Raymond Aubrac (born Samuel, 31 July 1914 – 10 April 2012) was a member of the French Resistance in World War II.

Previously, as a recipient of an American Field Service scholarship, [4] he left for the United States in August 1937 to study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University where he had the opportunity to follow the courses of Joseph Schumpeter.

In May 1941, after the birth of their first child Jean-Pierre, they helped Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie to set up an underground newspaper called Libération to promote the French Resistance.

Raymond Aubrac's parents, whom he had tried unsuccessfully to convince to leave for Switzerland, were arrested in France, deported to Auschwitz Concentration Camp by convoy No.

Aubrac organised the purge of the police forces and oversaw the often brutal treatment meted out to suspected collaborators with the Nazis.

Her childbirth forced her to stay in London, but Emmanuel d'Astier, who had been in Algiers since November 1943, where he was appointed commissioner of the interior of the French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN) asked Raymond to go and join him there.

[13] In 1947 and 1950, he was a witness for the prosecution during two trials of fellow French Resistance leader René Hardy, who was accused of betraying Jean Moulin to the Gestapo but eventually acquitted.

In 1948, he helped to create a civil engineering consultancy firm, at first working mainly with Communist-run local authorities, then in Eastern Europe.

Aubrac was to be used in the late 1960s by Henry Kissinger, as a secret intermediary between the Americans and the North Vietnamese at the height of the Vietnam War.

In the early 1970s, as America tried to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War, Aubrac served as a mediator between the American and North Vietnamese governments.

In 1973, he worked with the United Nations Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, on the followup to the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 to end the Vietnam War.

In 1985, Aubrac sat on the "Jury of Honor" that was to decide whatever the documentary Des terroristes à la retraite should be aired or not.

[20] Shortly before his death in 1990, Klaus Barbie issued a statement saying it was Raymond Aubrac who had betrayed the secret of Jean Moulin's 1943 Caluire meeting with the Resistance leaders.

The same allegations were then insinuated in a book (Aubrac, Lyon 1943; first published by Albin Michel in 1997) written by a French journalist and historian, Gérard Chauvy.

In 1997, the Aubracs, feeling outraged by such allegations and attempting to clear their names, submitted themselves to a “jury” of French historians set up by the Libération newspaper.

In his book Resistance and Betrayal: The Death and Life of the Greatest Hero of the French Resistance (2002), Patrick Marnham suggested that since Aubrac's overriding allegiance was to communism, he would not have considered himself a traitor if he had indeed betrayed Moulin, claiming that French Communists such as the Aubracs at times gave non-Communists such as Moulin to the Gestapo.

[6][12][21] In 1994, Aubrac persuaded Madeleine Ruffaud, who had also survived torture and interrogation by the Germans, to break her silence and speak publicly of her experience of the Resistance.

[19][23] Aubrac endorsed the Socialist Party's François Hollande for France's 2012 two-round presidential election, starting on 22 April.

It was held on Monday, 16 April 2012, starting at 10am local time, in the main courtyard of the Hôtel national des Invalides in Paris.

Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac (a member of the Free French Forces and France Libre based in London) and Jacques Vistel (president of the Fondation de la Résistance) delivered eulogies during the ceremony.

"He is a monument to the part of our contemporary history (World War II) which is fading from our memories and that only strengthens the duty to remember it," said Nicolas Sarkozy at the end of the 35-minute ceremony outside the main courtyard.