Thread by @Vanguard_WW2

🇫🇷 Occupied Paris - 23 July 1944
19-year old Madeleine Riffaud cycles along the Parisian cobblestone streets. She has a gun and has been ordered to take the war to the enemy. She stops on the Pont de Solferino. There is a German soldier there, watching the Seine. Madeleine waits until he turns towards her, and then shoots him twice in the head.... 1/10

Madeleine was born on 23 August 1924 at Arvillers in the Somme department. Her parents were school teachers and her father had been badly wounded during the Great War. Family holidays are spent in the Haute-Vienne with family friends near a village called Oradour-sur-Glane. 2/ 10

War and the Germans returned to the Somme in May/June 1940. Madeleine and her family joined the great exodus of refugees and set off to drive the 600 kilometres south to the Limousin. On the way, German planes strafed the road, and her grandfather protected her with his own body as they lay in a ditch. 3/10

Whilst in the ditch, Madeleine felt the first spark of resistance, but the veritable flame was lit later when a group of German soldiers at a train station began harassing her. Hearing the commotion, an officer appeared and berated the men, but then kicked Madeleine's behind and sent her sprawling. Incandescent with rage and humiliation, she vowed revenge. 4/10

In 1941, she was sent to a students sanitorium in the Alps to help recover from tuberculosis and it was whilst convalescing that she discovered the works of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and it would be the name of Rainer that later chose as her Resistance 'nom de guerre'. The sanitorium was also home to a clandestine printing press making fake papers for Jews to hide there as patients. Madeleine became a Resistance member there, she was 17 years old. 5/10

In September 1942, Madeleine began studying to be a midwife in Paris. She had to prove herself to a medical student Resistance group by carrying objects to other networks, but it was in early 1944 that she joined a Parisian FTP group. In late July 1944, the group received orders to start action against the occupying troops in provision for the uprising that would come a month later. And so Madeleine did so, shooting dead the German on the Solferino bridge. 6/10

Madeleine rode off, but the noise of a car, an unusual thing in occupied Paris at that time, got closer and closer and then pushed her off the road. Before she could do anything, she was handcuffed and taken to the Gestapo headquarters at Rue des Saussaies where she spent weeks being interrogated in the special torture chamber there. 7/10

Sentence to death, she was due to be shot on 5 August along with other prisoners, but at the last minute was identified by the owner of the gun that she had used and she was extracted from the group and sent to Fresnes prison where she was tortured again. By now, the German situation on the Normandy front was unravelling and on 15 August, she was put on the last train to leave Paris for the death camps, but managed to escape. Arrested again, she was part of a prisoner exchange four days later organized by the Swedish consul Raoul Nordling who would be soon playing an important role in the liberation of Paris. 8/10

No sooner was Madeleine released than she rejoined an FTP Resistance group. Integrated the St. Just company as a second lieutenant. On Wednesday, 23 August, Madeleine celebrated her 20th birthday by leading an attack on a German train stuck in a tunnel under the Buttes Chaumont. Her group took 137 German soldiers prisoner, and the next day Allied troops entered the city. 9/10

Madeleine was demobbed after Paris was liberated, despite wanting to carry on fighting, but this was refused due to her medical history. She suffered years of depression and PTSD from her time spent in the hands of the Gestapo. To tell the rest of her life story would require many threads. Madeleine is still with us and just a month shy of celebrating her 100th birthday. We will certainly raise a glass or two to her this coming 23 August. 10/10