Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass E-Book

Douglas Boyd

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 455

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

D-Day, 6 June 1944; a day that has gone down in history as one of the most crucial steps towards Allied victory of the Second World War. But what is known of the thousands of young Frenchmen and women who were formed into small, untrained armies and used as bait by the Allied powers to distract the German forces from the invasion beaches? These civilians were scattered through the French forests and hill country, and they believed that Allied forces would arrive to help them drive the hated Nazi occupiers out of France; but this support never arrived. Instead they were abandoned, to be hunted down by collaborationist French paramilitaries, Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS troops. Those that were lucky died quickly; the unlucky ones survived – they were brutally raped and tortured before being shot, or were deported to death camps in Germany. With rare, striking and often harrowing photographs of the people, places and events of this period, Boyd reveals the startling truth of the prologue to the D-Day landings, highlighting atrocities that should never be forgotten.

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is not surprising that few people in France wished to remember, let alone talk or write about, their experiences during the awful years of the German occupation of their country. I have to thank historian Robert O. Paxton, sometime professor of Columbia University, for breaking down ‘the wall of silence’ in 1973 and forcing into the light of day many events that have since been investigated in greater depth.

On a personal level, my thanks are due to Max Lagarrigue, indefatigable editor of Arkheia magazine, for repeated access to information on the war years in south-west France; to Marie-Françoise Roth and her husband at Le Noirlac Hotel in St Amand-Montron for background on what did happen in ‘the town where nothing ever happened’; to Palu Fourcassié for an account of his time in Le Service de Surveillance des Voies; to Dédée Fourcassié for persuading ‘Marie-Rose Dupont’ to trust a historian she had never met before and talk about the terrible price she paid for the affair with her Austrian SS lover Willi, of which she had previously never spoken to anyone; to Joseph la Picirella for keeping alive the history of the Vercors betrayal – a story that no one in France or the Allied countries wanted to be known; to Fabrice Vergili for sharing his research on the shame within the shame of the occupation – the many thousands of French women who bore babies by German fathers and were publicly humiliated for this.

Many others who survived these years contributed – but with the plea that their names not be revealed. Some asked this from guilt at what circumstances forced them to do and some from shame at what happened to them. Among the museums that contributed significantly are: le Musée de la Résistance at Clermont-Ferrand; le Musée de la Poche at Royan; le Musée de la Résistance du Vercors; le Centre Jean Moulin at Bordeaux; le Musée de la Résistance at Limoges; le Musée de la Résistance at Cahors. On a professional level, at The History Press, I have to thank Jay Slater for commissioning the book and editor Chrissy McMorris for pulling everything together and making a book out of a pile of paper. My personal thanks go to Jennifer Weller for help with maps and otherwise and, as always, to my partner Atarah Ben-Tovim who suffers with good humour the loneliness of living with a historian who is forever somewhere and sometime else.

Douglas Boyd

Summer 2012

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

Part 1: The Build-Up to Bloodshed

1 Raising the Resistance – Tracts and Terrorism

2 Putting the Dirt in ‘Dirty War’

3 The Making of the Maquis

4 The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Agent

Part 2: Fighting to the Death

5 Live Free or Die!

6 The Trojan Horse

7 Dream of Victory, Reality of Death

8 Ransomed from the Death Cell

9 From the Sky Came Death

10 They got what they Deserved

11 Failure is an Orphan

12 Atrocities on Both Sides

13 The Worst Atrocity of All

14 ‘Understand? Officer, Bang Bang!’

15 The Town Where Nothing Ever Happened

16 A Recipe for Disaster

17 A Country in Chaos

18 No Time to Waste

19 Bodies in the Trees, Bodies Down the Wells

20 Kill the Hero!

Part 3: The Savage Revenge

21 Rough Justice

22 Punishing the Women

23 Paying the Price of Love

Epilogue

Notes and Sources

Plates

Copyright

LIST OF ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

Abwehr: German military intelligence and counter-espionage organisation

Allgemeine-SS: the organisation headed by Himmler that ran the concentration and death camps

BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action): the Free French intelligence organisation

CDL (Comité Départemental de la Libération): committee in each département coordinating Resistance actions before and during the liberation

CNR (Conseil National de le Résistance)

COMAC (Comité d’Action Militaire): action committee of MUR (see below)

COSSAC: Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander

deuxième bureau: French military intelligence

FAFL (Forces Aériennes Françaises Libres): Free French air force

FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur): blanket term covering all Resistance and Maquis groups in build-up to, and during, the liberation

FTP (Francs-tireurs et Partisans): a communist Resistance movement

Kriegsmarine: German navy

malgré nous: term for Alsatians and Lorrainers compulsorily enlisted in German armed forces, meaning literally ‘we had no choice’

MAAF: Mediterranean Allied Air Forces

MAT (Manufacture d’Armes de Tulle): arms factory in Tulle

Milice: paramilitary Vichy police force

MLN (Movement de Libération Nationale): successor to MUR

MUR (Movements Unis de le Résistance): the first nationwide coordinating body of the Resistance

OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète): a Resistance movement headed by ex-army officers

OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht): German High Command

PCF (Parti Communiste Français): French Communist Party

ORA (Organisation Résistance Armée): Resistance movement headed by ex-army officers

OSS: United States Office of Strategic Services

PH: Purple Heart

SAARF: Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force

SAS: British Special Air Service

Section F: department of SOE dealing with France

Section RF: department of SOE liaising with BCRA

SHAEF: Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force

SIS: Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6

Sipo-SD (Sicherheitspolizei/Sicherheitsdienst): German ‘ultra’ anti-partisan troops

SOE: Special Operations Executive

SPOC: Special Projects Operations Centre

STO (Service du Travail Obligatoire): compulsory conscription for labour service in Germany

USMC: United States Marine Corps

Waffen-SS: the elite parallel German army controlled by Himmler, which carried out atrocities

PART 1

THE BUILD-UP TO BLOODSHED

1

RAISING THE RESISTANCE – TRACTS AND TERRORISM

Tourists visiting France are often surprised by the number of Second World War memorials in towns and villages and beside country roads, dedicated to men shot by the German forces occupying the country in 1940–45 or deported in atrocious conditions to concentration and death camps in the Reich, from which the few who did return came back broken in health and spirit. Although many who suffered and died under the occupation have no memorial, the tourist wandering down a side street of a peaceful town, perhaps looking for a shady bar on a hot afternoon, is confronted far too often by a little shrine bearing the inscription Ici est tombé un maquisard, followed by a date in summer 1944.

