Raymond Aubrac - Telegraph This was a complete fabrication. But Lucie was used to telling lies, for she was already Aubrac's wife, and a fellow founder of Libération-Sud. Thus, as her husband whiled away the time before his inevitable execution, his captors and Lucie made arrangements for his "marriage." On October 21 he was taken from his cell at Montluc and driven to the "ceremony" at police headquarters. On the way, the convoy was ambushed by a heavily-armed gang; three Germans were killed as Raymond Aubrac was freed. Soon afterwards the couple was evacuated by RAF Lysander to London, where Lucie Aubrac gave birth to their child at Queen Charlotte's hospital. The romantic story of the Aubracs" heroism was to become one of the most glorious legends of the Resistance, and was twice turned into a feature film. But more than 40 years after the dramatic escape, Klaus Barbie came back to torment the couple once again. Barbie had taken refuge after the war in South America but was tracked down and extradited to France in 1983. At his trial he was sentenced to life in jail from where, in 1990, shortly before his death, he issued his "testament." In it Barbie said that it was not Hardy who had betrayed Moulin, but Raymond Aubrac. Aubrac, Barbie noted, had been arrested by the Gestapo in March 1943, but then released. It was while in detention, Barbie alleged, that Aubrac had been turned. It was not Hardy's dramatic escape that should seem suspicious, he insinuated, but that of Aubrac. The claims of a bitter, dying Nazi might have been easy to dismiss. But the charges were then repeated in a book by an amateur historian, Gérard Chauvy. Outraged, the Aubracs submitted themselves to a "jury" of French historians led by Moulin's secretary and biographer, Daniel Cordier. Their report made mixed reading. While the Aubracs were cleared of collaboration, their stories were revealed to be inconsistent and even contradictory. While the Aubracs simply blamed old age and failing memories for such conflicts, the story of their wartime exploits had been irrevocably tarnished. Raymond Aubrac was born in Vésoul, in eastern France, on July 31 1914. His courage in the war was all the more extraordinary because he was Jewish, and his family name was Samuel. His parents, Albert and Hélène, were both to die at Auschwitz. After school he studied Engineering in Paris, graduating in 1937. Active in Left-wing student politics, he met a fellow young radical, Lucie Bernard. In 1937 he spent a year in Boston, where he acquired impeccable, if accented, English. On his return he began seeing Lucie again, and they married in 1939. He was doing his military service, posted on the Maginot Line, when the Nazis invaded. As French forces crumbled he headed south to the unoccupied zone, where his wife rejoined him. There they began their campaign of insurrection, with Raymond adopting the nom de guerre "Aubrac," which he would keep ever after. "I never 'joined" the Resistance because at the beginning there was nothing to join," he said in an BBC interview earlier this year. It started off with us buying boxes of chalk and writing graffiti on walls. Then we progressed to writing tracts and putting them through people's letterboxes. And then the third stage was our newspaper, Libération. It's when you have an underground press that you can first talk of an organisation - because you need a proper structure for it to work. By 1942, when Moulin arrived, Libération-Sud was, with Combat and Franc-Tireur, one of three major clandestine networks operating in the south of France. These groups formed the basis of Moulin's Secret Army. After their evacuation to London, the Aubracs did not return to France until the Liberation. Aubrac was appointed to an official position in Marseilles, where he oversaw the often brutal treatment meted out to suspected collaborators as well as, later, mine clearance and reconstruction. A self-declared "fellow traveller," in the 1950s Aubrac founded a nebulous institute, known as the Study and Research Group for Modern Industry, to encourage trade with Communist countries in the Eastern Bloc. For a decade from 1964 he was head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, based in Rome. In the early 1970s, as America sought to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War, Aubrac proved a useful go-between between the parties. Ho Chi Minh, it turned out, had stayed in Aubrac's house for several months in 1946 while negotiating independence from France - the pair were close friends. Lucie Aubrac died in 2007. Raymond Aubrac is survived by their three children. Raymond Aubrac, born July 31 1914, died April 10 2012