Claude Rodier was a physicist, teacher and staff sergeant in the Mouvements Unis de la Resistance, part of the French Resistance in Auvergne, France.
11 Facts About Claude Rodier
1.
2.
Claude Rodier was born on 21 July 1903 in Saint-Eloy-les-Mines to a family of secular, republican teachers.
3.
Claude Rodier's ancestors were miners, and one of her grandfathers died in a mining accident in the Combrailles region.
4.
On 28 August 1926, Claude Rodier married Pierre Virlogeux, a young ceramic engineer in Clermont-Ferrand.
5.
In 1940, after the available workforce diminished due to the large numbers of war prisoners detained in Germany, Claude Rodier returned to teaching at the girls' school in Riom.
6.
Claude Rodier was arrested on 8 February 1944 with her husband, her two sons, and Pierre's father.
7.
Claude Rodier was held at the military prison of the 92nd Regiment of the French Infantry with the wife of General Andre Marteau and Marie Pfister, grandmother of the writer Patrick Raynal.
8.
The Nazis expected Claude Rodier to participate as an atomic physicist in the German nuclear weapons program.
9.
Claude Rodier had been liberated on 2 May 1945 from the Wobbelin concentration camp by the 82nd Airborne Division of the United States and was repatriated to France on 29 July 1945 after a stay at the hospital of Ludwigslust to treat typhus and advanced bone decalcification.
10.
Claude Rodier remained ignorant of their fate until the liberation for his father, and the liberation of the concentration camps for his mother.
11.
Claude Rodier was profoundly affected by this for the rest of his life.