Raymond Aubrac, 1914–2012

last updated 8 January 2015

Hollywood could hardly have scripted a more dramatic rescue. In 1943, Raymond Aubrac, captured in a raid on a secret meeting of top French Resistance leaders, was being held in Lyon by the notorious Gestapo torturer Klaus Barbie. Aubrac’s wife, Lucie, bribed a Nazi official with champagne and a silk scarf to let her wed Aubrac, even though they were already married. As Aubrac was being transported back to jail after the wedding ceremony at Lyon police headquarters, four cars full of Resistance fighters—including six-months-pregnant Lucie—ambushed the truck, killing five German guards and freeing all the prisoners. Aubrac would later say that marrying Lucie was the best decision he ever made.

Born Raymond Samuel to well-off shopkeepers in eastern France, Aubrac studied engineering in Paris and briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When he met schoolteacher Lucie Bernard in Paris, said The Washington Post, it was “love at first sight,” and the two married in 1939. After the Nazis invaded France, in 1940, the couple settled in Lyon and founded Libération Sud, an underground network of Resistance fighters. Under the nom de guerre Aubrac, they waged a covert war “that began with writing anti-Nazi graffiti and escalated into sabotage,” said The New York Times. Aubrac, a Jew, was arrested twice before falling into Barbie’s hands. His parents died in Auschwitz.

In February 1944, the Aubracs were evacuated to London, where Aubrac worked for Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s government-in-exile. In Paris after the war, Aubrac became friends “with a Vietnamese nationalist leader called Ho Chi Minh,” said The Independent (U.K.). Aubrac’s link with “Uncle Ho” made him a go-between in negotiations—first secret and then open—between the U.S. and North Vietnam. Aubrac was a controversial figure in postwar France, especially after Barbie claimed that Aubrac had tipped off the Gestapo about the meeting where he was captured—a contention that a panel of historians found groundless. At a state funeral at the Invalides in Paris, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Aubrac one of the “heroes of the shadows who saved France’s honor at a time when it appeared lost.”