Each of these shrines marks the spot where a young civilian – usually male but sometimes a woman – was gunned down by battle-hardened soldiers in German uniform, to die in a pool of blood with a parachuted pistol or Sten gun in hand. Even that word ‘die’ is often a euphemism for a savage beating that ended with his or her body twisting on a rope hanging from a nearby tree or street lamp.

But who exactly were the maquisards and why were so many of them killed? And what exactly was the Resistance? Two clear generations after the tragedies to which the memorials bear witness, many French people ask themselves these questions, confused about the difference between the Resistance and the Maquis.

In the summer of 1940, after Hitler and his generals had taken just six weeks to conquer the country with the biggest standing army in Europe, the new government of Marshal Philippe Pétain signed an armistice agreement on 22 June. It was a humiliating defeat, after which a few patriots immediately sought to assuage the shame that their military and political leaders had been found so sadly wanting. In full knowledge that the penalty for being caught was death, they decided to work against the occupation in defiance of the armistice agreement signed by their legal government. A clause in the armistice agreement was quite explicit:

The French government will forbid French citizens to fight against Germany in the service of states with which the German Reich is still at war. French citizens who violate this provision are to be treated by German troops as insurgents.

Should they be caught, as many were, their own government would do nothing to help them. On the contrary, the Gestapo and German Security Police were aided and abetted by Vichy’s Police Nationale, Gendarmerie Nationale, the Milice and the Groupes Mobiles, including their Reserve, which was the ancestor of today’s Compagnie Républicaine de Securité riot police.

In the First World War, which ended just over two decades before the defeat of 1940, France and the British Empire each mobilised between 8 million and 9 million men, but total French casualties were twice as high as those for the whole Empire. From a population of 40 million, France lost 1,357,800 men killed, with 4,266,000 wounded and another 537,000 taken prisoner or missing in action. At the other end of the scale, the decisive but late entry of the USA into that war cost only a total of 116,516 Americans killed and 206,502 other casualties.1

After the 1940 armistice the vast majority of French people were simply relieved that the fighting was over with no more bloodshed and no more loved ones’ lives to be pointlessly lost by France’s inadequate generals and wavering politicians. Numbed by the speed at which their nation had been defeated and its British allies driven out of the Continent, people spent hours every day in the long queues outside the few bakeries and food stores still open. The problem was not so much shortage of food as disruption to food production and distribution caused by 8 million refugees being far from home, butchers, bakers and other shopkeepers among them.

Once the fighting stopped, most French people were surprised at the good behaviour of the German soldiers. Taking refuge with friends in the Loire valley after fleeing the capital, Simone de Beauvoir wrote of their arrival there:

To our general surprise, there was no violence. They paid for their drinks and the eggs they bought at farms. They spoke politely. All the shopkeepers smiled at them.

Further north in Cherbourg, General Erwin Rommel wrote home to his wife:

The war is turning into a peaceful occupation of the whole of France. The population is calm and in some places even friendly.

Likewise, they were in the British Channel Islands, where the Wehrmacht landed on 30 June without opposition, the islands having been judged impossible to defend and demilitarised a week earlier.

Even Hitler’s ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, commented upon the apparent apathy of the general population. Like all German officials and civilians in France, Abetz was well fed – as were some privileged or dishonest French people, but the majority of the population was preoccupied with getting the next meal, or extra clothing coupons, or ‘grey’ market food at the weekends. The diary of a Parisian housewife for October 1942, when commerce was far more stable than just after the defeat and prices were controlled by the government, goes some way to explaining this:

7.30

At the baker’s. Got bread. Rusks maybe available later.

9.00

Butcher says will only have meat on Saturday.

9.30

Cheese shop. Says he will have some cheese at 5 p.m.

10.00

Tripe shop. My ticket No. 32 will come up at 4 p.m.

10.30

Grocer’s. Vegetables maybe, but only at 5 p.m.

11.00

Return to baker. Rusks, but no bread this time.2

At 4 p.m. she had to be back at the tripe shop. At 5 p.m. came the dilemma: a small portion of cheese or a handful of vegetables? And so it went on, day after day. In addition, there were effectively three price levels for food and most other things: the official price decreed by Pétain’s government in Vichy, which only applied to purchasers who possessed the right number of coupons; the ‘grey’ market where peasants could be persuaded to sell a few eggs or some meat; and the black market, where everything could be obtained – at a price. If the housewife keeping the diary was rich enough, she had the following choices:

Legal price

Grey Market

Black Market

1kg butter

42F

69F

107F

12 eggs

20F

35F

53F

1kg chicken meat

24F

38F

48F

On some items the mark-up was grotesque: farmers sold potatoes for cash at 3F per kg; in Paris they cost five times as much. With average wages frozen at 1,500F per month for men and 1,300F for women, shopping around was time-consuming and exhausting.3

The chaos immediately after the defeat was unbelievable. In many areas under no military threat from the German advance, the population had been ordered by local authorities, the police or Gendarmerie officers to leave their homes, taking only three days’ provisions with them. In many of the half-empty villages and towns German soldiers set up for the hungry stay-at-homes and returnees a soup kitchen and distributed bread to them. German railwaymen were driving the few trains that enabled the first refugees to return home. On the bandstands in public parks and in front of town halls, Wehrmacht musicians played afternoon concerts, whose programmes included a token French composition like an extract from Bizet’s Carmen to calm the population and show them what German Kultur was all about.

