Germaine Tillion, the French resistant betrayed by Father Robert Alesch, spent a year in the Paris prisons of Fresnes and La Santé. On October 21, 1943, Tillion was deported with her mother, Émilie, to the all-female Ravensbrück concentration camp outside Berlin. Amazingly, Tillion continued her ethnographic studies, observing the behavior of guards and fellow prisoners. She secretly wrote an opera to keep up her spirits. Émilie was gassed before the war ended, but Germaine Tillion survived. Tillion wrote extensively about the war once she returned to Paris, and resumed her ethnographic studies in the Middle East and North Africa. Germaine Tillion died on April 18, 2008. In 2014, it was announced by French president François Hollande that Tillion’s body would be buried at the Pantheon along with great French heroes dating back to the Revolution. Her family did not wish to disturb her remains, so dirt from her burial site occupies a place of honor at the Pantheon. Tillion, said Hollande, “incarnated the values of France when the country was beaten to the ground.”
Charles de Gaulle went on to a long and successful career as the leader of the French people. De Gaulle served for two years as head of the provisional government of France following World War II. He later served as prime minister from 1959 to 1969, then president for the next ten years. De Gaulle died in 1970 at the age of seventy-nine.
Winston Churchill was voted out of office after Allied victory in Europe but before the end of World War II. However, he was once again elected prime minister in 1951, serving four more years. Churchill died in 1965 at the age of ninety. Revisionist historians now believe that his “soft underbelly” strategy for attacking the European continent was a sound policy and might have succeeded, given greater Allied support.
General George S. Patton fought to the very last days of World War II, famously pushing his troops as far east as possible to halt incursion by troops of the Soviet Union into those territories. Patton was a passenger in a car hit by a truck just one day before returning home at war’s end. He was paralyzed and died soon after in Germany.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was implicated in the July 1944 plot to kill Adolf Hitler. Given the choice of suicide followed by a state funeral or a public trial that would surely result in torture and execution, Rommel took a cyanide pill in October 1944.
General Dwight Eisenhower went on to serve two terms as president of the United States. He kicked his three-pack-a-day cigarette habit, passing away at the age of seventy-eight in 1969.
Virginia Hall was decorated by British king George VI and American president Harry S. Truman for her brave undercover work. It is widely believed that much of the success of D-Day is owed to her intelligence reports and sabotage of German defenses with the French Resistance. Hall subsequently served in the Central Intelligence Agency. She died in 1982.
The memory of Jacques Bonsergent lives on. Following the war, the Lancry Métro station in the 10th arrondissement was renamed in his honor. Bonsergent is buried in his hometown cemetery at Malestroit in Brittany.
Colonel Fabien, a.k.a. Pierre Georges, was captured and tortured by the Nazis in 1943 but escaped. He died the following year when a mine exploded while he was leading a Free French fighting unit against German forces during the Battle of the Bulge. It is now common in France to name streets in towns with Communist leanings for Colonel Fabien. The Colonel Fabien Métro stop is under the Boulevard de la Villette, on the border of the 10th and 19th arrondissements.
The Battle of Bir Hakeim is remembered as one of the great French moments of World War II—and, indeed, French military history. The Bir-Hakeim Métro stop is an elevated platform in the 15th arrondissement, just a ten-minute walk south of the Eiffel Tower.
General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc—a.k.a. Jacques-Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque—was the French representative to the Japanese surrender on board the USS Missouri at the end of World War II. He was killed in the crash of a B-25 bomber flying over Algeria on November 28, 1947. The general is interred in the crypt at Les Invalides in Paris.
Jean Moulin’s ashes were interred in the Pantheon in Paris on December 19, 1964. As with many French heroes, a Métro station has been named in honor.
The husband and wife French refugees who appeared in Casablanca, Marcel Dalio and Madeleine Lebeau, went on to have lengthy film careers. The couple split up during the filming of Casablanca, with Dalio citing “desertion.” Dalio died in Paris in 1983. Lebeau lived long enough to become the oldest credited cast member of the film. She died in Spain in 2016 after breaking her femur in a fall. Madeleine Lebeau was ninety-two.
Father Robert Alesch was arrested after the war and placed on trial. Germaine Tillion witnessed the proceedings. The priest was found guilty and shot by a firing squad on January 25, 1949.