career as a forger. Kaminsky was fifteen-years-old when Germany conquered France in 1940. It did not take long before he and his Jewish family felt the Nazi yoke. Their home was seized early in the occupation to quarter German troops, and the Kaminskys were evicted.

The following year, the Nazis shot Kaminsky’s mother dead. In 1943, the rest of the family was interned in a holding camp, preparatory to deportation to Auschwitz. They were only spared after intervention from the Argentinean consul. By then, sixteen-year-old Kaminsky had joined the French Resistance.

12. This Kid’s Gift For Chemistry Was a Godsend to the Resistance

Sent by his father to pick up forged identity papers from a Resistance cell, Kaminsky discovered that they had trouble removing a particular dye. The precocious chemist gave them a solution off the top of his head that immediately solved their problem. Impressed, the Resistance put him to work in an underground laboratory in Paris.

He spent the rest of WWII working out of a secret laboratory in Paris. He specialized in forging documents for those on the run from the Nazis and in need of fake IDs, particularly Jews. By war’s end, he had produced fake documents that helped save over 14,000 Jewish men, women, and children, from the Holocaust.

11. Helping Other Resistance Movements After the War

After the war, Kaminsky worked as a professional photographer. He also continued his clandestine work as a master forger, and lent his talents to disadvantaged peoples and liberation causes around the world. He created documents for thousands of freedom fighters, such as the Algerian FLN, refugees, exiles, and pacifists.

As the Jerusalem Post summed his career: “He grew to be a humanist forger, a utopian outlaw, the Robin Hood of false papers, preparing passports and identity cards for the world’s oppressed.” He continued forging until 1971, before moving to Algeria. He lived there for ten years, married a Tuareg woman, and had five children with her, including a well-known French hip-hop artist known as Roce. Adolfo Kaminsky passed away in 2023, aged 97.

10. A Courageous Fireman

Georges Charles Louis Blind (1904 – 1944) was a French fireman, ambulance driver, and French Resistance member from Belfort. He became famous in 1984 when a photograph was published to try and identify an anonymous man’s display of extraordinary courage in the face of death. It depicted a man with his back to a wall, identified as near a moat in the Belfort Citadel, and a wide smile across his face as he faced a German firing squad with its raised rifles aimed at him.

A man from Belfort stepped forward and identified the man in the picture as Georges Blind, his father, who had died in Nazi custody. A blacksmith, Blind became a fireman in 1929. A few months into the Nazi occupation of France, he and others sheltered a statue of Edith Cavell, a World War I heroine who had been executed by the Germans.

9. Smiling in the Face of Death

As a fireman, Blind had a pass that allowed him to drive fire trucks and ambulances between Belfort and Alsace. He eventually became a Resistance courier, and used his ambulance to transport fugitives fleeing the Nazis, weapons, information, and clandestine publications. He was arrested by the Germans on October 14^th, 1944, and jailed.

At some point between October 15^th and 23^rd, he was placed before a firing squad, and somebody took the photo that captured his courage, smiling in the face of death. It immortalized him as an anti-fascist symbol of the Resistance. Literally smiling in the face of death has to be one of the manliest ways to shuffle off the mortal coil. However, unbeknownst to Blind, he was not to die that day.

8. Refusing to Snitch on Comrades

Blind had been subjected to a mock execution, used as psychological torture in an attempt to scare him into snitching on his Resistance comrades. He declined, 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, where he arrived on November 24^th. There, he was killed by lethal injection on November 30^th, 1944. Georges Blind 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.

7. Before He Became Famous, This Global Star Was in the French Resistance

Marcel Marceau (1923 – 2007) was and remains the world’s most famous mime. His white-faced character, the melancholy vagabond Bip, became globally famous from TV and stage appearances. Among many accomplishments in his long and eventful career, Marceau won an Emmy Award, and got declared a national treasure in Japan despite the fact that he was not even Japanese.

He was also admitted to the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts as a member, and became a decades-long friend of Michael Jackson. Indeed, the King of Pop borrowed some of Marceau’s moves and used them in his dance routines. Before he became world famous, however, Marceau spent most of WWII in hiding and working for the French Resistance.

6. A Jewish Family Hiding From the Nazis

The world’s most famous mime was born Marcel Mangel into a Jewish family in Strasbourg, France. His father was a kosher butcher originally from Poland, and his mother hailed from today’s Ukraine. The family had to hide its Jewish origins when the Nazis conquered France in 1940. They fled to central France, but the father was captured in 1944 and sent to Auschwitz, where he perished.

Marceau moved to Paris with a new name and forged identity papers. The future star went underground in the French capital, adopted the surname “Marceau” after a French Revolutionary War general, and joined the Resistance. His underground activities included the rescue of many Jewish children from German clutches.

