Hubert Germain, the last of the liberation companions, is dead – archyworldys

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Hubert Germain died at the age of 101, announced Tuesday, October 12 the Minister of the Armies, Florence Parly, in the Senate, without specifying the exact date of the disappearance of the one who was the last of the companions of the Liberation. “I would like to have a moving thought for him, for his family and for his brothers in arms who left us for a long time. It is an important moment in our history ”, said Florence Parly.

Only 1,038 people received the title of Companion of the Liberation. As the last of his representatives, Hubert Germain will be buried at Mont-Valérien.

The Elysée has announced that Emmanuel Macron will preside over the burial ceremony of Hubert Germain on November 11, which will be held at the Arc de Triomphe and Mont-Valérien. Previously, during a ceremony which will take place in the coming days at Les Invalides, the Head of State will pay tribute to Hubert Germain, whom he described as “Figurehead of free France” having “Embodied a century of freedom”.

Hubert Germain resembled the piece of sequoia that served him as a cane in the decline of his life: he was inflexible. Like the piece of wood on which he rested his great carcass, the last of the 1,038 companions of the Liberation did not know how to bend. He was like that, old soldier Germain, the last of the deres, all in one piece. “A rock”, said of him Pierre Messmer, of which he was the brother in arms within the Foreign Legion, to Bir Hakeim in 1942, then the minister of the government, in 1972, post accepted more by fidelity than by taste of the power.

Once seated, Hubert Germain turned and turned the solid stick with a distracted hand, his mind marauding eighty years away, wandering between the scorching desert of Libya and the snowy plains of Alsace. He recounted in one go memories as if chiseled in his memory, recited his story which, without a superfluous word, without a burst of voice, took on the value of an epic. An unruly, insolent young man appeared unvarnished, even a little loudmouthed. A soldier’s son in permanent revolt, turning in circles in his rage, who, in June 1940, in the chaos of defeat and the surrounding cowardice, refused fatality. At 19, the refractory sailed for England, going among the first to join de Gaulle and Free France. He found there an ideal, better, a destiny

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Stiff in his certainties for the next five years, he bowed neither to events, sometimes desperate, nor to men, occasionally desperate. The former lieutenant thus narrated how, after the landing in Provence, the French seated in front of a glass, in the shade of an arbor, applauded his men when they saw them pass. “My legionaries asked me: “But aren’t they coming with us?” I was ashamed. “ Further, he had put an end to a poor spectacle during the liberation of Autun (Saône-et-Loire) in 1944. Junk vigilantes heard shearing women after a sham trial. Hubert Germain had two cannons placed in front of the windows of the pseudo-tribunal. The masquerade was canceled as if by magic. And, in the East, this mayor of a municipality just reconquered after bitter fighting who intended to sell them water from his well … This weakness shocked him all the more because it was the opposite of the heroism he had rubbed shoulders with since 1940. She drew a stinging and saddened conclusion: “I fought for France, not for the French. “

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