by Paul Kix
For a long time thereafter, he saw and heard nothing on the road. Soon he was a few miles from the city. Robert followed a bend, moving now between two farmsteads and something else—
He broke hard and nearly slammed into a roadblock. Two German soldiers flashed their lights and raised their submachine guns, yelling at him to stay where he was. La Rochefoucauld stretched his arms to the sky and assumed the practiced, panicked hysteria of a civilian: Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! In bad French, the Germans asked him what he was doing tonight. Did he have permission, an Ausweis, to be out this late?
No, he said. He told them the response he’d been mulling in his mind: He was returning from the woods. He had been with his girlfriend, you see, making love. And he was just on his way home now.
The Germans were suspicious. Why not fuck your girlfriend at home? Or in a hotel? And even if you did take her to the woods, where was she now? The questions rattled him more than they should have, and La Rochefoucauld stammered out responses. He sensed they weren’t satisfying. Suddenly, he was no longer assuming the role of the panicked Frenchman: He was one. With each meandering statement the Germans’ skepticism grew. “I knew I was damned,” Robert later said.
The Nazis handcuffed La Rochefoucauld and loaded him into the vehicle just beyond the roadblock. Moments later Bordelais storefronts rushed past, the truck turning down one street and then another and stopping at last before an imposing multistoried brick and concrete enormity, with a high stone wall surrounding it. The engine clicked off and the guards led La Rochefoucauld inside Fort du Hâ.
CHAPTER 18
France’s King Charles VII had ordered its construction in 1453 along the ramparts of Bordeaux, at the end of the Hundred Years’ War, to protect the city from future British invasions. An imperious and stately compound rose from the earth—and in the centuries to come dukes and mayors and barons would call it home, despite its primary function as a barricade. In the eighteenth century, and largely in response to the French Revolution, Fort du Hâ became a prison, its hulking three-story towers the last stop for dissidents—journalists, lawyers, even the mayor of Bordeaux—before the guillotine. After the Reign of Terror, the government partially demolished the structure, to allow for a courthouse and new prison, built around two of its original towers. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Fort du Hâ had become a symbol of progressive reform, modeled after the penal infrastructures in Pennsylvania, where prisoners were not shackled or bunched together in common areas but separated into small cells, in which reflection and (one hoped) rehabilitation could take root.
Fort du Hâ’s standing changed again after 1940. It housed the political opponents that Poinsot and the Nazis interrogated and thus became a savage symbol of torture, of firing squads and, for some prisoners, of deportation to concentration camps. La Rochefoucauld did not need to be told into which prison the Germans escorted him. Fort du Hâ’s reputation reached beyond its stone walls.
The heavy door to the outside world thudded closed behind him. The Germans pushed him up a flight of stairs and down a humid corridor to a processing room. Signs on the wall said in French, German, and Spanish that prisoners could not talk. A sergeant and two clerks awaited him behind three vast tables and, despite the order on the wall, La Rochefoucauld spoke up, trying to explain that he was there by mistake, attempting to tamp down the notes of hysteria climbing out of his voice. He was traveling at night by bicycle—he did not deny that—but it was completely for personal reasons. The administrators, however, were no more romantic than the soldiers had been. They sniggered and ignored him. They had a protocol to follow, after all. They told him to empty his pockets. They then counted the money he had on him, and asked him for any valuables or jewels, keeping it all.
After that, the administrators gave him a paper to sign, which asked if he were part of France’s secret army or the French Forces of the Interior. La Rochefoucauld’s military records made clear his involvement in the Resistance, but he was not about to mention this to the Germans.
And they seemed to suspect as much, because the sergeant on duty told him to save his pleas of innocence for the interrogating officer. The man would return in two days’ time, the following Monday morning.
That interrogating officer would be none other than Friedrich Wilhelm Dohse.
What made Dohse dangerous, what made him so good at his job, was his detachment from it. He was born in 1913 in the suburbs of Hamburg to a professorial father, and this last bit of biography explained a lot of why Friedrich Dohse later excelled: In a field ruled by visceral reactions, Dohse questioned résistants academically, distancing himself from the emotion and even brutality of the interrogation to observe his suspects, to see what motivated them, which was a more useful insight than what frightened them. Given that his father had taught French, Dohse went into every interrogation with a cultural understanding of the man or woman opposite him. His ease with the language made him all the more lethal.
He was not an imposing man. He had a slight frame and easy smile. Though he dressed well, officiously, always in a suit with a tie and collar cinched tight to his skinny neck, he was not handsome. He looked sickly even, with deep lines under his eyes and a bald pate that seemed almost alien in its dimensions, a bulbous forehead barely corralling his big brain. At the age of twenty he had enrolled in Hitler’s Fascist party, and by 1936, at twenty-three, was a member of the vaunted Schutzstaffel, or SS, the führer’s elite Praetorian guard, which soon assumed intelligence operations and ran the Reich’s concentration camps. Membership in the SS required an ancestry free of Jewish forebears, but the anti-Semitism rampant among its ranks was not shared by Dohse, who joined the service almost exclusively for career advancement. Even at that young age, then, Dohse was not motivated by the baser urges of the Nazis and their attendant ideologies. Because the SS was less an agency than a club, Dohse apprenticed within the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence apparatus. He took a post in Denmark and, in 1941, Paris. In the capital he worked alongside Karl Bömelburg, the head of the city’s SD Section IV, which snuffed out the saboteurs and helped deport France’s Jews. Bömelburg was a complex man. In an earlier life, he had been a great law enforcement agent, thriving within the Internationale kriminalpolizeiliche Kommission (IKPK), the forerunner to Interpol, where from his office in Vienna he’d developed relationships with French policemen, conferring with them in their native tongue on the subtleties of international law. Years later, in his mid-fifties, he worked to stifle the very ideals he had once defended. There was no indication that that pained him. In fact, Bömelburg turned to Dohse because he saw a kindred soul, another man whose capacious intellect could hold and not be troubled by opposing moralities. Bömelburg became Dohse’s mentor.
