Fernand Pauriol

Fernand Baptistin Pauriol (13 September 1913 in Mallemort – 12 August 1944 in Fresnes) was a French communist, journalist and resistance fighter with the French Communist Party (PCF) during World War II. As a young man, Pauriol trained and worked as a sailor, later specialising in wireless telegraphy. Under the influence of his father, he became interested in communist politics and that led him to join the PCF. In the later interwar period, he swapped his maritime career for a career working underground in the PCF. When the war started, his skills in building radio transmitters enabled him to become the director of communications for the PCF on 2 March 1942 when he replaced Charly Villard and used the alias "Duval". He was eventually arrested by the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle and shot.

Life Pauriol was born into a poor family of working class trades people. His father was a carpenter. As a child, he attended an upper primary school for boys in Aix-en-Provence. At the beginning of 1936, he was ordered to move to Marseille to provide the local SRI organisation a new orientation. development of the Thaelmann campaign, support of strikers, workers arrested in protest struggles, assistance of proscribed anti-fascists."

In 1937, Pauriol talents as a journalist led François Billoux to appoint him as editor-in-chief of "Rouge-Midi". The next day, he represented the central committee of the PCF at the departmental conference of the SRI. Representatives of the Popular Front organizations were invited to the conference. In April 1942, Pauriol constructed a radio transmitter that was used by Hersch and Miriam Sokol to provide a link to London for Trepper to transmit intelligence from an apartment in Maisons-Laffitte. The cipher clerk was Vera Ackermann. At the time this was only link between the Rote Kapelle in France and the Soviet Union. who informed him that she had first been visited by Abraham Rajchmann and then later Hillel Katz. On both occasions, she had pretended she did not know them. The meeting with Moussier had been arranged by Gestapo officer Karl Giering of the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle and was part of a German Funkspiel operation. Trepper was in custody of the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle. Ostensibly the operation was to prove to Soviet intelligence that he was still free and enable the Funkspiel operation to continue, otherwise he would likely have been executed but in reality it was an operation by Trepper to pass a message to the PCF that confirmed the espionage network had collapsed. Trepper had instructed Moussier not to recognise anybody from the Trepper network except himself. In early June 1943, Trepper met Moussier and passed a message from Giering, supposedly from Trepper to inform Soviet Intelligence that the French Rote Kapelle was still functioning, as well his own report and a letter instructing Duclos to send the report to Soviet intelligence as soon as possible. After the meeting, Moussier went into hiding. During the summer Pauriol visited Moussier and her husband Milo in Beugne l'Abbe, west of Luçon and arranged for the couple to disappear.

On 7 July 1943 the first part of the message was transmitted to Soviet intelligence by Jacques Duclos. The second part followed on 10 July. (German:V-Mann, plural V-Leute). They were generally prisoners who agreed to work as undercover agents on pain of death, should they have refused. When Moussier disappeared, he ordered the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle to search for Pauriol all over France, but months past and there was no sign of him. Giering decided to adopt another approach and used the Funkspiel to request Soviet intelligence send them the name of a radio technician to repair Trepper's malfunctioning radio transmitter. He was arrested by the Sonderkommando on 13 August 1943 during a meeting with Vayssairat