Monsieur le Commandant

by Romain Slocombe

  P.K.: Were there any foreigners?

  F.L.: Yes, especially Spaniards in the 1930s. But it wasn’t a large community. Their presence didn’t bother anybody. That is to say, there was never any hostility towards them, other than a few articles in Le Journal d’Andigny.

  P.K.: And Jews?

  F.L.: I only knew Monsieur Lévy, who worked as caretaker at the cemetery. He was a veteran of the First World War. He was deported. The other Jews were Parisians who had country houses on the Seine. They wore the yellow star, but we only saw them here on holiday. They thought they were free to travel as they liked if they wore the star. But some of them were arrested in Paris, like that engineer who died in Auschwitz, along with his wife, and one of their daughters died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen.

  P.K.: And politically?

  F.L.: There were communists like me, and some Croix-de-Feu18 members. And a few excitable youngsters in the PPF. There was even one who signed up to fight on the Eastern Front, with the Germans; you saw him swaggering around town on leave in his German uniform. Well, off he went and he never came back; he might’ve been one of those who was picked up at the end of the war and shot by the French army … But there were no physical confrontations between the communists and the far right in Andigny. They had their own ideas, but they respected each other as Frenchmen. The only ‘clashes’ were between Le Patriote and Le Journal d’Andigny. It was just a war of words between newspapers. The Germans shut down the Patriote in ’42, since it had always leaned towards the Popular Front. But in any case the Journal, with its conservative Old France sympathies, had a wider readership because it was more in tune with local feeling. Its owner was a rabid collaborator, and she had some trouble with the law after the liberation.

  P.K.: Did the air raid on 8 June 1940 trigger a mass exodus?

  F.L.: A lot of people left, maybe 30 per cent, to take refuge in the surrounding farms. The centre of town burned for two weeks. Those who stayed lived in the houses that were left standing, and in makeshift camps.

  P.K.: How did the occupying forces act towards the locals?

  F.L.: They behaved themselves. They were always a little stiff – I’m thinking of the officers in the Hôtel de Paris, where the local Kommandantur was set up, in particular – but for the most part they were good sorts. Even the tall SS chap, Schöllenhammer, who was here for a few months before being sent back to Russia. The Germans paid for what they bought, even their haircuts, as honestly as the rest of us. But the Feldgendarmes would arrest you over the slightest thing, a bald tyre, or breaking the curfew. A constant police presence. They also raided farmhouses occasionally, on the grounds of anonymous letters. But there was no torture or executions. The mass graves that were later found in the forests were the work of the French Gestapo from Rouen and Caen, who spread terror wherever they went, especially when they withdrew in ’44 … As the Resistance grew much stronger with all the kids deserting the forced labour service, and as people began to see that the Krauts were on their last legs, that’s when a kind of civil war broke out in our country. There was a lot of violence on both sides.

  P.K.: Were the people of Andigny Pétainists?

  F.L.: I wouldn’t say that, no. Just obedient to the government, except for a few who openly supported the Maréchal. You know, you won’t find much in Andigny - a few people who had their heads shaved after the liberation, but nothing exceptional. Besides, those poor women who got shorn hadn’t denounced anyone; they’d just slept with the Krauts. Or not even that – they shaved the head of this young Spanish girl whose only crime had been working as a chambermaid in the Kommandantur hotel! On the other hand, there were a lot of denunciation letters, sent anonymously. Usually to settle personal scores, or to do with land disputes, inheritances … But other than that, the town was quiet. At ten o’clock you had to close your windows and curtains to prevent the bombers from seeing the lights. We lived under the permanent yoke of the Germans. That’s all.

  P.K.: Did the Town Council implement Vichy directives?

  F.L.: From the administrative side, of course they had no choice. But as for the rest of it, they were passive. For instance, they had nothing to do with the arrest and deportation of Monsieur Lévy. That started with an article in Le Journal d’Andigny, and the Kommandantur decided to act on it. The day the Jew was arrested, I was visiting my mother-in-law who lived across the street, on Rue du Buet. I saw a German truck pull up in front of his house. He was packed off with all his furniture, right up to his fishing rods. They took everything. Monsieur Lévy was sent away because he was a Jew, not because he was in the Resistance. He was a nice man with no family, who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  P.K.: Were there Resistance fighters in Andigny?

