workingclasshistory:

On this day, 11 July 2002, German socialist and French resistance fighter Irene Bernard died aged 94. An office clerk and mother of three, she lived in Saarland, which was independent of Germany in the early days of Nazi rule, and became home to many Germans fleeing the regime. There she and her husband, Leander, assisted refugees. When Saarland was annexed by the German Reich in 1935, the Bernards fled to France to escape the Gestapo. There, they kept up their anti-fascist activities and helped volunteers on their way to fight general Franco’s nationalists in the Spanish civil war. When the Wehrmacht occupied southern France in 1942, Irene joined Travail Antifasciste Allemand, a combat unit of the French resistance consisting of thousands of mostly German speakers. She later went underground, fought with the National Committee for Free Germany and gathered military intelligence. After the war, Bernard took care of wounded German soldiers who were prisoners of war. Later she returned to Saarland and became involved with women’s and anti-war movements, and remained involved with anti-fascism and advocating for victims of Nazism.
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