French ethnographer Tillion dies

Tillion was one of the most decorated women in France

French World War II resistance fighter and anthropologist Germaine Tillion has died at the age of 100.

Her activities against the Nazis and deportation to the Ravensbrueck concentration camp earned her the highest order of the Legion of Honour.

After the war she completed her studies in anthropology, worked in Algeria, and was among the first to denounce torture by French forces there.

She denounced Soviet camps in the 1950s, and lately torture in Iraq.

Born in May 1907, Germaine Tillion began studying Berber groups in north-eastern Algeria in the 1930s.

In 1940, she returned to occupied Paris to head the Museum of Man resistance network, was betrayed and sent to Ravensbrueck in 1942.

In the late 1940s, she finished her doctorate and worked as an adviser to the French government in Algeria, where her work included liaising with the pro-independence National Liberation Front.

She wrote books about Algeria and her experiences in Ravensbrueck.

In 1999 she became one of only five French women to be awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour.