The ceremony was attended by US Vice President Kamala Harris.
The French President, Emmanuel Macron, paid tribute this Thursday to what is considered the last great hero of the liberation from the Nazi yoke during World War II, Hubert Germain, in a ceremony in which the American vice president was present, Kamala Harris.
In a solemn address at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on the occasion of the 103rd anniversary of the armistice of World War I, Macron reviewed the life path of Germain, who died on October 12 at the age of 101.
Until then I was the last survivor of the call Order of Companions of Liberation, created in 1940 by General Charles de Gaulle to honor the most prominent figures in the fight against the Nazi regime.
“They were all colleagues and there were 1,038,” recalled the current president in an address a few dozen meters from the place where Germain’s coffin covered by a French flag had been placed, symbolically next to the tombstone of the unknown soldier with whom he is remembered to the dead fighters of the World War I at the Arc de Triomphe.
Covered with a thick scarf and with a somewhat hoarse voice, Macron pointed out that among those 1,038 men and women there were “illustrious and anonymous, military and civilians, diverse due to their political opinions, their geographical origins, their religion.”
“All without possible distinction are the timeless face of France,” he stressed after noting that what united them was “the love of a free homeland, the rejection of divisions for the honor of France.”
Germain’s coffin had left the Invalides of Paris this morning, where it was loaded onto a tank bearing the name of Bir Hakeim, a battle of the Second World War which took place in 1942 in which he had meant himself.
On that tank, he made a tour of the city center preceded by motorists from the Gendarmerie and followed by members of the Republican Guard on horseback until he reached the Arc de Triomphe.
This afternoon, in another ceremony in the city of Suresnes, on the outskirts of Paris, in the presence of the French Prime Minister, Jean Castex, his coffin will come to rest permanently in the cripta del Mont Valérien, the main place where the Nazis shot those who resisted the occupation of France.
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Inside that monument inaugurated by Charles de Gaulle In 1960, where more than 1,000 resisters had been executed during the Second World War, is the crypt in which there are already another 16 liberation fighters, eleven of them military.
Hubert Germain was the son of a general of the colonial troops who fled to England at the beginning of the German occupation of France to join the Free French Forces that de Gaulle constituted from London.
He took part in fighting in Syria, North Africa, Italy and France until his demobilization in 1946, promoted to officer and received numerous French and foreign decorations.
Harris is in Paris for a five-day visit to heal the wounds of the bilateral crisis generated last September when Australia canceled a contract for the purchase of French submarines to opt for other Americans in the heat of an alliance with Washington and London hatched behind the back of Paris. (I)
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