36 Facts About Raymond Aubrac

Raymond Aubrac's father, Albert Samuel, was born on 2 March 1884, in Vesoul and his mother Helene Falk was born on 2 March 1894 in Crest.

Raymond Aubrac became an attache to the staff of the French Army.

Raymond Aubrac adopted several noms de guerre, among them "Vallet, Ermelin, Balmont and Aubrac".

Raymond Aubrac was arrested by the Milice on 15 March 1943 in a routine raid.

Raymond Aubrac was operating with fake identity papers under the pseudonym Francois Vallet.

Raymond Aubrac's captors had no idea whom they had captured.

On 21 June 1943, Raymond Aubrac was one of eight senior Resistance leaders, including Jean Moulin, secretly meeting in a doctor's surgery in the Lyon suburb of Caluire when Gestapo officers, under the orders of Klaus Barbie, stormed the place and arrested all the eight leaders.

Raymond Aubrac was sentenced to death by a Paris court, but the execution was not quickly carried out because the authorities still hoped to obtain intelligence from him.

Lucie Raymond Aubrac helped to organise his escape from the prison.

Raymond Aubrac claimed to be his fiancee, saying he was named "Ermelin" and that he had been caught in the raid while innocently visiting a doctor.

Raymond Aubrac was told that he was to be executed for resistance, and asked to marry him; a French legal clause allowed engaged people to marry if one of them was to die.

Raymond Aubrac organised the purge of the police forces and oversaw the often brutal treatment meted out to suspected collaborators with the Nazis.

Raymond Aubrac requisitioned a number of local industries, leading to allegations that he was really working in the interests of the Communists.

Raymond Aubrac was dismissed from his post and recalled to Paris after only four months.

Lucie Raymond Aubrac had been appointed to sit in the Provisional Consultative Assembly as representative of Liberation-Sud.

Raymond Aubrac's childbirth forced her to stay in London, but Emmanuel d'Astier, who had been in Algiers since November 1943, where he was appointed commissioner of the interior of the French Committee of National Liberation asked Raymond to go and join him there.

In 1948, Raymond Aubrac founded an institute, Bureau d'etudes et de recherches pour l'industrie moderne, to encourage trade with Communist countries in the Eastern Bloc.

Raymond Aubrac was a Director of the United Nations' Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization from 1964 to 1975.

Raymond Aubrac worked on many civil engineering projects in Europe, North Africa and Asia.

Raymond Aubrac served as a technical adviser to the government of Morocco, which has just attained independence from France, from 1958 to 1963.

Raymond Aubrac was to be used in the late 1960s by Henry Kissinger, as a secret intermediary between the Americans and the North Vietnamese at the height of the Vietnam War.

Raymond Aubrac joined a group of intellectuals and scientists working to end the war.

In 1975, while working on rebuilding projects in Vietnam, Raymond Aubrac witnessed the Fall of Saigon.

In 1985, Raymond Aubrac sat on the "Jury of Honor" that was to decide whatever the documentary Des terroristes a la retraite should be aired or not.

Shortly before his death in 1990, Klaus Barbie issued a statement saying it was Raymond Aubrac who had betrayed the secret of Jean Moulin's 1943 Caluire meeting with the Resistance leaders.

In 1994, Raymond Aubrac persuaded Madeleine Ruffaud, who had survived torture and interrogation by the Germans, to break her silence and speak publicly of her experience of the Resistance.

In 1996, Raymond Aubrac published his own autobiography Ou la memoire s'attarde.

Raymond Aubrac endorsed the Socialist Party's Francois Hollande for France's 2012 two-round presidential election, starting on 22 April.

Ho Chi Minh, a friend of Raymond Aubrac, became the godfather of the Aubracs' third child, daughter Elizabeth.

Raymond Aubrac died on 10 April 2012, aged 97, in the Val-de-Grace military hospital in Paris, surrounded by his family.

Raymond Aubrac had been hospitalized in recent days after suffering from fatigue.

Raymond Aubrac was accorded a state funeral will full military honors.

Raymond Aubrac had said he wanted only ex-Resistance fighters to speak at his funeral.

Vistel hailed Raymond Aubrac for "committing himself to make France more just and the world more humane".

Raymond Aubrac was later cremated on the same day with only family members present.

Raymond Aubrac's ashes were put beside those of Lucie Aubrac in the family tomb of the cemetery in the Burgundian village of Salornay-sur-Guye.