Hubert Germain, the last of France’s officially designated heroes of the resistance, has died aged 101, reports The Guardian.
He was the only surviving member of the 1,038-strong Order of the Liberation, France’s highest bravery order, handpicked by the country’s wartime hero, General Charles De Gaulle.
Germain made his last public appearance in June in a wheelchair alongside the French president, Emmanuel Macron, at a ceremony to mark the moment many consider the resistance to the Nazi occupation began – with de Gaulle’s radio broadcast from London on 18 June 1940.
The son of a general in France’s colonial army, he walked out of an entrance exam at France’s Naval College shortly after France fell to the Germans in the summer of 1940.
“I am going to war,” he told the shocked examiner.
Standing 1.90 metres tall (6ft 3in), he boarded a ship carrying Polish soldiers to England, where he arrived on 24 June 1940.
His shock at the call by the collaborationist Gen Philippe Pétain’s to lay down arms prompted him to take a decision many at the time thought rash and foolhardy.