Germaine Tillion

Germaine Tillion (1907 – 2008) was an eminent French ethnologist, intellectual, and resistance leader. Having spent years conducting field research among the Berber Chaoui people in the Aurès Mountains of Algeria, she returned to Paris in 1940 and immediately co-founded the *Réseau du Musée de l'Homme*, one of the first organized resistance networks in occupied France.

Betrayed and deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1943, where her mother was murdered in the gas chamber, Tillion used ethnological observation and humour as tools of psychological resistance, secretly writing a comic operetta, *Le Verfügbar aux Enfers*, in the camp's barracks. After liberation, she documented Nazi war crimes and later intervened courageously during the Algerian War to oppose state torture and negotiate ceasefires to save civilian lives. She was inducted into the Panthéon in 2015.