Compounding the confusion, France was now divided in two. Hitler did not wish to occupy the whole of France, because this would have required keeping hundreds of thousands of men there on garrison duty, men he needed for his planned invasion of the USSR. Under the June 1940 armistice, he therefore annexed the industrial north-east départements rich in mineral deposits and heavy industry and declared the border provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, also known by their historic German names of Elsass und Lotharingen, to be part of the Reich. For strategic reasons, the coastline from the Belgian border to the Pyrenees was occupied, and this Occupied Zone stretched so far inland in the north as to absorb more than half of France. The remaining two-fifths of the country, governed from Vichy, was known euphemistically as the Free Zone, with the exception of some pockets in the south-east that were occupied by Italian forces as a result of Mussolini’s ‘stab in the back’ incursions after Il Duce had waited to make sure that the main French armies had been beaten by the Wehrmacht.

France divided by the armistice agreement.

On the hoardings all over the Occupied Zone, the tattered general mobilisation notices from the previous September had been covered by more recent posters boasting, ‘We shall win because we are the stronger’. These, in turn, were now covered up by thousands of German posters showing a valiant Wehrmacht soldier holding a grateful small child in his arms above the message, ‘Abandoned by your leaders, put your trust in the German soldier’. For many French civilians, there was no one else they could trust, with their civil servants, police and even the local firemen far away and uncertain when they could return.

An acting brigadier named Charles de Gaulle, who had briefly served as Minister of Defence in Paul Reynaud’s government that handed power to Marshal Pétain on 16 June, disagreed. On 18 June he issued over the BBC French Service from London a call to arms that was heard by very few French listeners, but swiftly reproduced clandestinely in print all over France. It read:

To the people of France

France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war!

Unworthy leaders have capitulated through panic and delivered the country into servitude. However, nothing is lost! Nothing is lost because this war is a world war. The immense forces of the free world have not yet come into play. One day, they will crush the enemy.

On that day, France must share in the victory to recover her liberty and her prestige.

That is my sole aim, and the reason why I invite all Frenchmen, wherever they may be, to join me in action, in sacrifice and hope.

Our fatherland is in danger of dying. Let us all fight to save it.

Vive la France!

The writer François Mauriac, later a strong supporter of de Gaulle, remarked at the time: ‘Purely symbolic, his obstinacy. Very fine, but ineffectual.’4 The reaction of most of his audience to the radioed call to arms, or its clandestinely printed copies, was bafflement. They reasoned that France’s two most famous soldiers President Philippe Pétain and Chief of Staff General Maurice Weygand must have considered all the possibilities and have a better grasp of the situation than this unknown renegade in London. There was also the worrying thought that, should de Gaulle lose his solitary gamble – which seemed only too likely at the time – his supporters could legally be condemned to death for high treason by the French government, as was de Gaulle himself shortly afterward.

It was one thing for a career soldier like him, safely across the Channel in London, to call upon his countrymen to resist the German invader, but what could ordinary people at the mercy of Hitler’s victorious war machine do about it? The first individual acts were limited to disobedience of German proclamations, which invited reprisals to serve as lessons to the general population, and a scattering of acts of unthinking desperation. In Rouen, Epinal and Royenne lone protesters cut German telephone lines and were executed by firing squad. In Bordeaux a distraught Polish refugee shook his fist at a military band, for which he too was shot on 27 August.

At the time, most French people were saying that the British Expeditionary Force had ‘fought to the last drop of French blood’ before running away in the Dunkirk evacuation, although a few resolute souls in the north-eastern départements, who recalled the Tommies fighting alongside their fathers in the previous war, did shelter and help British servicemen on the run out of humanitarian instinct. They took this risk in defiance of ubiquitous German posters warning that the penalty for doing so was death.

A few patriots and political activists opposed to fascism braved the dangers of duplicating and distributing anti-German tracts bearing news from abroad, especially the BBC French Service, but most people considered this sort of activity to be un refus absurde – a ridiculous refusal to face the facts. In the larger towns of the Free Zone exiled Alsatians and Lorrainers who could not return home and intellectuals from the north whose political reputations made it inadvisable to return to the Occupied Zone – as well as Jews and others with good reason to fear German racial policy – all formed their own groups where resistance was talked about, but little of their hopeless frustration was translated into action in the early months of the occupation.

One of the very few people to respond immediately to de Gaulle’s call by thinking in terms of espionage that could be used against the Germans was Catholic farmer Louis de la Bardonnie, who lived in an elegant château above the sleepy Dordogne village of Le Breuilh. A pre-war member of the far-right Action Française party, whose members supported the collaborationist government in Vichy headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, Bardonnie’s personal sense of honour obliged him to resign from Action Française after the defeat, stating in writing that he withdrew his support from Pétain, whom he regarded as a traitor for capitulating to Hitler. There was little else that Pétain could have done, except leave France and continue the war from French North Africa, as a minority of officers and politicians – the latter mainly Jewish – urged him to do.

