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

Khalid Elhassan May 12, 2025 18 min

Resistance - Women and men of the French Resistance — Women and men of the French Resistance. Pegasus Battlefield Tours

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

Resistance - Simone Segouin posing for reporters in 1944 — Simone Segouin posing for reporters in 1944. US National Archives

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“.

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.