Missak Manouchian (also spelled Manoushian) (Armenian: Միսաք Մանուշյան) (1 September 1906 - 21 February 1944) was a French poet of Armenian birth, a militant communist in the MOI (Main-d'œuvre immigrée or Immigrant Workforce Movement), and military commissioner of the FTP-MOI (Partisan irregulars of the MOI) in the Paris region. He was 37 years old when executed by the Germans for his Résistance work.
Although Manouchian became well known for his leadership in the French Resistance, he was, above all, an intellectual and a talented poet.
Contents |
Missak Manouchian was born on 1 September 1906 at Adıyaman in the Ottoman Empire into a peasant family of Armenian ethnicity. The town was near the Syrian border. Manouchian's father died during the Armenian genocide of 1915, and his mother died soon afterward.
Missak and his brother, Karabet, now orphaned, joined the stream of Armenian refugees heading south into the French protectorate of Syria. The brothers were accepted at an orphanage, where they learned the French language, and acquired carpentry and other manual skills. They remained until they were able to secure passage to Marseilles, where they landed in 1925, when Manouchian was 19. Eventually, they moved to Paris, where Missak took a job as a lathe operator at a Citroën plant and joined the General Confederation of Labour (in French: Confédération Générale du Travail or CGT). This national association of trade unions was the first of the five major French confederations.
His brother Karabet died in 1927 of unknown causes. In the early 1930s when the world-wide economic crisis of the Great Depression set in, Missak Manouchian lost his job. Disaffected with capitalism, he began earning a meager living by posing as a model for sculptors. Manouchian also wrote poetry and, with his Armenian friend by the surname of Semmes, he founded two literary magazines, Tchank (Effort) and Machagouyt (Culture). They published articles on French literature and Armenian culture. The two young men translated the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud into Armenian, making many of these works available in Armenian for the first time. Both Manouchian and Semmes enrolled at the Sorbonne to audit courses in literature, philosophy, economics, and history.
In 1934, Manouchian joined the Communist Party. The following year, he was elected secretary of the Relief Committee for Armenia (HOC), an organization associated with the MOI (Immigrant Workforce Movement). He became a full-time militant. At a meeting of the MOI in 1935, he met a woman named Mélinée Assadourian, who became his companion (and, later, his wife). Also in 1935, Manouchian assumed responsibility for the Armenian-language weekly newspaper, Zangou, named for an Armenian river.
When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Manouchian as a foreigner was evacuated from Paris. He found work in the Rouen area, again as a lathe-operator. After the defeat of June 1940, he returned to Paris to find that his militant activities had become illegal. (French authorities had banned the Communist Party as early as September 1939.) On 22 June 1941, when the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Nazis began, Manouchian was arrested by the occupying Germans in an anti-Communist round-up in Paris. Interned in a prison camp at Compiègne, he was released after a few weeks without being charged.
Manouchian became the political chief of the Armenian section of the underground MOI, but little is known about his activities until 1943. In February of that year, Manouchian transferred to the FTP-MOI, a group of gunmen and saboteurs attached to the MOI in Paris; the FTP was an armed faction of the MOI that had been formed in April 1942 under the leadership of the Jewish Bessarabian, Boris Holban. The first detachment to which he was assigned included mostly Jewish Romanians and Hungarians, and only a few Armenians.
On 17 March 1943, Manouchian at age 36 participated in his first armed action, in Levallois-Perret. His lack of discipline earned him a reprimand, and he was suspended from further operations. In July 1943, he became technical commissioner of the FTP-MOI in Paris; in August, he became the military commissioner, replacing Boris Holban, who had been dismissed for insubordination. Joseph Epstein, head of another group of FTP-MOI, became the head of all of the partisan guerrilla fighters in the Paris region. Manouchian assumed command of three detachments, totaling about 50 fighters. The Manouchian group is credited with the assassination (by the partisans, Marcel Rayman, Léo Kneller, and Celestino Alfonso) on 28 September 1943, of General Julius Ritter, the assistant in France to Fritz Sauckel, responsible for the mobilization and deportation of labor under the German STO (the Obligatory Work Service) in Nazi-occupied Europe. The groups under Manouchian carried out almost thirty successful attacks on German interests from August to November 1943.
In March and July 1943, the Special Brigade No. 2 of General Intelligence made two sweeps, looking for troublemakers. (The Special Brigades were a collaborationist French police force specializing in tracking down "internal enemies": members of the French Resistance, dissidents, escaped prisoners, Jews, and those evading the STO.) The Special Brigades undertook a large operation based on tailing suspected activists, an effort which eventually led to the complete dismantling of the FTP-MOI of Paris in mid-November. They arrested a total of 68 persons, including Manouchian and Epstein. On the morning of 16 November 1943, Manouchian was arrested in his headquarters at Evry-Petit Bourg. His companion, Mélinée, managed to escape the police.
Missak Manouchian, tortured, and 22 of his comrades were handed over to the Germans' Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP) and all 23 were exploited in a show trial for propaganda purposes before execution. Manouchian and 21 of his comrades were shot at Fort Mont-Valérien, near Paris, on 21 February 1944. Only Olga Bancic, the twenty-third member of Manouhian's inner circle, was executed elsewhere; she was beheaded in the prison at Stuttgart on 10 May 1944.
The members of the group were:
The original document "the last letter by Manouchian" is currently stored in the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
In the wake of the executions, the Germans printed 15,000 propaganda posters, the famous red posters, that bore photos of ten of the dead, each in its own black medallion. In the center of the poster, Manouchian appeared, with this inscription: "Armenian gang leader, 56 bombings, 150 dead, 600 wounded." The objective of the poster was to convince ordinary French citizens that the members of MOI (and the Resistance in general) were nothing but murderous foreigners and a danger to law-abiding, cooperative, citizens. But, the red posters, pasted on the walls all over Paris, became emblems of martyrdom by freedom fighters, and popular support for the Resistance grew.
Photographs taken secretly by a German officer were made public by Serge Klarsfeld in December 2009.