With the aim of collecting intelligence that could be used against the forces occupying his country and transmitting it somehow to de Gaulle’s intelligence service in London, then known as le deuxième bureau, Bardonnie contacted a small group of trusted friends who shared his patriotic feelings. De Gaulle’s deuxième bureau was commanded by André Dewavrin, who took the nom de guerre of ‘Colonel Passy’. One of his first recruits inside occupied France was Gilbert Renault, a thickset, balding, dynamic 35-year-old film producer with a prodigious memory, whose alias was ‘Colonel Rémy’. He regularly crossed the Demarcation Line from the Occupied Zone carrying military intelligence collected by a network of informers in Brittany and along the Atlantic coast. Once in the Free Zone, Rémy gave this to Bardonnie, who passed it to the guard of a train leaving Pau for Canfranc in Spain. From there, a French customs official took it to Jacques Pigeonneau, the Vichy consul general in Madrid, who forwarded the vital envelope to London.

While Rémy risked only his own life, Bardonnie and his friends of both sexes had families to worry about. By keeping in his house a transmitter furnished by Rémy, plus weapons and 10 million francs in secret funds at times, and by allowing his home to be used as a safe house by two other Gaullist agents, Bardonnie was placing at risk his wife Denyse and their nine children. Among his group was Paul Armbruster, a refugee from Alsace who had lived through the German occupation of the province in 1914–18, later studying in Germany and working there for French Intelligence undercover as a journalist. He persuaded Bardonnie to go underground using false identities after initiating proceedings for divorce with the aim of protecting Denyse and their children from guilt by association – as would have been the case because the Nazi code of Sippenhaft made all members of a suspect’s family equally guilty. Armbruster also assured Louis and Denyse that their children would be left alone by the Germans because of their blue eyes and blonde hair. On several nail-bitingly terrifying occasions, his advice was proved right.

Two other members of Bardonnie’s tight-knit réseau were Freemasons working as pilots for the port of Bordeaux, who conned the U-boats up the treacherous Gironde estuary into port at the end of each foray and guided them out to sea again. To begin with, the information of this traffic which they sent to London was considered ‘too good to be true’ and not acted upon. Their greatest frustration was that the immense U-boat pens being built by the Organisation Todt in Bordeaux were never bombed during construction because, once completed in autumn 1942, they were bombproof – and still stand today, indestructible. Grand Admiral Doenitz considered the British failure to destroy the pens along the Atlantic coast while they were still vulnerable one of the greatest mistakes of the RAF bombing campaign in the entire war.5

However, Bardonnie’s pilots were eventually able to claim the credit for eleven U-boats destroyed by Allied aircraft after leaving the Gironde estuary, having diverted suspicion from themselves by the daring expedient of repeatedly telling their German employers that the losses must be due to a spy inside their own port administration!

Like the Bardonnie-Rémy operation, all Resistance networks were organised groups of men and women who shared a particular political or religious orientation but, for security reasons, had little or no contact with other groups or individuals likely to take unwarranted risks. At the time of the blitzkrieg invasion in June 1940, Hitler had dismissed his generals’ fears of organised resistance to the occupation of France by telling them that the French nation was so irrevocably divided by class, politics and religion as to be unable to create a unified resistance to anything. How close he was to being right is borne out by the many occasions on which different Resistance networks worked against each other to the advantage of their common enemy.

Eventually the most tightly, indeed punitively, disciplined Resistance networks were the various communist factions. Because of its very efficient propaganda machine, Le Parti Communiste Français (PCF) was later believed by many to have been an important force in the Resistance from the first day of the occupation. In fact, far from opposing the arrival of German troops on occupation duties, it obeyed the spirit of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed in August 1939 and supported Hitler for the first twenty months of the Second World War. The PCF’s daily L’Humanité had been banned for its anti-war stance during the phoney war of September 1939 to June 1940 – as had the British Communist Party’s organ The Daily Worker in Britain. When the German occupation authorities re-authorised publication of L’Humanité, editorials followed instructions from Moscow by dubbing the recent conflict ‘an imperialist war’, for which the capitalists of Britain and France were mostly to blame. De Gaulle was labelled a lackey of the international banking interests in the City of London and readers were urged to regard German soldiers in France as fellow workers far from home, for whom works committees should organise picnics, to make them feel welcome.

On 22 June 1941, Hitler showed what he thought of the paper on which the pact was written by launching Operation Barbarossa, his invasion of the USSR. The Comintern in Moscow immediately ordered the PCF to go underground – its secretary general Maurice Thorez was safely installed in Moscow, working with the Comintern – and execute a 180-degree turn vis-à-vis the occupation forces. Going underground was not too difficult for many members because, when the party was banned during the phoney war, its elected députés who were not immediately arrested went underground, as did many less well-known activists. There was thus already a cell structure in which no one member could betray more than a few colleagues.

Reversing the previous love affair with the occupation troops was a more bloody business: orders came swiftly from Moscow to launch a campaign of terrorism, assassinating German military personnel and civilians. This had nothing to do with the French war effort, but was intended to oblige the German forces in France to take reprisals by shooting hostages and thus drive a wedge between themselves and the previously passive population. This in turn would force Hitler to keep in France on garrison duties whole divisions which could otherwise have been transferred to the Eastern Front. Their presence there could have proved critical during the German advance on Moscow when the Soviet armies, badly trained, poorly equipped and purged of most of their commanders from colonels upwards, were collapsing like a house of cards.

Initially, PCF activists worked under a number of banners, but the party’s perpetual paranoia regarding individual initiative forced a unification at the beginning of 1942 under the apparently patriotic name Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), a title borrowed from the patriotic militias that had fought against the German invaders during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Although the PCF propaganda machine portrayed its killers as heroic patriots fighting the German enemy, few people outside the party thought the assassinations heroic or even of any value. For example, after a Wehrmacht captain was shot dead on the Boulevard de Strasbourg in Paris on 16 September 1941, journalists of all shades except the communists reflected the mood of the population and publicly deplored the assassination. Author Pierre Audiat summed up their views to this and previous assassinations:

It is by no means clear how the elimination of a German soldier who is only here in obedience to military discipline might influence the outcome of the war. Had some truly heroic gesture been at stake, the murderer should have fulfilled his patriotism by staying right out in the open, to pay the price.6

From London, de Gaulle condemned the assassination campaign as militarily useless.7 Most other factions in the Resistance regretted the PCF assassination campaign because it achieved nothing for France and simply made life more difficult for everyone. So, the largest single element of the Resistance was frequently at odds with the others from June 1941 onwards.

