The French Resistance
Charles de Gaulle
Le Struthof or Camp du Struthof in Alsace
has a particular significance for the French because it was the
main Nazi concentration camp where French resistance fighters
were sent after they were captured by the Germans during World
War II. The camp, also known as Natzwiller-Struthof, has become
a symbol of the French resistance against the evils of Fascism
during the German occupation of France. Although there were around
40,000 French citizens who were convicted of collaborating with
the Nazis, there were also thousands of brave men and women who
did not accept the capitulation of France and continued to fight
Fascism as civilian soldiers or partisans in defiance of both
the Geneva Convention of 1929 and the Armistice signed by France
and Germany after France surrendered.
The leader of the French resistance was
Charles de Gaulle, shown in the photo above, as he broadcasts
over the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). De Gaulle made his
headquarters in Great Britain and the French resistance was aided
and financed by the British.
In 2005, a new museum at the Natzweiler
Memorial Site was dedicated to the heroes of the French resistance
whose efforts to defeat the Nazis and liberate Europe were significant.
By the time that the Allies were ready to invade Europe in June
1944, there were as many as 9 major resistance networks which
were fighting as guerrillas against the German occupation of
France. There were an estimated 56,000 French resistance fighters
who were captured and sent to concentration camps; half of them
never returned.
The French resistance fighters blew up
bridges, derailed trains, directed the British in the bombing
of German troop trains, kidnapped and killed German army officers,
and ambushed German troops. They took no prisoners, but rather
killed any German soldiers who surrendered to them, sometimes
mutilating their bodies for good measure. The Nazis referred
to them as "terrorists."
The photo below shows a Nazi poster which
depicts the heroes of the French resistance as members of an
Army of Crime.
World War II had started when France
and Great Britain both declared war on Germany after Hitler ordered
the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Poland was conquered
by September 28, 1939 with the help of the Soviet Union which
invaded Poland from the other side on September 17, 1939. France
and Great Britain had made a pact with Poland that they would
provide support in case of an attack, but only if the attack
was made by the Germany Army; they were under no obligation to
declare war on the Soviet Union. The British also made a pact
with France that neither country would sign a separate peace
with the Germans.
After the conquest of Poland, there was
a period called the "phony war," or the "Sitzkrieg"
when there were no further attacks by the Germans. Months later,
when the war started up again, Germany invaded France on May
10, 1940, going around the Maginot Line, which the French had
thought would protect them from Nazi aggression. On June 17,
1940, Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, the new prime minister
of France, asked the Germans for surrender terms and an Armistice
was signed on June 22, 1940. The French agreed to an immediate
"cessation of fighting."
According to the terms of the Armistice,
the French were allowed to set up a puppet government at Vichy
in the southern part of the country which the Germans did not
occupy. The Vichy government openly collaborated with the Germans,
even agreeing to cooperate in the sending of French Jews to Nazi
concentration camps.
There were no German soldiers stationed
in Vichy France, and many refugees, including some Jews, flocked
there. In occupied France, the German soldiers were ordered by
Hitler to behave like gentlemen. They were not to rape and plunder.
They were to take only photographs. Hitler himself visited Paris
and had his photo taken in front of the Eiffel Tower, as shown
below.
On Hitler's orders, the German conquerors
went out of their way to be friendly. They set up food depots
and soup kitchens to feed the French people until the economy
could be brought back to normal. The French soon decided that
collaboration with the Germans was to their advantage. The French
people had been stunned by the collapse of the French Army in
only a few weeks. To many, this meant the end of France as a
world power. The collaborationists felt that the German war machine
was invincible and the only sensible thing to do was to become
allies with the Nazis who would soon unite Europe under their
domination. But for some, centuries of hatred of the Germans
prevented them from accepting their defeat.
Charles de Gaulle, a tank corps officer
in the French Army, refused to take part in the surrender; he
fled to England where, on the eve of the French capitulation,
he broadcast a message to the French people over the BBC on June
18, 1940. This historic speech rallied the French people and
helped to start the resistance movement. Part of his speech is
quoted below:
Is the last word said? Has all hope
gone? Is the defeat definitive? No. Believe me, I tell you that
nothing is lost for France. This war is not limited to the unfortunate
territory of our country. This war is a world war. I invite all
French officers and soldiers who are in Britain or who may find
themselves there, with their arms or without, to get in touch
with me. Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must
not die and will not die.
