| Germaine Tillion | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 30, 1907 Allègre, Haute-Loire, France |
| Died | April 18, 2008 (aged 100) |
| Occupation | Anthropologist |
Germaine Tillion born in Allègre in Haute-Loire on May 30, 1907 – April 18, 2008) was a French anthropologist, best known for her work in Algeria in the 1950s on behalf of the French government.
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Studying social anthropology with Marcel Mauss and Louis Massignon. Licenciée en lettres, she receives a degree from the École pratique des hautes études, the École du Louvre, and the INALCO. She did four fieldwork in Algeria between 1934 and 1940, studying the Berber and Chaoui people in the Aures region of northeastern Algeria, to prepare for her doctorate in Anthropology.
As she came back to Paris from the field, France had been defeated and, Germaine Tillion turned into one of the leading commanders in the French Resistance in the network of the Musee de l'Homme in Paris. Her missions included helping prisoners to escape and organizing intelligence for the allied forces from 1940 to 1943. Betrayed by a priest, she was captured and sent to the German concentration camp of Ravensbrück, near Berlin with her mother, Émilie Tillion, also a resistante. From her arrival on the 21 October 1943 to the fall of the camp in Spring 1945, she wrote an Operetta, called "Le Verfügbar aux Enfers", a comedy describing the poor life of the "Verfügbar" in the world of the camp, to help the other survivors to have fun, at the same time undertaking a precise ethnographic analysis of the concentration camp.
Concentration Camp Survivor
In 1973, she published Ravensbruck: An eyewitness account of a women's concentration camp, detailing both her own personal experiences as an inmate as well as her remarkable contemporary and post-war research into the functioning of the camps, movements of prisoners, administrative operations and covert and overt crimes committed by the SS. She reported the presence of a gas chamber at Ravensbruck when other scholars had written that none existed in the Western camps, and affirmed that executions escalated during the waning days of the war, a chilling tribute to the efficiency and automated nature of the Nazi "killing machines." She documents the dual but conflicting purposes of the camps; on the one hand, to carry out the Final Solution as quickly as possible, and on the other, to manage a very large and profitable slave labor force in support of the war effort (with profits reportedly going to SS leadership, a business structure created by Himmler himself). Finally, she gives chilling vignettes of prisoners, prison staff, and the "professionals" who were central to the operation and execution of increasingly bizarre Nazi mandates in an attempt to explore the twisted psychology and outright evil behavior of oftentimes average participants who were instrumental in allowing, and then nurturing the death machines.
In the 1950s, during the Algerian War of Independence, Tillion served as an adviser to the French government in Algeria on its social policies, helping the government to set up 'Social Centres'. During this period, at the time of the battle of Algiers and through FLN Political advisor Hadj Smaine Mohamed El Hadi (Whom later became Minister of Justice in the Algerian Government and life long friend), she served as a liaison between the National Liberation Front leader Saadi Yacef and the French government, and helped arrange several cease-fires. Tillion was among the first to denounce the use of torture by French forces in the war.
In 1977 Germaine Tillion was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca and holds France's Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur. She was Honorary Director at France's School of High Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) at the time of her death.