De Gaulle therefore used a number of politically astute figures in efforts to unite the various groups in the Resistance under his overall control. Socialist politicians Pierre Brossolette and Christian Pineau played their parts but most credit is usually given to a brilliant administrator named Jean Moulin. Parachuted into France in January 1942, this former prefect of Chartres had by the end of the year drawn the three main Resistance networks of the Free Zone – COMBAT, LIBERATION-SUD and the communist FTP – into a loose federation titled ‘Les Mouvements Unis de la Résistance’ (MUR). As the plurality of the title indicates, command was divided. Charles Frenay, the hard-line escaped POW ex-officer who had founded COMBAT with a core of other military men, refused to collaborate with FTP, with whose pro-Moscow politics he strongly disagreed, while both FTP and LIBERATION-SUD claimed that Frenay was a militaristic dictator. The differences between the various leaders were deliberately played up by the infiltration into the other networks of undercover communists nicknamed ‘submarines’.

Frenay, as befitted his military background, sought approval from his superiors – in this case, General de Gaulle. In September 1942 he had travelled to London and met de Gaulle, who gave him a solemn assurance that organised groups in France who wanted to fight the Germans would be supplied from London with arms and other provisions. Although this was in accord with Churchill’s desire to ‘set Europe ablaze’, the Allied military commanders mistrusted the idea of arming civilians in an occupied country where the weapons might fall into German hands and one day be used against Allied soldiers. They also mistrusted the political motivation of many Resistance networks, particularly the communist-dominated ones. Implementation of de Gaulle’s undertaking was thus inadequate, irregular and subject to assessment of the recipients by London’s Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Since none of the various movements’ leaders agreed to work with the others, Moulin harnessed them loosely to his troika by astute manipulation and by doling out subsidies from funds parachuted to him with arms drops – and then withdrawing financial support when someone became too difficult. In the first five months of 1943 his subsidies totalled 71 million francs.8 As to what was done with this money, researchers run into blank walls, since it was simply written off back at base, with no records kept of the disbursements, and most Resistance operations at this point cost no more than a few bullets or some plastic explosive.

Although Moulin’s brief from London ran only in the Free Zone initially, he also made contacts with the PCF hard core in Paris, working directly for Moscow. Shortly thereafter, ‘Col Passy’, whose intelligence operation was now called Le Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA), defied all the canons of intelligence work by parachuting into France at the end of February 1943. Moulin chose the moment to return to London and did not return to France until 21 March.

There was considerable friction between BCRA officers and those of Major Maurice Buckmaster’s Section F of SOE, on whom BCRA depended for clandestine pick-ups in France and the return of agents to the field, for arms and other supply drops and for finance and communications links. BCRA was, however, kept at arm’s length by SOE’s creation of Section RF (standing for République Française) whose main function was to separate the two organisations, allegedly because BCRA was riddled with double agents reporting to Vichy. Seemingly justifying SOE’s caution, on 9 June 1943 in Paris the Gestapo arrested Moulin’s military counterpart General Charles Delestraint, code name ‘Vidal’. He was a man so unsuited for the clandestine life that he was caught after signing his true name in a hotel register. Once arrested, there could be no question of denying his mission or using an alibi because he was carrying identity papers in his own name. Detained with him was one René Hardy, who was liberated a few days later with no marks of ill treatment, but did not tell his Resistance comrades that he had been arrested.

The major breakthrough in unifying the many Resistance movements came on 27 May 1943, when the first meeting was held, in Paris, of the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR). Three of the movements were those of the Free Zone, co-existing uneasily thanks to Jean Moulin; the other five were from the Occupied Zone, brought together by fellow Gaullist Pierre Brossolette, and represented six political parties and two national trade unions.

On 21 June 1943 Moulin committed a fatal error. Although well aware that he was being hunted all over France by the Gestapo and its French collaborators, he called a meeting in Caluire, a suburb of Lyon, of the heads of the eight Resistance networks in the CNR. Any one of the attendees was likely to be under surveillance and thus unwittingly to lead his shadowers to the meeting. It is hard to find a sane reason for such a major error, which may have been due to a disarming sense of triumph at getting this group of powerful men to set aside their internecine conflicts in a common cause.

The venue for the meeting in the afternoon of 21 June was in the house of dental surgeon Dr Dugoujon, chosen because Moulin thought they could enter and leave unnoticed among the coming and going of Dugoujon’s patients. Frenay, in London for a briefing, was represented by his deputy Henri Aubry, who brought along René Hardy. Representing LIBERATION-SUD was a PCF member named Raymond Aubrac.

The dentist’s house was already staked out before they arrived and the meeting had no sooner begun than Gestapo agents burst in and handcuffed everyone, including genuine patients awaiting treatment. As they were all being herded into closed vans, Hardy made a run for it. Despite several Gestapo men turning automatic weapons in his direction, he escaped with only a slight leg wound – a remarkable achievement for a man running with his wrists cuffed behind the back.

