French resistance hero Germaine Tillion dies at 100

Sat Apr 19, 12:56 PM ET

PARIS (Reuters) - Germaine Tillion, a distinguished French anthropologist and member of the World War Two resistance who denounced French torture in Algeria has died at the age of 100, the French government said on Saturday.

President Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute to "an exceptional woman whose courage, commitment and humanism were guides throughout her whole life."

Tillion, who conducted research into Berber culture in the mountains of southeastern Algeria before the war, joined the resistance after Nazi forces defeated France in 1940.

She was arrested in 1942 and transported to Ravensbrueck concentration camp in Germany, where her mother, who had joined her, was later killed.

During her imprisonment, she wrote an ironical operetta mocking the horrific conditions of life in the camp that was performed for the first time last year.

"She was someone who was able to resist evil without ever taking herself for an incarnation of good," Tzvetan Todorov, a Franco-Bulgarian writer who knew her, told France Info radio.

She wrote extensively on the Nazi concentration camps and, together with other intellectuals, such as the historian Pierre Vidal-Nacquet, she denounced the torture practiced by French security forces in the colonial war in Algeria in the 1950s

Among numerous official distinctions, she was one of only five women to be awarded the Grande Croix de la Legion d'Honneur, one of France's highest honors.

(Reporting by James Mackenzie, edited by Richard Meares)