The ranks of cadres and great witnesses of resistance continue to clarify the disappearance Wednesday, February 27 Stephane Hessel, 95 years, one of the latest survivors of the secret services of Free France (BCRA).
“I am appalled by the death of Stephen, with whom I was bound by 70 years of friendship,” said Wednesday, Jean-Louis Cremieux-Brilhac, 96, former head of clandestine broadcasting to France’s national police of within London and author of several books on the free France.
“From the team at London Free France, there remains much that Daniel Cordier, also the BCRA, and me,” he says. Daniel Cordier, 92, was the secretary of Jean Moulin during the eleven months prior to his arrest and the author of a monumental biography of the first president of the National Council of Resistance.
HESSEL, DEPUTY CHIEF OF INTELLIGENCE IN THE BCRA
St??phane Hessel, re? U twice Normale Sup in 1938 as a foreign (German) and in 1939 as a Frenchman, he joined London in early 1941, says Jean-Louis Cremieux-Brilhac. “After a stint as an artillery observer, this brilliant young man, fluent in German, French? Ais and English, joined the Central Bureau of Intelligence and Action (BCRA, secret services of France free) as Deputy Head of the R (Intelligence) section. ”
With his young wife, Vitya, he formed a “lovely couple, very integrated into the social life of the Frenchman in London free and full of hope and courage,” recalls Jean-Louis Cremieux-Brilhac. Volunteered for a mission to France in March 1944, St??phane Hessel was arrested, tortured, deported to Buchenwald in September, sentenced to death. He escaped hanging thanks to a substitution of identity with a dead remote typhus.
After the war, Daniel Cordier and Stephane Hessel drafted the White Paper of BCRA. A year ago, the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE), heir to the BCRA, had made a solemn tribute to the Invalides to the 70th anniversary of its creation in the presence of two men.
A HANDLE FOR SURVIVORS
Other survivors, Jean-Louis Cremieux-Brilhac cites Yves Gu??na, 90, rallied to free France from June 20, 1940, wounded in Normandy in the ranks of the 2nd DB and former President of the Constitutional Council. There is also Fran? Ois Jacob, 92 year-old former physician of the 2nd DB, Nobel Prize winner and former Chancellor of the Order of the Liberation. Today they are only 23 survivors of this prestigious order, a total of 1038.
The last survivor of the National Council of Resistance (NCR), Robert Chambeiron, is 97 years old. In recent years, big names of the resistance disappeared Raymond and Lucie Aubrac, Alain Le Ray, the first commander of the Vercors, Pierre Messmer, Germaine Tillion, co-founder of the Museum of Man, Serge Ravanel, Chief Forces Network French? comforts of Toulouse within the liberation of the city.
As Raymond Aubrac or St??phane Hessel, very resistant continued to speak regularly. In March 2004, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the CNR program, Lucie and Raymond Aubrac, Germaine Tillion, St??phane Hessel, Daniel Cordier, the philosopher Jean-Pierre Vernant (d. 2007) and the former communist leader Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont (died in 2006) called the younger generations to respond to the challenge of the “base of the social conquests of Liberation.”