The job of eliciting information from those arrested fell to the infamous SS Obersturmführer Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo boss in Lyon, who earned the title ‘The Butcher of Lyon’. In his torture chambers at the Ecole de Santé Militaire, Moulin claimed he was Jacques Martel, an art dealer from Nice, and gave the address of a genuine art gallery there, of which he was the legal owner. Barbie brushed this alibi aside, calling him by his Resistance code name, ‘Max’. What happened in the following thirty hours is best left to the imagination. The local French police noted the arrest routinely, between reports of ID cards stolen from a town hall and an increase in thefts of vegetables from private gardens. On the evening of 23 June the ‘trusty’ prison barber in Montluc prison was ordered to shave an unconscious man, who had obviously been severely tortured and whose flesh was cold to his touch. Moulin mumbled something in English and asked for water. The guard rinsed out a shaving mug and the barber held it to Moulin’s mouth, but he could only swallow a few drops before losing consciousness again.

Driven to Paris, he was lodged for two weeks in a cell at No. 40 Boulevard Victor Hugo, a suburban villa in Neuilly used by the Gestapo as an interrogation centre. Delestraint and another prisoner were brought there from Fresnes prison to be shown Moulin lying on a stretcher. Noting that his skin had turned yellow and his respiration was hardly noticeable, the dignified Delestraint, who could speak German, replied coldly to the guards’ questions with, ‘How do you expect me to identify a man in that condition?’

Officially, Jean Moulin died in a train taking him to Germany on 8 July 1943, aged 44. General Delestraint was transferred to the concentration camp at Natzwiller9 in Alsace and from there in September to Dachau, where he was shot and cremated on the morning of 19 April 1945, aged 64. In one successful operation the Gestapo had neutralised both the military and the political leaders of the Gaullist Resistance.

Just occasionally, Klaus Barbie seems to have been cheated of a victim. Arrested with Jean Moulin was Raymond Aubrac, whose Jewish wife Lucie was also a member of the PCF. The mother of a young child by Raymond, she devised a plan to rescue her husband, based on a huge gamble: that his false identity as ‘Claude Ermulin’ had not been broken under torture. Two days after the arrests, she arrived asking to see Barbie at the Ecole de Santé Militaire. Smartly dressed and visibly pregnant, she called herself Ghislaine de Barbantine. Most French people avoided the sadistic Gestapo officer and his colleagues like the plague, so Barbie was intrigued and agreed to see her. He was smartly dressed, she afterwards recalled, in a light summer suit and pink shirt, and had an attractive woman with him, as usual – he enjoyed fondling a woman while watching his victims being tortured.

Lucie’s first request to see ‘Ermulin’ was rejected, but she returned on 21 October and succeeded in meeting Barbie again by dint of bribes to French staff working for the Gestapo. When he asked what she wanted, Lucie cried hysterically that she was ashamed to be carrying a child by a criminal like ‘Ermulin’ and wanted to tell him just what she thought of him. As she had astutely deduced, the idea of a wronged woman tongue-lashing a tortured detainee so appealed to Barbie’s perverted sense of humour that he sent for prisoner ‘Ermulin’ to be brought to the Ecole de Santé Militaire.

Apparently unmoved by his pitiful state after four months in the Gestapo cells of Montluc prison, Lucie raved at ‘Ermulin’ that whatever was happening served him right as far as she was concerned, but she needed a name for her child and expected him to ‘do the decent thing’ and marry her. ‘Ermulin’ was hardly in a condition to marry anyone. The whole point of the dangerous pantomime was to have him brought to the medical school for the confrontation. As the police van was returning him and Barbie’s other victims of the day to Montluc prison after interrogation, two cars closed in on it and automatic fire from silenced weapons killed the men in the driver’s cab and mowed down the guards who jumped out, save one who escaped. The prisoners were unharmed in the attack. By risking her own life, Lucie Aubrac had saved that of her husband.10

Was that the truth? Accused of being the traitor who betrayed Jean Moulin and the others in Dr Dugoujon’s house on 27 May 1943, René Hardy was tried by a civil court in 1947 and a military tribunal in 1950, but narrowly escaped conviction on both occasions for lack of proof. When Barbie was eventually extradited from Bolivia in 1983, he was held in Montluc prison at Lyon, where so many of his victims had suffered atrociously. Throughout his detention, he repeatedly threatened to ‘tell the truth’ about some scandals of the Resistance. The following year Maître Jacques Vergès, Barbie’s lawyer, claimed that Raymond Aubrac was a double agent, working for Barbie.

On 11 May 1987 Barbie’s first trial for crimes against humanity – the only possible charge still legally valid after so many years – opened in Lyon. After two months of hearings, he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. In October a second trial opened, with Vergès determined to discredit the Resistance by proving his allegation of 1984 that its great heroine Lucie Aubrac was a liar and that her husband was the traitor who had betrayed Moulin, having agreed, when arrested in March 1943, to act as Barbie’s secret informer within the Resistance. According to Barbie’s testimony, he had personally arranged Raymond Aubrac’s seemingly miraculous rescue by his wife in return for this collaboration. On 25 September 1991 Barbie died, still unrepentant for his actions during the occupation of France, and the investigation was officially closed.

Two days after his death, a sixty-three-page document called Le testament de Klaus Barbie, but allegedly written by Vergès, circulated in French media circles. It included this allegation. Vergès, a shadowy Francophobe French-Thai-Algerian figure, who professed to be both a communist and a Muslim, was a personal friend of the insane Cambodian dictator Pol Pot and was best known to the general public for his high-profile cases defending extremely unpopular clients like the assassin Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, nicknamed ‘the Jackal’.

In April 1997 the Lyonnais reporter Gérard Chauvy published Aubrac, Lyon 1943 repeating the accusations against Lucie and Raymond Aubrac, who sued for slander and demanded the withdrawal of the book. The Aubrac couple assembled a number of eyewitnesses to the events of 1943, including the man who organised the raid on the prison van, all of whom testified that Chauvy had never bothered to interview them. The tribunal imposed fines of 60,000F on him and 100,000F on the publisher. Their appeal being rejected, the fines were raised to a global sum of 400,000F.