  F.L: In terms of action in the town itself, no. I personally joined a group that was blowing up locomotives over by Dieppe. Another local was in a network working out of Rouen. And there were farmers who supplied the Resistance and hid airmen. Monsieur Madry was arrested in ’43 with his wife; they sent him to Neuengamme, and her to Ravensbrück.

  P.K.: How many locals were in the Resistance, would you say?

  F.L.: I’d say seven or eight. But then, when I came home after the liberation, the town was swarming with resisters! The truth is, there was never a network in Andigny.

  P.K.: So the Resistance came late to Andigny?

  F.L.: It became active when there was less danger. People were scared for their lives, you know? And then there were those who suddenly discovered towards the end that they had always been resisters, deep down, but that was mostly a desire to be on the winning side.

  P.K.: Was there any violence, or purges, when the town was liberated?

  F.L.: No. People were mostly relieved that it was over. About thirty people went before one of two tribunals: the Court of Justice or the departmental Civic Chamber, but only two or three were fined or sentenced to jail, including the editor of the Journal. No one was shot. In other towns, yes, there were cases of summary justice. And let me tell you something: there were a lot more French Gestapo agents than there were members of the Resistance. We hated them with a passion. Later, we were reproached for our excesses; people accused us of taking the law into our own hands. But what were we supposed to do? When we caught a known, registered Gestapo agent with his little yellow card, there wasn’t much incentive to arrest him correctly, bring him to justice, wait for the trial and the sentencing. That was too much to ask. We were seething with rage and the desire for vengeance. Our justice was more direct – we kind of settled it on the spot. Those Gestapo agents had a debt to pay, to us more than anyone else. They had betrayed us, denounced us, hunted us, humiliated us, tortured us, handed us over to the enemy … They had tricked us by infiltrating our ranks and then turning us in. How could anyone be expected to control themselves after that, to abide by the law? All I could think about was our dead. So we showed them no mercy.

  P.K.: I read somewhere …

  F.L.: Hold on, hold on, let me tell you another thing. It wasn’t just the Gestapo! Personally, I consider the broadcasters, speech-makers, journalists and politicians to have been far more criminal than the worst Gestapo filth. Certain speeches and articles, along with the prevailing climate and ‘European’ propaganda, swept men and women into the deadly orbit of the German police, when their only mistake had been to swallow everything they heard and read. Unfortunately, the law courts and tribunals followed other criteria. They put the torturers and killers before the firing squad, but those who had incited them to it usually got off with a slap on the wrist. To me, that was the real scandal.

  P.K.: I see … and in what way was the liberation of Andigny a relief?

  F.L.: Well, they were occupiers after all. So when they left, people were glad to see them go.

  P.K.: Did the Allied troops stay in Andigny after the fighting was over?

  F.L.: Yes. The liberators were fêted. But no one was willing to house the soldiers. You see, to the people of Andigny, they were foreigners, t
oo.

  P.K.: So you think the locals just wanted to draw a veil over the entire period and forget it all ever happened?

  F.L.: Exactly. People tried to put all the death and suffering behind them. The terrible poverty, too, for those who were worst off. In fact, I was amazed at their ability to forget. All they focused on was getting back to normal. And then, in any case, time passes, doesn’t it? It’s what you might call natural. The tradesmen gradually returned. It’s really pretty around here, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. The castle, the hills, the Seine … It’s a little heaven on Earth. You know, we’re really attached to our patch of ground. So all we wanted was to enjoy it quietly …

  The following information is drawn from Peter Klemm’s documentary Elsie Bergers Französische Familie, broadcast on German television in 2008. The film has yet to be distributed in France.

  SS Sturmbannführer (Commandant) Hugo Schöllenhammer died on the Eastern Front – in Lublin, southern Poland – on 22 July 1944. Documents found in Leipzig, the officer’s home town, include the following extract from the poem ‘Ténèbres’ by Paul Claudel, written out in the hand of the signatory of the denunciation letter:

  I suffer, the other suffers, there is not any space

  Between her and me, not any word, not any face

  Nothing but the night we share and cannot speak,

  The work-barren night where love is vile and weak.

