Arsène Tchakarian, the last surviving member of the Armenian-led Manouchian network, which fought alongside the French resistance against the Nazi occupiers during World War II, died Aug. 4 at a hospital in Villejuif, south of Paris. He was 101.
Mr. Tchakarian, an ethnic Armenian born in Turkey during the Ottoman Empire, later received France’s highest award, as a commander of the Legion of Honor. His family announced the death but did not specify the cause.
President Emmanuel Macron of France commemorated Mr. Tchakarian on Twitter as ‘‘a hero of the resistance and tireless witness whose voice resonated strongly to the very end.’’
The Manouchian resistance network, named after Mr. Tchakarian’s fellow Armenian Missak Manouchian, a poet and resistance leader, was made up of immigrants from many nations that had been affected by Hitler’s expansionism — Italians, Greeks, Romanians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Spaniards, Poles, even young German Jews who had fled to what was then a free France.
‘‘There was such a friendship between us, between all these people coming from everywhere, Jews, Spanish, Italians, Germans, Armenians and French of course,’’ Mr. Tchakarian said in a 2002 speech to pupils at a junior high school near his home in Vitry-sur-Seine, France. ‘‘A brotherly friendship which surpassed all that you can imagine.’’
Throughout World War II, the Manouchian network linked up with the local French resistance to carry out a guerrilla campaign against the Nazi occupiers, including broad-daylight assassinations and sabotage of power lines and munitions trains.
Mr. Tchakarian, code-named Charles, started out secretly distributing anti-Nazi tracts in Paris. After meeting Manouchian, he recalled that his fellow Armenian told him: ‘‘Enough of tracts, we are now being asked to fight with arms.’’
Mr. Tchakarian’s first assignment was to throw a grenade among a group of Nazi soldiers.
‘‘As I hesitated,’’ Mr. Tchakarian told Le Parisien newspaper in February, ‘‘Georges’’ — Manouchian’s nom de guerre — ‘‘snatched it from me and threw it himself.’’
The following day, Mr. Tchakarian took part in an attack on German military police. He was also part of a small resistance cadre that assassinated Nazi SS General Julius Ritter in September 1943. Ritter had been in charge of a forced-labor program that deported hundreds of thousands of French workers to Germany to support the Nazi war effort.
The Manouchian network later became better known as ‘‘L’Affiche Rouge,’’ or the Red Poster Group, after the Nazi occupiers put up blood-red posters carrying the faces of the network’s wanted members, including Mr. Tchakarian. The Germans called them ‘‘The Army of Crime’’ and focused on the fact that many of them were Jewish.
In November 1943, Mr. Tchakarian had scheduled a clandestine rendezvous with a fellow resistance fighter, Olga Bancic, a Romanian Jew, at the Gare d’Orsay railway station in Paris.
‘‘She didn’t show up, as she always had without fail,’’ Mr. Tchakarian recalled earlier this year. He had seen pro-Nazi police in the area and escaped shortly before Bancic was arrested along with Manouchian and 22 other male members of the underground network.
On Feb. 21, 1944, all 23 men, including Manouchian, were lined up and shot by a German firing squad at the notorious Fort Mont-Valérien on the western outskirts of Paris. (More than 1,000 people, mostly Jews, were executed at the fort between 1941 and 1944.) Because French law prohibited the execution of women by firing squad, Bancic was taken to Germany, where she was beheaded with an ax.
Mr. Tchakarian fled from Paris to Bordeaux and continued the fight with the resistance. The German Luftwaffe had taken control of Bordeaux-Mérignac airport and was using it as a base for maritime reconnaissance and attacks against allied shipping in the Atlantic. Mr. Tchakarian helped provide intelligence for a 1943 raid on the airport by British and US bombers.
During the spring and summer of 1944, he joined a resistance group that, along with US Army troops, helped liberate the central French town of Montargis. The soldiers and resistance fighters were greeted with kisses, flowers, wine and delirium by residents who knew by then that the war had turned against the Germans.
After the war, Mr. Tchakarian returned to his previous occupation and became a master tailor near Paris. He also turned his focus to history, writing memoirs about his wartime experiences.