René Niel 1897 - 1944

Born 4.6.1897 in Romeyer
Died 21.8.1944 in Hartheim

Biography

René Niel was born June 7 1897 in Romeyer. Romeyer is a small village in the foothills of Vercors where resistance to Nazism would develop intensively during World War II. 

In 1916, because he had decided in favor of a military career, he prepared for the competitive entrance examination of a grande école, Saint-Cyr, the Army Officers’ School that gave France its greatest military officers. He was injured in 1917 while fighting the dreadful 1914-1918 war on the battlefront. His condition was considered so serious that his mother was allowed to visit him one last time in a hospital in Amiens. He would escape from the ordeal with some huge scars on the torso and one hand. 

The horrors he had gone through during the war made him change his plans and choose a civil engineer career in the public service. He was sent to Nyons, in the metropolitan département of Drôme where he remarried after the death of his first Italian wife and got two children. As a liberal, he gave the municipal library literary advice about what to buy. As a member of the high school board, he tried to open a class for girls in their high school senior year. 

During World War II, he was a resistant from the beginning. Because of his job, he wandered a lot in the countryside and then was assigned the task of finding landing grounds for paratroopers which coordinates he would then pass on to a British intelligence officer he was in touch with. He knew the codes of the messages the BBC broadcasted.

He was arrested by the Gestapo on January 21 1944 at his home in front of his wife that would beseech the three Gestapo officers and the three German soldiers that were arresting her husband. As the same time five other Resistance fighters were arrested as well as fifteen Jewish refugees that had found refuge in Nyons in 1935 after fleeing Germany. The youngest one was four years old. 

René Niel arrived at Mauthausen at the end of March 1944 after passing through Fort de Montluc in Lyon, the jail where the French Resistance fighters were interned. The camp archives show that he died in Hartheim on August 21 1944.

His brother Gabriel Niel and his nephew Pierre Arnaubec were deported to Dachau as Resistance fighters but never reached their destination since they died in horrible conditions in the train that was taking them there.

Jean-Christophe Niel, grandson of René Niel

 

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