During the Second World War, while the north of France had been occupied by German troops since June 1940, the southern or free zone was also invaded in November 1942, except for the Alps region, which found itself under a much less violent Italian occupation.

The city's proximity to imposing mountain ranges and the ease with which Maquis fighters could hide made it an ideal location for the development of resistance to the occupying forces.

The city of Grenoble, with its population then reaching the 100,000 mark,[2] was occupied on November 11, 1942, by the 8,000 men of the 5th Italian Alpine Division, known as the Pusteria, under the command of General Maurizio Lazzaro De Castiglioni.

[Note 1] Young men who had refused Compulsory Work Service arrived in Grenoble in increasing numbers, and joined the various Maquis in the surrounding mountain ranges.

Then, on September 29, 1943, the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), the security service responsible for espionage in Lyon, seconded its intervention commando (Einsatzkommando) to Grenoble, under the command of SS Paul Heimann.

In this highly tense context, the first victim of the German occupiers soon fell: 32-year-old engineer André Abry was shot dead on October 6 in the street of Palanka, as he had just placed his briefcase on the sidewalk in order to open his garage door.

They were afraid of the Alpine zone, where BBC broadcasts were announcing the presence of tens of thousands of young men ready for combat, and giving Grenoble the title of maquis capital.

This was reflected in the relocation of the headquarters of the Reich Security Police, the Sipo-SD (Sicherheitspolizei), in April 1944 to a hotel on Boulevard Maréchal-Pétain,[Note 2] and the replacement of Chief Heimann by SS-Hauptsturmführer Hartung.

While the authorities were at the Student House, they found that German troops had maneuvered and surrounded around 5-600 people going off into the adjacent streets, and led them into a wire-wrapped area near a General Staff building.

"[18] Unrelated to this demonstration, a spectacular attack took place in Grenoble on the night of November 13 to 14, destroying the German ammunition depot located in the north of the city on the artillery polygone with a huge explosion.

[22] Under the direction of SS August Moritz, they received information from the Girousse couple[22][23] of the Mouvement Franciste, and decided on the details of the operation in retaliation for the death of collaborators in Grenoble.

[24] At 6 p.m. on November 25, the operation began with the simultaneous arrests of Communist Party member Roger Guigue in his wife's hairdressing salon on rue Brocherie,[25] journalist Jean Pain in the Café La Table ronde [fr] on Saint-André square[26] and lottery ticket salesman Georges Duron in his wife's flower store on Victor-Hugo square,[27] marking the start of this series of murders.

However, the doctor had taken the precaution of cutting the documents in two, giving the second half to his secretary Henri Maubert, who had been hospitalized at the Alpes clinic a few weeks earlier under a false name.

[Note 7] At midday, Francis André's team, joined by Grenoblois from the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchevisme (Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism), lunch at the Savoyard tavern on Avenue d'Alsace-Lorraine.

Three other Resistance members were arrested that day: René Lembourg and Maurice Taccola died in deportation, while Henri Arbassier was interned and released in August 1944.

[Note 16] At the same time, Professor Jean Bistési, the new departmental leader of the Combat movement, was executed outside the Institute of Electrochemistry and Electrometallurgy on boulevard Gambetta.

Other Resistance fighters escaped the massacre, but on the same day, at around 6 pm, two German policemen arrived at the Trésorerie Générale de l'Isère on avenue Félix-Viallet.

Newspapers were forbidden to publish the death notices of the murdered resistance fighters, and only four family members, designated by the Gestapo, were allowed to attend the funerals of each of the victims.

The list of victims follows, with this comment: "Is it necessary to add that this series of attacks has provoked strong emotion in our city, where everyone condemns the bloody violence which is putting the families of the Dauphiné region in mourning and adding further pain to the anguish of our people?

In his opening speech to the twelve delegates of the Dauphiné Resistance, none of whom was a member of the MUR, he said that Valois had betrayed his comrades in arms, and that he was living happily in the Midi as payment for his crime.

[47] On August 6, a crucial meeting for the early liberation of Grenoble took place in Naples between French Colonel Henri Zeller, military commander of the southeast region, and General Alexander Patch, commander-in-chief of the Provence landings.

[48] Zeller, who had escaped from the fighting in Vercors two weeks earlier, managed to convince Patch to send part of his troops along the Route Napoléon, heading for Grenoble in order to pincer the Germans further north.

But on the morning of August 24, against all expectations, some of the German troops who had turned back during the night returned to Domène and Gières and began firing artillery at Grenoble.

On November 5, 1944, just as the collaboration trials had begun two months earlier,[56] and in front of a large crowd in Pasteur Square, Charles de Gaulle presented the medal of the Order of Liberation to Mayor Frédéric Lafleur, whose city became one of five French communes to receive it.

"[57] Numerous decisions in contumacy were handed down in the early months of 1945, concerning French people who had sided with the enemy and managed to leave the country to escape reprisals.

Francis André, known as "Gueule tordue" (Twisted mouth), the main protagonist of this operation, and his henchmen, gathered around Barbie in the Côte-d'Or on August 21, 1944, then in Nancy.

Shortly after Germany's defeat in 1945, Francis André was arrested, brought back to France and incarcerated in the Montluc prison in Lyon, where he had had so many people imprisoned.

Located in 1945, he was brought back to Grenoble by resistance fighters, including Pierre Fugain, to stand trial, and was executed in the artillery range on October 20, 1945.

[60] As for the Girousse couple, after fleeing to Germany and then Italy, Antoine, a Mouvement Franciste representative in Grenoble, was executed on March 29, 1946, but his wife Edith was pardoned.

On November 14, 2002, the statue was transferred to the wall of remembrance at the end of the Avenue des Martyrs on the former military range, now a scientific polygon, where he now presides over his fellow Resistance fighters.