Gilbert Grandval

Gilbert's grandfather, Henri Hirsch (1829-) had also been a book dealer.

The Hirsch family traced their origins back to Strasbourg, but after the frontier changes of 1871 they were given and took up the option of retaining French citizenship, which meant leaving Alsace.

Edmond Hirsch (1873-), his father, was a book dealer who expanded the family business to include a publisher of school books.

His mother, born Jeanne Ollendorff (1880-), was the daughter of Paul Ollendorff (1851-1920), another book dealer, and a publisher who numbered Guy de Maupassant among his authors.

It may have been on account of the name recognition than the Ollendorff family enjoyed that while he was still a child the family took to using the family name Hirsch-Ollendorff.

Gilbert Hirsch-Ollendorff was born into a Jewish family but with the post-revolutionary French state deeply committed to "Laïcité" he seems to have been able to carry his religion lightly: at some stage he converted to Roman Catholicism.

Nevertheless, as Gilbert grew up the family was part of the city's Jewish intellectual community: their social circle included the family of Léon Blum, who also traced his family origins back to Alsace.

He received his schooling at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet, close to the family home.

In compliance with his family's wishes he then embarked on the study of medicine.

Gilbert Grandval (born Gilbert Hirsch, subsequently Gilbert Hirsch-Ollendorff; 12 February 1904 – 29 November 1981) was a French Resistance activist who went on to become the military governor of the Saarland in 1945.

That study was interrupted between 1924 and 1926 when he was required to perform military service.

He never returned to medicine.

Instead he used his contacts to find work with Saint-Gobain, a major manufacturer of chemicals and glass-based products.

He rose quickly through management ranks to become a sales director with the fertilizers division, based in Lyon.

During the 1930s, like many upwardly mobile young executives, he obtained a pilot's license, apparently from motives which were, at the time, purely recreational and social.

France declared war on Germany, in response to the German-Soviet invasion of Poland, in September 1939.

Gilbert Hirsch-Ollendorff was by now an experienced pilot.

He was almost immediately conscripted into the Air Force and given the rank of " lieutenant".

He was deployed in a reconnaissance squadron and later as a fighter pilot in northern France.

The German invasion was launched on 10 May 1940 and ended six weeks later in France's military defeat on 22 June.

The southern half of France was placed under the administration of an (initially semi-autonomous) puppet government while the northern half of the country was placed under direct military occupation.

Gilbert Hirsch-Ollendorff was demobilised and on 17 August 1940 returned to work in the chemicals business.

Général de Gaulle's famous rallying speech was transmitted from London on 18 June 1940, and during the same month Hirsch-Ollendorff made contact.

He became a member of the Ceux de la Résistance ("Those of the Resistance" / CDLR) group in 1941.

Although, in the first instance, he retained doubts about the Resistance, one of his early assignments involved finding more recruits for it.

From 9 June 1942, threatened with Gestapo persecution, he "disappeared underground".

In November of that same year he became the CDLR's head of military organisation in the area designated by the movement as "Region C", which comprised eight eastern departments including three - those comprising Alsace-Moselle - that for historical and linguistic reasons the Germans were treating as fully integrated parts of the German state (Gau Baden-Elsaß and Gau Westmark).

Most of the rest of "Region C" was defined by the Germans as the "Forbidden zone" "Zone interdite", subjected to tighter military control and a more punitive régime in respect of the civilian population than most of occupied France.

Gilbert Grandval was the alias Hirsch-Ollendorff used from approximately 1943 while working with the Resistance.

Subsequently, he was authorized permanently to substitute the Grandval name for the family name with which he had been born, both on his own account and on behalf of his father.

On 6 August 1943, while on a trip to Paris, he was arrested by German occupation troops.

He was released two days later "for lack of evidence against him".

After this his commitment to the Resistance was evidently total.

He used a range of cover names: "Chancel", "Pasteur", "Berger", "Planète" and "Grandval".

He was seen to be acquiring enhanced leadership potential, with an intimate appreciation of the organisation's structures and hierarchies.

Additional military responsibilities arrived in due course along with promotion to the rank of colonel.

The authorization came from a decree signed on 25 February 1946 by the President of the postwar provisional government, and officially transcribed at the appropriate town hall on 12 March 1948.

Yves Gilbert Edmond Hirsch was born at his parents' home along the Rue La Boétie in the 8th arrondissement of Paris.

He remained in post for a decade, although the nature of the job evolved and there were changes of title in 1948 and again in 1952 when he became, formally, the French ambassador to the Saarland.

Subsequently, he became a government minister during the early years of the Fifth Republic.