Lazare Rachline

Origins and early life

Lazare Rachline was born at Gorki Leninskie in Russia on 25 December 1905 to Zadoc and Kassia Rachline, née Shapiro, Jews who fled the pogroms of the Russian Empire; the family reached France in 1906, when he was an infant, and he grew up French.

Work and career

In the Resistance he went by the names Socrate and Lucien Rachet and became one of the men on whom the escape lines depended: he headed the VIC network, which moved agents and airmen out of France, and on 16 July 1942 he organised the escape of eleven prisoners from the camp at Mauzac, an operation later described as among the most fruitful of the whole war, since those freed included several senior members of the Special Operations Executive networks.

In March 1944 de Gaulle entrusted him with the Mission Clé, sending him into occupied France to reorganise the internal resistance and to prevent premature and unsupported risings that would have been crushed. He worked at the highest level of the London and Algiers command while remaining a Jew whose family had come to France as refugees a generation earlier, and he never made a public career of either fact. After the war he returned to business and to the rebuilding of Jewish communal life in France. He died in Paris on 25 January 1968.