Medal of Deportation and Resistance for Acts of Resistance awarded to a French doctor

Dr. Gaston Crouzet was born on December 25, 1881, in St. Felix de Lodez, France. He and his wife Irene had a son Robert, who was born on April 21, 1910, in Aignes-Vives. They had another child, who moved to Madagascar with thier spoused and son Jean before the war. The family was Catholic and lived in the center of Marseille where Gaston was a general practitioner. Robert was a public notary. In May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded France. An armistice was signed in June, giving control of Paris and northern France to Germany. A Free Zone was established in the south, governed by Marechal Petain, known as the Vichy Regime. Gaston became a central member of the French resistance in Marseille. His primary responsibility was gathering information about German troop transports to North Africa and relaying the information to the British. Gaston’s network of contacts included an architect who would gather the information from German officers and relay it to Crouzet. His son Robert worked alongside him. In May 1943, Gaston and Robert were denounced by another resistance member. They were arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo for several days. They were then sent to Centre Penitentiaire de Fresnes near Paris and then to Compiegne internment camp. On January 29, 1944, they were deported to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. Gaston was assigned prisoner number 44158; Robert was number 44159. Both Robert and Gaston were able to correspond occasionally with Irene. On March 18, 1944, the men were separated when Gaston was transferred to Neuengamme, a subcamp of Sachsenhausen. On October 8, 1944, he was sent to Flossenbürg concentration camp near the Czech border. Gaston worked as a locksmith in the camps. In mid-April 1945 as Allied forces neared, the SS began evacuating the camp. When members of the 358th and 359th Infantry Regiments, 90th US Infantry Division, liberated Flossenbürg on April 23, 1945, just over 1500 prisoners remained in the camp, and 200 died soon after liberation. Gaston and another inmate prepared a report to request quick repatriation of the seventy-eight French inmates back to France. They explained how the inmates health was continuing to deteriorate and that French inmates were dying at a rate twice as fast as other prisoners. Gaston returned to Marseille circa May 1945. Robert, 33, had died in April 19, 1944, of typhus in Buchenwald. Irene had remained active in the resistance and provided a hiding place for a Jewish man, British pilots, and a French judge. Gaston was later awarded a Medal of Deportation and Resistance for Acts of Resistance by the French government. Gaston, 86, passed away on December 25, 1967.

The medal was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2003 by Jean Crouzet, the grandson of Gaston Crouzet.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Jean Crouzet

Funding Note: The cataloging of this artifact has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.