Although Charles de Gaulle was not well
known in France, and few people had heard his broadcast, this
was the beginning of the French resistance which slowly gained
momentum. At the time of the French surrender, America was not
yet involved in World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt
had no choice but to recognize Vichy France as the legitimate
government. Winston Churchill refused to acknowledge Pétain's
government and recognized de Gaulle as the leader of the "Free
French." On July 4, 1940, a court-martial in Toulouse sentenced
de Gaulle in absentia to four years in prison. On August 2, 1940,
a second court-martial sentenced him to death.
Aided by the British, de Gaulle set up
the Free French movement, based in London. It was particularly
galling to the French that Germany had annexed the provinces
of Alsace and Lorraine to the Greater German Reich after the
Armistice. The Cross
of Lorraine was later adopted by Charles de Gaulle as the
symbol of his Free French movement.
The French resistance was in direct violation
of the Armistice signed by the French, which stipulated the following:
The French Government will forbid
French citizens to fight against Germany in the service of States
with which the German Reich is still at war. French citizens
who violate this provision are to be treated by German troops
as insurgents.
Since Great Britain was the only country
still at war with the German Reich, the collaboration of the
French resistance with the British was a violation of the Armistice,
as was the later collaboration of the partisans with American
troops after the Normandy invasion. According to the Geneva Convention
of 1929, the French resistance fighters were non-combatants who
did not have the rights of Prisoners of War if they were captured.
In the summer of 1940, British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill established an intelligence organization
called the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Its purpose was
to wage secret war on the continent, but with the defeat of France
this intelligence network was all but destroyed. The SOE was
revived and by November 1940, it was giving aid to the French
resistance.
At least one American participated in
the French Resistance: Lt. Rene Guiraud was a spy in the American
Military Intelligence organization, called the OSS. After being
given intensive specialized training, Lt. Guiraud was parachuted
into Nazi-occupied France, along with a radio operator. His mission
was to collect intelligence, harass German military units and
occupation forces, sabotage critical war material facilities,
and carry on other resistance activities. Lt. Guiraud organized
1500 guerrilla fighters and developed intelligence networks.
During all this, Guiraud posed as a French citizen, wearing civilian
clothing. He was captured and interrogated for two months by
the German Gestapo, but revealed nothing about his mission. He
was then sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where he participated
in the camp resistance movement along with several captured British
SOE spies. Because he was an illegal combatant, wearing civilian
clothing, Lt. Guiraud did not have the rights of a POW under
the Geneva Convention.
At first, the French resistance was not
organized; it consisted of individual acts of sabotage. Ordinary
French citizens cut telephone lines so that communications were
interrupted, resulting in German soldiers being killed because
they had not received warning of bombing raids by the British
Royal Air Force. The Germans fought back by announcing that hostages
would be shot if more acts of resistance were carried out.
Slowly, resistance organizations began
to form. Telephone workers united in a secret organization to
sabotage telephone lines and intercept military messages which
they would give to British spies operating in France. Postal
workers organized in order to intercept important military communications.
The French railroad workers formed a resistance group called
the Fer Réseau or Iron Network. They diverted freight
shipments to the wrong location; they caused derailments by not
operating the switches properly; they destroyed stretches of
railroad tracks and blew up railroad bridges.
Women also participated as lone fighters
in the resistance, as for example, Madame Lauro who poured hydrochloric
acid and nitric acid on German food supplies in freight cars
on the French railroads. Hundreds of the railroad workers were
shot after they were caught, but Madame Lauro continued her acts
of sabotage, working alone and at night; she was never captured.
Another French woman, Marie-Madeleine
Fourcade, became the head of the most famous resistance network
of all, the Alliance Réseau; its headquarters was at Vichy,
the capital of unoccupied France. This espionage network was
one of the first to be organized with the help of the British.
They began by supplying the Alliance Network with short wave
radios, dropped by parachute into Vichy France. Millions of francs
to support the Alliance Network were dropped from the air by
the British or sent by couriers. The British SOE and the French
resistance worked together throughout the remainder of the war
to obtain vital information about the German military and their
plans. The SOE would send questions for the French resistance
network to find the answers to and report back the information.