  I lend an ear, alone, embraced by fear.

  A voice not unlike hers, a cry I hear.

  In April 1943, Bernard Grasset published Paul-Jean Husson’s latest novel The Bars of Daylight, one of the biggest literary successes of the year yet never reissued after the war despite its merits. Arrested at home on 29 August 1944 by the French Forces of the Interior the day after the sub-prefecture was liberated by the troops of the 15th Scottish Reconnaissance Regiment, the writer was held first – to protect him from being lynched by the ‘eleventh hour resisters’ – at the École Militaire where he had been deputy director during the phoney war, then transferred to Fresnes prison.

  On 28 December of that year, he was tried in the Court of Justice. He was accused of having written viciously anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler articles published in La Gerbe, Au Pilori, Révolution nationale, Je suis partout, Le Journal de Rouen, and in the local weekly Le Journal d’Andigny, edited by a notorious collaborationist; of having joined the Franco-German Committee, founded by Fernand de Brinon, in 1934; of having links with Gustave Hervé, Lucien Pemjean and the authors of a ‘long-standing conspiracy against the Republic, aimed at bringing Maréchal Pétain to power’; of having been a financial supporter of Eugène Deloncle’s Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire and an associate of Jean Fontenoy; of having participated in the delegation of French authors to Germany in autumn 1941; of having accompanied Lucien Combelle to a French workers’ conference in Berlin; and of having frequented the German Institute of Paris alongside Drieu la Rochelle, Henry de Montherlant and Jacques Chardonne.

  On the basis of Article 75 of the penal code relative to intelligence with the enemy – which he would use again successfully against Robert Brasillach the following month – the prosecutor called for the death penalty. However, thanks in particular to letters from François Mauriac and André Gide (despite the fact that Husson had openly accused the latter of being a corrupter of youth) attesting to the sincerity and authenticity of his involvement, and to the efforts of his friends in the Académie Goncourt, who awarded their first post-war prize to Elsa Triolet to mollify the Communist Party,19 Elsie Berger’s father-in-law was allowed to plead mitigating circumstances. He was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labour and stripped of his civic rights. He was also struck from the rolls of the Académie Française, like Pétain, Maurras, Hermant and Bonnard. Reprieved in 1952, Paul-Jean Husson returned to live in Haute-Normandie, where he wrote a further four novels, one play and two essays, all unpublished, and died in 1959 in the Trappist monastery at Radepont, near Fleury-sur-Andelle, to which he had retired several months earlier.

  In his will, he left 500,000 old francs to Germaine Roussel, née Pin, of Fresne-l’Archevêque – the younger sister of his natural son André Pin.

  Olivier Husson entered Paris by Porte de Saint-Cloud on 25 August 1944, riding up Avenue Mozart on a tank of the Langlade tactical group of General Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division. As soon as the fighting was over he went to the Eure to retrieve his children and bring them to live with him in Paris. He permanently severed all relations with his father. His efforts to find Ilse Husson – inter alia, among the surviving deportees who assembled at the Hotel Lutetia as they gradually trickled home – came to nothing, and he ultimately believed that she had perished.

  He was remarried in 1951 to a musician in the Paris Orchestra. One son was born of the union in 1953.

  Omer Aristide Husson became an editor, and in 1982 brought out a collection of his grandfather’s unpublished works. Shunned by the critics, the book went unnoticed.

  Lieutenant Gerhard Heller, of the Propagandastaffel’s Schrifttumgruppe, left Paris on 14 August 1944 in a private car requisitioned during the retreat of the German army. The previous evening, he had buried, in an iron box at the foot of a tree on Rue de Constantine, between Rue de Talleyrand and Rue Saint-Dominique, the journal he had kept throughout the Occupation, in which he had recorded his meetings with French writers and publishers. Years after the war, Heller returned to Paris, but no matter how many times he counted and recounted the rows of trees, he was never able to find the hiding place. He therefore had to rely on memory to reconstruct the document, which was published in 1981 by Éditions du Seuil under the title A German in Paris (1940–1944).

