Manouchian group halloween

Heroes and Martyrs of the Resistance

by Mitch Abidor

On the afternoon of February 21, 1944, 23 members of a Communist Resistance movement, the Francs Tireurs et Partisans - Main - d'oeuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI), were executed at Mont Valerian.

The one-day trial of these men and women, who were to become known as the Manouchian Group (after the leader of the Parisian section of the organization, the Armenian activist and poet Missak Manouchian), had been the subject of a huge publicity campaign in the collaborationist press.

Manouchian group halloween

The reason for the campaign was simple: of the 23, 20 were foreigners, and of them, 11 were Jews. The goal of the publicity campaign was to use the Manouchian Group to paint the Resistance as a Communist, foreign and (more specifically), a Jewish affair.

The daily France-Soir headlined its coverage of the trial with: “The trial of the 24 Judeo-Communist terrorists/The Jew Rayman and Alfonso, accomplices of Missak Manouchian, tell judg