The Alliance Network was originally started
by Georges Loustanau-Laucau and a group of his friends. The nickname
of the Alliance was Noah's Ark because Madame Fourcade gave the
members of her underground network the names of animals as their
code names. She took the name Hedgehog as her own code name.
Madame Fourcade was eventually captured, but she escaped by squeezing through the bars on the window of her prison cell. She then joined the Maquis and worked with the British SOE spy organization in the last days before France was liberated. Sir Claude Dansey, the head of the S.I.S, requested the Alliance Réseau to go to Alsace to give General George Patton information about the German Order of Battle in that region. The Alliance was able to help Patton with some very valuable intelligence that had been obtained by the British. Madame Fourcade survived the war, but members of her Alliance Network were captured in Alsace and executed
at Natzweiler-Struthof.
As the war progressed, anti-Fascists and Communists from other countries joined the British SOE as secret agents. One of the most famous was Albert Guérisse, who headed the PAT line which helped downed British and American flyers to escape from France, going through Spain and then back to England. Guérisse was captured in 1943 and subsequently sent to Natzweiler-Struthof. Another escape line, called Comet, was also infiltrated by German agents in 1943 and Dédée de Jongh was arrested by the Gestapo. She was sent to the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück where she survived. Guérisse was taken to Dachau when the Natzweiler camp was evacuated and he also survived. After the arrests of Guérisse and de Jongh, the escape lines were rebuilt and they became more effective than ever in saving British and American downed fliers.
Eight women SOE agents were executed,
four at Dachau and four at Natzweiler, for their part in the
French resistance. Three other women SOE agents were shot at
Ravensbrück. But for some strange reason, Guérisse
and de Jongh were not executed, despite the important part they
had played in rescuing fliers so that they could live to bomb
German cities again in what the Nazis called "terror bombing."
Nor was Madame Fourcade, a very high-ranking resistance fighter,
executed by the Gestapo. Instead, they tried to convince her
to become a double agent, but she refused.
Don Lawson, the author of a book entitled
"The French Resistance," wrote the following with regard
to the downed fliers who were saved by the resistance fighters:
How many Allied military escapees
and evaders were actually smuggled out of France and into Spain
will never really be known. Records during the war were poorly
kept and reconstruction of them has been unsatisfactory. Combined
official American and British sources indicate there were roughly
3,000 evading American fliers and several hundred escaping POWs
who were processed through Spain. These same sources indicate
there were roughly 2,500 evading British fliers and about 1,000
escaping POWs. (American and British escapees and evaders in
all of the theaters of war totaled some 35,000, which amounts
to several military divisions.)
Operating these escape and evasion
lines was not, of course, without cost in human lives. Here,
too, records are incomplete and unsatisfactory, since many of
the resistants simply disappeared without a trace. Estimates
of losses vary from the official five hundred to as many as several
thousand. Historians Foot and Langley estimate that for every
escapee who was safely returned to England a line operator lost
his or her life.
According to the terms of the Armistice
signed on June 22, 1940, the 1.5 million captured French soldiers,
who were prisoners of war, were to held in captivity until the
end of the war. The French agreed to this because they thought
that the British would surrender in a few weeks; instead, the
British rejected all peace offers by the Germans and the French
POWs remained in prison for five long years. Many of them escaped
and joined the Maquis, one of the most notorious resistance groups,
which distinguished itself by committing atrocities against German
soldiers.
In 1943, the Germans started conscripting
Frenchmen as workers in German factories. Many refused to go
and escaped into the forests where they joined the Maquis. In
the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which were annexed into
the Greater German Reich, former French citizens were conscripted
into the German Army. Many Alsatians went into hiding and escaped
into Vichy France where they too became part of the French resistance,
fighting with the Maquis.
The Maquis was independent from the other
resistance groups; they operated as guerrilla fighters in rural
areas and especially in mountainous regions. The name Maquis
comes from a word that means bushes that grow along country roads.
The Maquis literally hid in the bushes, darting out to kidnap
German Army officers and execute them in a barbarous fashion.