  The Gestapo officer Martin Laugnac was arrested on 16 May 1945 at the Danish border after having wandered for weeks through the devastation of Germany. After several months of questioning by the British intelligence and military security services, he was handed over to the French, who had long called for his extradition. He was committed to Caen prison, where he attempted suicide in his cell. The Calvados Court of Justice sentenced him to death, as it had three members of his group previously (two others had been killed by the Francs-Tireurs Partisans in June 1944; another two were captured and condemned to death in the Orne; two more were sentenced to forced labour for life, and the rest evaded justice). Martin Laugnac was shot by firing squad on 15 June 1946 in Caen. Refusing to be blindfolded, he tried to give the order to shoot himself, but the sergeant in charge of the firing squad beat him to it.

  Laugnac’s direct superior, the man who had trained him, Hauptscharführer Harald Heyns, alias ‘Bernard’, of the Sipo-SD in Rouen and later in Caen, was arrested in northern Germany by the British in 1945. Summoned before a military tribunal in August 1948 accused of having ordered the executions of Canadian prisoners in Normandy, he escaped shortly before the the trial began by prising off the sheet-metal roof of the courthouse toilets, and was never seen again.

  The bodies of the Resistance fighters André Pin and Yvonne Lelouarn were identified in October 1944 among the thirty-eight bodies exhumed from a mass grave in the Lyons forest. Buried just below the surface, the corpses had had their limbs dislocated, twisted and broken, jaws fractured and thoraxes crushed. One of the martyrs had had his lips sewn shut with wire.20

  Joseph Cuvelier, the erstwhile constable promoted to auxiliary and then ‘special detective’ of General Inquiries, was jailed in the liberation and brought before the ‘Purging Commission’ on 26 October 1944. He claimed to have been a member of the Resistance (in the intelligence service of the Mouvement de Libération Nationale). Dismissed from the police force, he was reinstated in 1948 after appealing to the Council of State and with the support of the association of former police officers, which was led by Commissioner Jean Dides, himself a former chief inspector in General Inquiries (in the branch in charge of combating foreign Resistance fighters). Appointed division commissioner, on 17 October 1961 Joseph Cuvelier took part in the suppression of a de
monstration by Algerians in Paris and its suburbs ordered by the Prefect of Police, Maurice Papon, and in the ensuing massacres. He retired in 1970.

  The archives of the French police concerning the ‘Jew-eater’, Deputy Chief Inspector Sadorski (first name unknown) of General Inquiries – whose existence is attested to by numerous eyewitness accounts of his arrests – are not open to the public, and the film-maker Peter Klemm was unable to obtain a special dispensation to see them.

  Ilse Husson, née Wolffsohn (Elsie Berger), was arrested in Andigny on 5 September 1942 by two officers of the German Gestapo. Following a brief interrogation – in the course of which she was accused of having violated the pre-war census law for German Jews living abroad, and the 1942 regulation on wearing the yellow star in the Occupied Zone – she was handed over to the French police. She was transferred to a cell at Paris police headquarters and then, on 7 September, to the Drancy detention camp. On 6 November 1942 she embarked from Bourget-Drancy station for Auschwitz-Birkenau in convoy No. 42 (1,000 deportees, four survivors). Ilse Husson’s pregnancy was apparent to the SS doctor who examined her on disembarkation; along with the children, the sick and the elderly, he handed her over to the camp police. The Schutzhaftlagerführer brought them to a small white building by the camp perimeter known as ‘Bunker Two’ which was surrounded by Sonderkommando prisoners who, in order to forestall panic, had been ordered to calm the terrified deportees and respond reassuringly to their questions.

  SS guards and dogs encircled the building and watched the newcomers, who were informed that they had been brought there to shower and be deloused. Ilse Husson undressed with the others outside the building. Then she was ushered, naked, into one of the four gas chambers, fitted with shower heads and water pipes to allay any suspicion that they were not bathrooms. Bunker Two had a maximum capacity of 1,200 people. The Sonderkommando prisoners stayed inside with the newcomers until the last minute, as did a single SS guard.