Europe 1 with AFP 9:45 p.m., April 25, 2022

Former resistant deported in 1944, Pierre Rolinet died Sunday at the age of 99, announced Monday the National Association of deportees and families of the disappeared from the Natzweiler-Struthof camp.

"We have unfortunately learned of his death, a few weeks before his 100th birthday," Jean-Luc Schwab, president of the Amicale, told AFP. 

Former resistant deported in 1944, Pierre Rolinet died Sunday at the age of 99, announced Monday 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."

Sentenced to death in 1943

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 arms 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 "sentenced to disappear without leaving of tracks".

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He arrived in April 1944, under registration number 11,902, at the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, where he remained for several months.

"The living conditions there are appalling. Hunger, beatings, slave labor quickly exhaust Pierre. Sick, he is admitted to the camp infirmary. In six weeks, he loses 25 kilos. He owes his survival only 'to the solidarity of his comrades,' recalled in a press release Guillaume d'Andlau, director of the European Center of the deported resistant.

An essential testimony for the duty of memory

“It was the Communists, who had organized solidarity between French people in the camp, who saved me,” Pierre Rolinet 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. Anxious to preserve 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.

It also housed a gas chamber where 86 Jews were killed.