Lucie Aubrac wrote several books about the Resistance and naturally did everything to refute Barbie’s story, but some people in France choose to believe Barbie rather than credit her with the rescue of her husband. Which account is the truth? After the liberation, de Gaulle’s priority was to restore the shattered morale of the French nation, so many heroes and heroines were created to bolster ‘the legend of the Resistance’. Lucie Aubrac was one. It is hard to credit the account of a sadistic torturer and murderer like Barbie, as manipulated by the Francophobe Vergès, but was he telling the truth or simply attempting to besmirch the record of real French heroes and heroines?

The Resistance numbered many women in its ranks. Some, like Aubrac, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who ran the Gaullist HERISSON network, the feminist Bertie Albrecht and Danielle Casanova, who died in Auschwitz, are famous. There were also thousands of other women who played their parts, exploiting the advantages of their sex. This became increasingly important as time passed and controls tightened up in both zones, since women per se were not perceived as being dangerous by the predominantly male German security forces. Women’s potential for resistance activity was likewise underestimated by the Vichy Milice, whose members had grown up in the ultra-chauvinist pre-war Third Republic, under which women had no rights to sign contracts, own property, vote or hold public office – rights that would not be granted to Frenchwomen until after the liberation.

Notes

1 US casualties amended by the Statistical Services Center, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 7 November 1957, as quoted in Encyclopaedia Britannica 2002 Deluxe CD-Rom edition.

2 Diamond, H., Women and the Second World War in France, London, Longman, 1999, p. 60.

3 Lazare, L., La Résistance Juive en France, Paris, Stock, 1987, p. 105.

4 Guillemin, H., Parcours, Paris, Seuil, 1989, p. 400.

5 Doenitz, K., Memoirs, London, Cassell, 2000, p. 409.

6 Pryce-Jones, D., Paris in the Third Reich, London, Collins, 1981, p. 120 (abridged).

7 Lagarrigue, M., article in Arkheia, No. 17–8, Montauban, p. 11.

8 Amouroux, H., La Vie des Français sous l’Occupation, Paris, Fayard, 1961, Vol. 2, p. 58.

9 Also spelled Natzweiler in German.

10 Paris, E., Unhealed Wounds, New York, Grove Press, 1985, pp. 98–9.

2

PUTTING THE DIRT IN ‘DIRTY WAR’

The concept of SOE stems from the very first days after the invasion of France in May 1940, when the Chiefs of Staff minuted the British War Cabinet that, should the French army and Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force be defeated, Germany might in turn be brought down in the long run by economic pressure and a campaign of industrial unrest in the conquered territories. This was followed by Anthony Eden, then War Minister, forwarding a proposal for an organisation to train agents and execute irregular warfare in German-occupied Europe with special emphasis on France, where any re-invasion of the Continent was almost bound to take place.

The new prime minister, Winston Churchill, was delighted and decided that the enterprise should be independent of the three services. The new organisation was, in the words of Hugh Dalton, Minister for Economic Warfare, to be free of:

… the British Civil Service [and] the British military machine. [It must] coordinate, inspire, control and assist the nationals of the oppressed countries, who must themselves be the direct participants. We need absolute secrecy, a certain fanatical enthusiasm, willingness to work with people of different nationalities, and complete political reliability. Some of these qualities are to be found in some military officers and, if such men are available, they should undoubtedly be used. But the organisation should, in my view, be entirely independent of the War Office machine.1

As indeed it was, except for borrowing of training personnel for instruction in unarmed combat, wireless transmissions and use of weapons – and for use of RAF aircraft to drop supplies and land and recover agents from the field. SOE was tasked, in the prime minister’s words, ‘to set Europe ablaze’. His private nickname for it was ‘the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’. Within certain limits, it did set parts of Europe ablaze, at the cost of burning also many innocent people, including citizens in the occupied countries who thought they were working with London to liberate their homelands, but were in fact being used as pawns, sacrificed in games of which they were unaware.

Section F of SOE, with responsibility for espionage and sabotage in France, was headed from September 1941 by Maurice Buckmaster, an Old Etonian who had been employed pre-war as a manager for the Ford Motor Company in France. His permanent staff numbered no more than seven, based in a flat in Orchard Court, off Portman Square in London’s West End. Buckmaster’s chief assistant was Nicholas Bodington, a pre-war Paris correspondent for the Daily Express, thought to have moonlighted there for British Intelligence. During that time, he met an extrovert French air force pilot named Henri Déricourt, who made friends wherever he flew, including in Nazi Germany. In charge of welfare and ‘prepping’ agents for their missions was an astonishingly cool and competent civilian, Ms Vera Atkins, who hid her exotic Romanian-Jewish origins under her very English manners. Recruitment and supervision of training was the responsibility of Major Selwyn Jepson, who used the alias ‘Mr Potter’ when interviewing prospective agents in English and French, of which his knowledge was so good that he could tell in what region of France they had picked up the language.

All this had to be done without the prospective agents knowing for what or by whom they were being interviewed. As one of them afterwards recalled:

I met [Jepson] in a bare office at the Northumberland Hotel and we talked together in French for three-quarters of an hour. He didn’t say anything at all about the actual set-up and at the end he said, ‘All right, I think we’ve got a job for you. You start your training on 1 August.’ And that was it. I still had no idea what I was actually signing up for.2

The training course was so tough that a failure rate of twelve out of a course of fifteen recruits was not unusual. It included field craft such as recognising when one was being followed and techniques of losing a tail, and the use not only of British weapons but also of American and enemy small arms, which had to be stripped down and reassembled in the dark by feel alone. Target shooting was made more difficult by taking place at the end of an exhausting obstacle course. The course ended with parachute training at Ringway airport near Manchester.