One of the most well-known victims of the Maquis was Major Helmut Kämpfe, the commander of
Der Führer Battalion 3, who was kidnapped on 9 June 1944
and killed the next day.
The Maquisards, as the fighters in the
Maquis were called, were politically diverse. Some of them, like
the "Red Spaniards" who were former soldiers in the
Spanish Civil War, were Communists, but in general, the Communists
had their own resistance organizations, such as the FTP. This
was a resistance group, formed by the Communist party, called
the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. The Communist party also formed
the Front National which fought in the resistance.
After the Allied invasion at Normandy
on June 6, 1944, the Maquis became particularly active. In preparation
for the invasion, the British had dropped a large number of weapons
and millions of francs by parachute into rural areas. The weapons
were stored in farm houses and villages, ready for the resistance
fighters who would play an important part in the liberation of
Europe. As a result, the Maquis was very effective in preventing
German troops from reaching the Normandy area to fight the invaders.
The reprisals against the Maquis by German
troops became more and more vicious. Innocent French civilians
suffered, as for example in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane which was destroyed by
Waffen-SS soldiers on June 10, 1944.
Henri Rosencher was a Jewish medical
student and a Communist member of the Maquis. He survived the
war and wrote a book entitled Le Sel, la cendre, la flamme (Salt,
Ash, Fire) in which he described his work as an explosives expert
with the French resistance. He was captured and sent to Natzweiler-Struthof,
then later to Dachau where he was liberated by American troops
on April 29, 1945.
The following is a quote from Rosencher's
book, which describes a typical Maquis resistance action which
resulted in the death by suffocation of 500 German Wehrmacht
soldiers (feldgraus):
On the morning of the 17th of June,
I arrived in the area of Lus-la-Croix-Haute, the "maquis"
[zone of resistance] under the command of Commander Terrasson.
They were waiting for me and took me off by car. The job at hand
was mining a tunnel through which the Germans were expected to
pass by train. The Rail resistance network had provided all the
details. My only role was as advisor on explosives. TNT (Trinitrotoluene
- a very powerful explosive) and plastic charges were going to
collapse the mountain, sealing off the tunnel at both ends and
its air shaft. When I got there, all the ground work was done.
I only had to specify how much of the explosive was necessary,
and where to put it. I checked the bickfords, primers, detonators,
and crayons de mise à feu. We stationed our three teams
and made sure that they could communicate with each other. I
settled into the bushes with the team for the tunnel's entrance.
And we waited. Toward three p.m., we could hear the train coming.
At the front came a platform car, with nothing on it, to be sacrificed
to any mines that might be on the tracks, then a car with tools
for repairs, and then an armored fortress car. Then came the
cars over-stuffed with men in verdi-gris uniforms, and another
armored car. The train entered the tunnel and after it had fully
disappeared into it, we waited another minute before setting
off the charge. Boulders collapsed and cascaded in a thunderous
burst; a huge mass completely covered the entrance. Right after
that, we heard one, then two huge explosions. The train has been
taken prisoner. The 500 "feldgraus" inside weren't
about to leave, and the railway was blocked for a long, long
time.
Another Jewish hero of the French resistance
is Andre Scheinmann, who emigrated to the United States in 1953.
Together with Diana Mara Henry, he has written a book entitled
"I Am Andre: World War II Memoirs of a Spy in France."
Andre is a German Jew whose family escaped
to France in 1938 after the Nazi pogrom known as Kristallnacht.
His parents were murdered at Auschwitz during the German occupation
of France. Andre had been a soldier in the French Army and was
a Prisoner of War when France surrendered, but he escaped and
joined the French underground resistance movement. Pretending
to be a collaborator, he became an interpreter for the Germans
for the French national railroad. The Nazis never suspected that
he was Jewish; he was given the job of overseeing the rail system
in the Brittany region of France.
As a member of the French underground,
second in command of a network of 300 spies, Scheinmann's job
was intelligence, but he also engaged in sabotage. His resistance
network gathered information on German troop movements and reported
weekly to the British. The information that they supplied was
invaluable to the British Air Force in bombing German troop trains.
Scheinmann and his compatriots also blew up trains, killing contingents
of German soldiers.
Scheinmann was eventually arrested by
the German Gestapo; he endured 11 months in a Paris prison until
he was sent in July 1943 to Natzweiler-Struthof as a Nacht und
Nebel prisoner. He disappeared into the Night and Fog of the
Nazi concentration camp system, where he was not allowed to communicate
with anyone on the outside. At Natzweiler, he was given a cushy
job working in the weaving workshop, and because of his ability
to speak German, he was made a Kapo with the authority to supervise
other prisoners.
Along with many other well-known French
resistance fighters, he was evacuated from Natzweiler to Dachau
and released by the American liberators. He joined the FFI and
remained a soldier in the French military even after the war
ended. As a hero of the resistance, he was awarded the Legion
of Honor, the Medal of Resistance and the Medal of the Camps
by the French government.
The FFI, or the Force Française
d'Interior, also known as the "Fee Fee," was
also very active after the invasion at Normandy. The British
increased their arms drops after the invasion and a vast arsenal
of weapons was stored on farms and in villages, ready to be handed
out to the resistance fighters.
Before Hitler broke his non-aggression
pact with the Soviet Union, signed in August 1939, the Communists
in France had refused to join the resistance movement. When Germany
invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the French Communists
then began to organize. The Communist resistance fighters were
not loyal to de Gaulle or to France; their loyalty was to international
Communism and the Soviet Union, which was fighting on the side
of the Allies, against Fascism.
The objective of the Communist guerrilla
fighters was the defeat of Fascism and the establishment of a
Communist government in France, which would have direct allegiance
to the Soviet Union. Because of this, they preferred to fight
independently of the other resistance groups. Their specialty
was capturing German army officers and executing them, which
brought swift reprisals from the Germans. In October 1941, the
Germans shot 50 hostages in reprisal for the assassination of
a German field commander at Nantes. This did not stop the assassinations;
in 1943, the Communists claimed that they were killing 500 to
600 German soldiers per month.
Following the German invasion of the
Soviet Union in June 1941, a right-wing collaborationist military
group, called the Service d'Ordre Legionnaire, was organized
by Joseph Darnand in July 1941 in support of Marshal Henri-Philippe
Pétain and his Vichy government. Darmand volunteered to
help the Germans and the Vichy officials in rounding up the Jews
in France and in fighting against the French resistance.
In January 1943, the Service d'Ordre
Legionnaire was reorganized into the Milice Française,
which became the secret police of the Vichy government, working
in close association with the German Gestapo in France. Darmand
was accepted into the Waffen-SS army and given the rank of Sturmbannführer.
Like all members of the SS, Darmand took an oath of loyalty to
Adolf Hitler. Another famous Milice leader was Paul Touvier.
By 1944, the Milice had expanded, from
an initial 5,000 members, to a special police force of 35,000,
which greatly assisted the Gestapo in fighting against the resistance.
Without the help of the French collaborationists, the job of
the Gestapo would have been much more difficult.
Sometimes, the Milice made mistakes,
giving misleading information, as when two Milice policemen told
the Germans that a Germany army officer, who had been kidnapped
by the Maquis, was being held in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane
and was going to be ceremoniously burned alive; this wrong information
led to the destruction of Oradour-sur-Glane and the murder of
642 innocent people, one of the worst atrocities committed by
the Waffen-SS in World War II.
Jean Moulin
The greatest hero of the French Resistance
was a man named Jean Moulin, shown in the photo above. His great
contribution was in convincing Charles de Gaulle that all the
independent resistance groups and the Secret Army should be united
into one central organization. De Gaulle had not planned to use
the French resistance to liberate France, but Moulin advised
him that the Allies would have a much better chance of defeating
the Germans with the help of a united resistance movement.
Moulin was authorized by de Gaulle to
establish the National Resistance Council (CNR). He contacted
the leaders of the various resistance networks and got them to
agree with his plan by promising them money and supplies from
the British. Then he suggested that the resistance should form
a military organization that would fight the Germans in open
combat. He was preparing for the day when the Allies would invade
Europe and a French Army would be ready to join them. De Gaulle
hoped to use this army to take control of France and become its
President after the country was liberated. Most of the resistance
networks were against this idea because they had been successfully
operating as guerrilla fighters and did not want to become part
of an Army. The Communists liked the idea of a resistance Army
but they would not swear loyalty to de Gaulle, since they had
their own plans to set up a Communist government in France.
