Pierre Masse

Origins and early life

Pierre Masse was born at Ribérac in the Dordogne on 13 December 1879 into a French Jewish family, and became one of the foremost civil lawyers of the Paris bar.

Work and career

He was deputy for the Hérault from 1914 to 1919, under-secretary of state for war with responsibility for military justice in 1917, and senator for the same department from 1939. In October 1940, when the Vichy government stripped Jewish officers of their rank under the first Statute on Jews, he wrote to Marshal Pétain a letter that has outlived every speech of that autumn: he asked whether he was to tell his brother, killed at Douaumont in 1916, that his rank was withdrawn; whether his son-in-law and his nephew, killed in 1940, kept theirs; and whether his great-grandfather, who had taken the oath in 1809, might at least keep his Saint Helena medal.

He received no reply. He was arrested on 21 August 1941 in a round-up of prominent Jewish lawyers, held at Drancy and Compiègne, and deported by convoy 39 on 30 September 1942 to Auschwitz, where he was murdered in October 1942. His name is on the Wall of Names at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris.