On Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron launched celebrations on the 80th anniversary of France's liberation from Nazism during World War II by honoring the resistance in the context of activities that culminate in June with the commemoration of the “Normandy landings.”
Macron attended a ceremony commemorating the battles that took place 80 years ago in March 1944 between the German army and the paramilitary group known as the “French Militia” on the one hand and elements of the French Resistance on the other hand on the “Glières” plateau in the Alps region (southeast).
The French President recalled, more than once, the slogan of the resistance fighters: “Live in freedom or die.”
Between January and March 1944, 465 resistance fighters to the German occupation gathered on this plateau located in the Haute-Savoie department to receive weapons dropped by the Allies by helicopter in preparation for the landing of Provence (August 1944).
In late March of the same year, the German army and militia members raided the site and arrested two-thirds of the resistance fighters. 124 of them were killed during battles or in executions, while nine of them went missing and 16 others died in detention.
The French President stated, “This is our tragedy in France. The French were not confronting the Nazis alone…the French imprisoned French people and the French assassinated French people.”
He praised the different walks of life of the resistance men and their diversity. “They included teachers, villagers, notables, Jews, as well as Catholics, communists, socialists, de Gaulle supporters, anarchists, and French and foreign officers who united in the face of Nazism.”
“dark stages”
The French President then went to Iseo (south-east), where a home was dedicated to the memory of the Jewish children who took refuge there. The Nazi “Gestapo” police in the city of Lyon, on the orders of its commander Klaus Barbie, arrested 44 of them on April 6, 1944. They deported them and killed them in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp ( Poland) and Reval (Estonia).
In Ezio, Macron stressed that “the only cause of anti-Semitism is hatred,” according to the Elysee.
Between May 1943 and April 1944, the Izio Center, which was established at the initiative of Sabine Zlatin, a Polish-Jewish resistance fighter, and her husband, Miron Zlatin, who fled during the Russian Revolution, received about a hundred children, sometimes for only a few weeks.
A French presidential advisor said, “The president’s mission is to remember our special history, our great history, which also includes dark stages that must be confronted,” referring to the “militia’s” cooperation with the “Vichy” regime to confront the French resistance to the Nazi occupation.
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