1. Germaine Tillion was a French ethnologist, known for her work in Algeria in the 1950s on behalf of the Government of France.
17 Facts About Germaine Tillion
1. 2.
Germaine Tillion was the daughter of Lucien Tillion, a magistrate, and Emilie Cussac Tillion.
3.
Germaine Tillion's mother was noted as an art historian and a French resistance fighter.
4.
Germaine Tillion's family belongs to the french bourgeoisie, they are both republicans and catholics.
5.
Germaine Tillion studied there from primary to secondary school, at the start of Word War One.
6.
Germaine Tillion left for Paris to study social anthropology with Marcel Mauss and Louis Massignon, obtaining degrees from the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, the Ecole du Louvre, and the INALCO.
7.
Germaine Tillion became one of the members in the French Resistance in the network of the Musee de l'Homme in Paris.
8.
Germaine Tillion's missions included helping prisoners to escape and organizing intelligence for the allied forces from 1940 to 1942.
9.
Germaine Tillion was transported in the Convoi des 31000 in 1943.
10.
On 21 October 1943, Germaine Tillion was sent to the German concentration camp of Ravensbruck, near Berlin with her mother, Emilie, a resistante.
11.
Germaine Tillion's mother was killed in the camp in March 1945.
12.
Germaine Tillion escaped Ravensbruck in the spring of that year in a rescue operation of the Swedish Red Cross that had been negotiated by Folke Bernadotte.
13.
Germaine Tillion documented 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.
14.
Germaine Tillion returned to Algeria in 1954 to observe and analyze the situation at the brink of the Algerian War of Independence.
15.
Germaine Tillion described as the principal cause of the conflict the pauperization of the Algerian population.
16.
Germaine Tillion was among the first to denounce the use of torture by French forces in the war.
17.
Germaine Tillion was Honorary Professor at France's School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences at the time of her death in 2008.