In 1942 Buckmaster decided to set up a totally new network to be run by Francis Anthony Suttill, a 33-year-old lawyer qualified in both Britain and France. He may have been a good lawyer but, like Delestraint and Moulin, lacked the paranoia necessary for clandestine work in an occupied country. Déricourt afterwards summed up Suttill as ‘more suited to be an officer in a gung-ho cavalry regiment than for clandestine warfare’. In retrospect, that may have been a powerful reason for selecting Suttill.

He christened the new network PROSPER, after a fifth-century theologian named Prosper of Aquitaine. On 24 September 1942 PROSPER’s courier Andrée Borrel was parachuted into France in preparation for Suttill’s arrival. In the early hours of 2 October 1942 a signal flashed from a field near Vendôme, midway between Orleans and Le Mans, was spotted by the pilot of an RAF Hudson whose passenger was Francis Suttill. Once on the ground, Suttill immediately set about recruiting agents throughout northern France with very poor security until several thousand people were involved directly or indirectly, many of them knowing the identities of far too many other members of the network.

At Norfolk House in St James’s Square in London was the office of Chief of Staff to the (yet to be appointed) Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC). This was also the umbrella beneath which several shadowy sub-organisations lurked – in particular, the London Controlling Section run by Colonel John Bevan, among whose creative brains was Wing Commander Dennis Wheatley, later to be a world-famous author. Bevan’s predecessor, Colonel Oliver Stanley, had resigned rather than deliberately misinform Resistance agents regarding the Dieppe raid. This was done with a view to letting them be caught in order to reveal under torture their false information so as to convince Hitler that the disastrous raid which cost 906 deaths in the invasion force and saw 2,195 men taken prisoner was a prelude to a full-scale invasion. Bevan, in civilian life a stockbroker, was made of sterner stuff.

It is against that background of cynical deceit that the PROSPER network must be assessed. Suttill’s first wireless operator Gilbert Norman arrived in November, followed a few weeks later by a second radio operator of Armenian origin named Jack Agazarian. Bodington brought in his old pal Déricourt to select and supervise landing grounds for Section F agents.

On 22 January 1943, Déricourt returned to France, tasked with organising reception parties and safe houses for new arrivals and agents returning to Britain. At first, everything seemed to be working out surprisingly well. During April and May PROSPER received 1,006 Stens, 1,877 incendiary devices and 4,489 grenades; in June it took delivery of another 190 man-sized containers of materiel on thirty-three landing grounds spread over twelve départements. Within a few months, Déricourt also safely brought in no fewer than sixty-seven agents, but his amazing confidence and success rate was beginning to worry Agazarian so much that when next recalled to London, he passed on his suspicions to Bodington and Buckmaster.

Agazarian was right. Déricourt’s successes were due to his pre-war friendship with SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Boemelburg, the senior German spy-catcher in France. Listed in the Paris Gestapo files as Agent BOE/48,3 Déricourt fed the details of the clandestine flights to Boemelburg, who then ordered anti-aircraft batteries along the flight path of the aircraft not to fire at them. What Boemelburg did not know is that his double agent was in fact a triple agent acting under instructions from SIS that overrode his duties for Section F. This was the real dirt of the deception operation: Suttill’s vast network was to be sacrificed in order to feed false information about the date of the planned Allied invasion of Europe when its members were tortured after capture by the Gestapo.

However, Buckmaster remained unconvinced by Agazarian and sent Bodington into France to check out the situation. Even when Suttill, Borrel and Norman were arrested by the Gestapo on 23 June and the PROSPER network wound up, Buckmaster never lost his faith in Déricourt and even put in writing as late as December 1945 that he was innocent of any collaboration with the Germans, and ‘had the finest record of operations completed of any member of SOE’.4

One essential requirement for a spy is to have the appearance and demeanour of a grey person who does not stand out in a crowd, which could certainly not be said of Noor Inayat Khan, a head-turningly beautiful courier whose looks would cost her her life. She was now the only member of the PROSPER network still at liberty, apart from Déricourt. Khan reported to London that she could no longer contact any members of the network. One can imagine the loneliness and fear she must have felt, stranded in an enemy-occupied country, knowing that so many people had been betrayed, and that some of them must have given her description, under torture or otherwise, to Gestapo officers. Déricourt tried unsuccessfully to persuade her to return to Britain. Was her refusal to go because she suspected he would hand her over to the Germans after bringing her to the landing field? We shall never know because she was betrayed and arrested on 13 October. Thereafter, the only concrete record of her existence is a sad little plaque at Dachau concentration camp, recording the deaths of Khan and three other SOE women agents on 13 September 1944, allegedly after a near-lethal beating meted out for his personal pleasure by the sadistic Allgemeine-SS officer Friedrich Wilhelm Rupert, later executed for this and other crimes.

That date was over two months after the deaths of Andrée Borrel and three other women agents at Natzwiller concentration camp in Alsace, as recorded on an equally sad plaque that was affixed to the camp crematorium there and is now in the memorial museum. Why the delay? Presumably because the women at Dachau were being interrogated for longer than the other four.

As Nacht und Nebel prisoners were destined to vanish without trace, the women at Natzwiller ceased administratively to exist. It was later discovered that they were taken individually to the sick bay on the evening of 6 July 1944, told to undress on the pretence that it was for an inoculation against typhus and then given what should have been an instantly lethal injection of phenol by the camp medical officer SS Untersturmführer Dr Werner Röhde or his assistant. Within minutes their bodies were shoved into the four-body camp crematorium by Hauptscharführer Peter Schraub. At least one of the women recovered consciousness sufficiently to scar Schraub’s face with her fingernails before being forced inside and the door slammed, so that she was burned alive. When Buckmaster’s assistant Vera Atkins, who made it her personal mission after the war to trace what had happened to the lost women agents, interviewed Schraub three months later, his face still bore the scars.5