Resistance Memorial Reims

"The monument to the martyrs of the resistance and deportation", designed by architect Louis Sollier, consists of a Breton granite slab measuring 9 by 6.5 meters, with an inscription in bronze letters: "To the Resistance".
On either side of the central monument are the names of the victims of Nazi repression, engraved on two plaques on the grass embankments.
On the right are the names of the resistance fighters and deportees who were shot, killed in battle, died under torture or during deportation.
"They fought, they suffered, they died for the same ideal"
On the left are the civilian victims of Nazi repression, almost all victims of the Holocaust.

The Monument was inaugurated on May 8, 1955 on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Allied victory.

Previously, a bronze urn surmounted by a sculpted flame, engraved by Lucien Velly, a former deportee in the Buchenwald camp, was filled with ashes from the crematoria in the Mauthausen, Flossenbürg, Bergen-Belsen and Neuengamme concentration camps,
Under a cross of Lorraine intertwined with the V for victory, symbol of the resistance, came the inscription: "Ashes of deportees to Nazi concentration camps".
On May 7, this urn was solemnly presented to a delegation of deportees during a ceremony at the town hall of Saint-Mandé. She was taken to Reims in a military vehicle accompanied by torches of deportees and resistance fighters.
The urn was taken to the Hall of Surrender where the capitulation of Nazi Germany had been signed 10 years earlier.
On the night of May 7 to 8, former deportees kept vigil at the urn,

On May 8, 1955, during the inauguration of the monument, the urn was placed in a converted niche in the central slab.
The alcove was closed by a gate forged in the shape of barbed wire by the students of the technical Roosevelt High School.