5. Becoming “Marceau”

Marceau’s talent for miming – a career to which he had aspired ever since he saw a Charlie Chaplain movie when he was five-years-old – came in handy. He used it to distract and quiet the children as he smuggled them past German guards and across the border to safety in Switzerland. After the Allies landed in France in 1944, Marceau gave his first major performance before an audience of 3000 troops in recently-liberated Paris. He then joined the Free French army for the remainder of the war.

Marceau’s talent for languages and near fluency in English and German led to his appointment as a liaison officer with General George S. Patton’s Third US Army. Marcel Marceau passed away in a retirement home in 2007. A biographical movie based on Marceau’s life and starring Jesse Eisenberg, Resistance, was released in 2020.

4. A Teenage Girl With a Gun

Life Magazine correspondent Jack Belden entered the French town of Chartres in August, 1944, and there encountered a gun-toting teenage girl who stood out from everybody around her. She was Simone Segouin, also known by her nome de guerre Nicole Minet. Belden wrote an article that made her a temporary celebrity.

Born in 1925 into a poor peasant family near Chartres, about 55 miles from Paris, Segouin grew up able to hold her own among men: she was the only girl in a family that included three brothers. She joined the antifascist fight in 1943, when a local French Resistance leader killed a collaborator in the center of Charters, then went on the lam. As he moved about the countryside, he came in contact with then-seventeen-year-old Segouin. Impressed by her poise, he recruited her into the Resistance as a courier.

3. From Courier to Combat Operative

Segouin was taught how to operate a submachine gun – a weapon with which she became highly proficient. She was also gradually introduced to the activities of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, a combat alliance of militant communists and French nationalists. As a courier, she needed a bicycle to get about, but she did not have one.

So her first French Resistance mission was to steal a bike from the Germans. She pulled it off, and the bicycle was repainted and became her personal reconnaissance vehicle. It allowed her to deliver messages and stake out targets. After she demonstrated that she could handle herself in dangerous situations, Segouin was allowed to participate in hazardous combat missions. She began to blow up bridges, derail trains, and kill or capture Nazis.

2. The Girl Who Got a Kick Out of Killing Nazis

Segouin killed her first German on July 14^th, 1944. Around 5AM, she waited in ambush in a roadside ditch. When two enemy soldiers rode by in bicycles, she opened fire with her submachine gun and killed both. She went to the road, searched the bodies, collected their papers and weapons, then made her way alone through the woods to deliver the haul to her Resistance hideout. She confessed that she had enjoyed killing the detested occupiers.

It was unsurprising: Segouin grew up intensely patriotic, inspired by her father, a decorated soldier who had fought in World War I. When first recruited into the Resistance, she was asked if she felt queasy about killing Germans. She replied: “No. It would please me to kill Boche“. As she put it decades later, it was simple: “The Germans were our enemies – we were French“.

1. Segouin After the War

Segouin was with the Resistance fighters of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans when they helped liberate Charters on August 23^rd, 1944. She helped capture 25 Germans, and shepherded them to POW pens. She and her comrades then linked up with the French 2^nd Armored Division as it headed out to liberate Paris. She was in the thick of the fighting that freed the French capital on August 25^th.

For her performance, she was promoted to lieutenant, and awarded a Croix de Guerre. After the war, she became a pediatric nurse, and in 2017, a street in Courville-sur-Eure, a small town near Charters in which she lived, was named in her honor. In 2021, she was appointed a Knight of the National Order of the Legion of Honour, France’s highest and most prestigious order of merit. Simone Segouin passed away in 2023, at age 97.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Accidental Talmudist – Girl With a Gun: Simone Segouin

BBC – Jean Moulin (1899 – 1943)

Chemins de Memoire – Henri Frenay

Clinton, Alan – Jean Moulin, 1899-1943: The French Resistance and the Republic (2001)

Daily Mail, August 29^th, 2015 – The Hotpants Hotshot: Formidable Derring-do of the Nazi Hunting, Gun Toting Pin Up Teen of the French Resistance

Find a Grave – Georges Blind

Forward – True History of an Unknown Hero of the French Jewish Resistance

History Collection – 10 Amazing Facts About the Polish Resistance in World War II

History Network – The French Resistance’s Secret Weapon? The Mime Marcel Marceau

Kaminsky, Sarah – Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life (2016)

Life Magazine, September 4^th, 1944 – The Girl Partisan of Chartres

New York Times, August 9^th, 1988 – Henri Frenay, Resistance Fighter, 82

New York Times – Adolfo Kaminsky Dies at 97; His Forgeries Saved Thousands of Jews

Times, The, September 24^th, 2007 – Marcel Marceau, Celebrated French Mime Artist Whose Clowning Dramas Eloquently Expressed the Wonder and Terror Existence

Washington Jewish Week – Charlotte Sorkine: Unknown Hero of the French Resistance

WWII Forums – Georges Blind, the Man Who Smiled at His Firing Squad