Former resistant deported in 1944, Pierre Rolinet died Sunday at the age of 99, announced Monday, April 25 the National Association of deportees and families of the disappeared from the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, the only concentration camp located in France.
“
We have unfortunately learned of his death, which occurred this Sunday April 24 in the morning, a few weeks before his 100th birthday on June 4,
” Jean-Luc Schwab, president of the Amicale, told AFP.
“
The coincidence is that he left on the very day of Remembrance of the victims of the Deportation.
»
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Born in 1922 in Allenjoie (Doubs), Pierre Rolinet trained in industrial design at Peugeot, where he spent his entire career.
During the Second World War, he refused to join the Compulsory Labor Service (STO).
Licensed, he joined a resistance network, under the name of Pierre Georges.
Arrested in possession of weapons by the Germans in 1943, he was imprisoned and then sentenced to death, a sentence commuted to NN deportation (Nacht und Nebel, night and fog), qualifier of the Third Reich for deported resistance fighters "
doomed to disappear without leaving of tracks
”.
Evacuated to Dachau under registration number 101.460
He arrived in April 1944, under registration number 11,902, at the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, where he remained for several months.
“
It was the Communists, who had organized solidarity between French people within the camp, who saved me
,” he explained to the regional daily Est Républicain last November.
Evacuated to Dachau under registration number 101,460 in September 1944, when Struthof was closed, he was then transferred to the Allach camp, near Munich, which was liberated by the American army in April 1945.
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Anxious to preserve the memory, this resident of Montbéliard (Doubs), Commander of the Legion of Honor, testified until the end of his life of his experience, in schools or during visits to Struthof.
President of the National Association of Natzweiler-Struthof deportees from 2007 to 2017, he remained its honorary president.
Natzweiler-Struthof was the only Nazi concentration camp located in France, erected in 1941 in Alsace then annexed to the Hitler Reich.
About 17,000 detainees and deportees were interned there from May 1941 to September 1944. He was at the head of a network of 53 neighboring annex camps, totaling with him 50,000 imprisonments and nearly 20,000 deaths.
The Natzweiler-Struthof camp was one of the deadliest in the Nazi system, apart from the extermination camps.