In the Spring of 1943, the first meeting
of the National Resistance Council took place in Paris, attended
by the leaders of 16 different resistance organizations. The
meeting lasted for several days, during which time Moulin was
finally able to persuade the rival factions to unite and to swear
an oath of loyalty to Charles de Gaulle as their leader. Several
weeks later, on June 21, 1943, Moulin was arrested by the German
Gestapo.
According to Don Lawson, author of a
book called "The French Resistance," Moulin had been
betrayed by Jean Moulton, an agent with "Combat," one
of the oldest of the resistance groups. Moulton had been captured
by the Gestapo and to avoid being shot or tortured, he agreed
to give names and locations of resistance members. Hundreds of
the resistance fighters were then arrested by the infamous Gestapo
Chief, Klaus Barbie. Many of them wound up at the Natzweiler-Struthof
camp.
Two of the biggest problems for the resistance
fighters were transportation and food, which was also was a problem
for the French people in general. Food was rationed and the Germans
had confiscated most of the cars. The British supplied weapons
and money, but there were no food drops into France. The places
where food was available, mainly in rural areas, became thriving
black market centers. The Maquis traveled mostly by bicycle,
although some had managed to hide a few old cars. Gasoline was
not available for most French civilians; only doctors and others
who needed to use a car were allowed gasoline.
When the Allied invasion came, the resistance
fighters were cautioned to wear armbands with the Cross of Lorraine,
so that they could be easily identified by the Allied soldiers.
French women who were not part of the resistance were asked to
volunteer to help sew the armbands.
After the successful Normandy invasion,
General Dwight D. Eisenhower made the decision not to take Paris
immediately. De Gaulle knew that Paris was a Communist stronghold
and he knew that if Paris were liberated from within by the Communists,
they would probably take control of the French government. To
prevent the Communists from taking control of the capital city
of Paris, De Gaulle decided that Paris must be liberated by the
Allies.
According to Don Lawson in his book "The
French Resistance," de Gaulle had taken steps, before the
Normandy invasion, to strengthen his plan to become the new President
of France after the liberation. He insisted that the SOE increase
its weapons drops, but stipulated that these weapons should be
mainly parachuted to the Maquis in the outlying areas, with only
a few going to the 25,000 Communist resistance fighters holed
up in Paris.
Don Lawson wrote the following, regarding
the decision to drop weapons to outlying areas:
That this procedure was justified
by motivations other than de Gaulle's personal ones was clearly
indicated by the fact that in the peninsula of Brittany alone
fewer than 100,000 FFI kept several German divisions pinned down
during the Normandy campaign. In the whole of France, it was
estimated by General Eisenhower, the FFI's efforts in preventing
German troops from attacking the Allied invasion forces were
the equivalent of some fifteen Allied divisions. As always, these
resistance efforts were not without cost. The Germans were now
desperate, and their reprisals were even more savage than before.
In March of 1944 an entire Maquis band numbering more than a
thousand resistants were wiped out in the Haute Savoie region.
In July 1944 another Maquis force of similar size was destroyed
at Vercors.
In the days immediately following the
Normandy invasion, the FFI, or the French Forces of the Interior,
became a French Army under the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary
Forces (SHAEF) commanded by General Eisenhower, who unilaterally
informed the Germans that the French resistance fighters were
to be regarded as legal combatants. Eisenhower authorized a French
combat division to be commanded by General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc.
This division was called the 2nd Armored Division, but it was
more commonly known as Division Leclerc. De Gaulle contacted
the Communist resistance in Paris and unilaterally informed them
that Division Leclerc would be the liberators of Paris.
Meanwhile, Hitler was holed up in his
Berlin bunker and he had seemingly gone mad; he ordered the destruction
of Paris rather than surrender it to the Allies. His generals
ignored this order and Paris was saved.
Eisenhower had finally agreed that the
2nd Armored Division should lead the liberation of Paris with
the US Fourth Infantry Division providing backup. Paris was liberated
on August 25, 1944; Charles de Gaulle rode into Paris in triumph,
holding up his arms, spread wide in a V for victory sign.
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