In January 1942, Dohse received orders to do in Bordeaux what Bömelburg did in Paris, and oversee southwest France’s SD Section IV. The existing chief there, Herbert Hagen, who lived on a yacht that belonged to the king of Belgium, did not take kindly to Dohse’s encroachment. Hagen was so standoffish in their initial meeting that Dohse left Bordeaux the same day he’d arrived. Back in Paris, he reported his interaction to Bömelburg, who, displeased, said he would take care of it. By the time Dohse returned to Bordeaux, Hagen warmly welcomed him—and soon thereafter left his job. “Commandant Bömelburg,” Dohse later said, “loved me like his son.”
Dohse occupied a strange position. The nominal chief of Bordeaux counterespionage—the Kommandant overseeing all SD sections—was Hans Luther, a crew-cut, big-eared man with a background as a civil magistrate. But Dohse, just twenty-nine upon his arrival in Bordeaux, soon became the real head of power. What made the arrangement even more remarkable was that Luther far outranked him. Dohse entered the war as a Hauptscharführer, which meant he wasn’t even an officer—though he was later promoted to SS Untersturmführer, the rough equivalent of a second lieutenant. Luther was a captain, two rungs higher than Dohse, and yet Luther deferred to him. Dohse was widely read and applie
d his towering intellect to the psychology of the résistant, so good at questioning suspects that soon Luther ordered all incoming “terrorists” to be grilled by Dohse, a stunning honor in a region of roughly 290 competitive agents. Dohse almost expected the commendation: He believed he was the intellectual better of every German in Bordeaux. This annoyed Luther, but, then again, Dohse was too smart to be overlooked and too valuable to be punished for his arrogance.
Interviewing all suspects gave Dohse the power to shape all investigations, and armed with such authority he effectively minimized Luther. Bordeaux became Dohse’s town, and résistants soon feared the sickly man in the well-tailored suit, for he seemed to know everything and to destroy what he wished. Perhaps nothing better illustrates his prowess and intellectual finesse than his interrogation of André Grandclément.
By day Grandclément worked as an insurance-salesman-cum-broker, and in his off-hours he led the Resistance group Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM), which over the course of the war helped civil servants and military officers take the fight to the Germans. He oversaw five combat groups, one team of parachutists, and recruited promising young men to a secret school in Bordeaux, where they learned how to operate the saboteur’s weaponry. He claimed to have forty thousand fighters at the ready. This was likely an exaggeration, but London respected OCM and by April 1943 Grandclément’s group and other Resistance outfits in the region had been the beneficiaries of 134 British air drops. By one account, Grandclément soon had enough weapons to supply a division, or as many as twenty-five thousand soldiers.
In the summer of 1943, SD agents infiltrated and destroyed Paris’ massive Resistance group, Prosper. One of the arrested Prosper résistants flipped under torture and revealed André Grandclément’s name and his address in Bordeaux. The Paris SD, and perhaps Bömelburg himself, notified Dohse, who descended on Grandclément’s house with a search warrant. Though the Germans did not find Grandclément and his wife—they were visiting friends in Paris at the time—they found something much better: the ledger in which Grandclément had written many OCM members’ names and their addresses. The SD arrested more than eighty people, including, ultimately, Lucette Grandclément, André’s wife, when she returned from Paris ahead of her husband. She was thrown with the others in Fort du Hâ.
Questioning the arrested résistants methodically, Dohse learned a great deal about Grandclément. Dohse learned that he was the son of a French admiral who’d spent his formative years moving between universities and military schools, seldom finishing what he started and entering the army as a soldier in 1928. Grandclément ultimately became an officer but left the military after a nasty fall from a horse. What buoyed him through a rather pedestrian life—he joined numerous insurance outfits—was a conservative ideology common to those of his station. It was little coincidence, in fact, that Grandclément joined and then thrived within OCM, which began the war as a notorious right-wing group.
Here, Dohse saw his opening. When at last SD agents arrested André Grandclément and put him before Dohse for questioning, the SD chief knew that Grandclément wanted to clean out not just the Nazis but the Communists, too. Dohse planned to appeal to Grandclément’s conservatism, and in so doing play a bigger game. What Dohse had in mind could only be revealed through conversational niceties, so he was not severe with the OCM chief. Dohse would later describe their first session as “a conversation on the general situation, the military situation, the chances of success for the adversaries [the Germans], the Resistance in France and the divergence in views within it.” And it was around this last point that Dohse began to make his pitch. He knew that the Communists bothered Grandclément as much as the Fascists. Dohse could see why: In fact, to his mind, the greater threat to France was not losing a war to Germany but winning it only to be overwhelmed by agents from Russia. In an offer that would be debated and deconstructed for decades to come, Dohse told Grandclément he was willing to free OCM members, and his wife, if Grandclément agreed to drop the fight against the Germans and battle the Communists alone. Dohse would also want, in exchange for the freed prisoners, the locations of some of the arms the English had sent to the OCM.
Grandclément did not immediately say no, and so Dohse pressed. He already knew, he said, the real names of British agents, OCM agents, their rendezvous points. He already knew—because it was his job to know and because he was good at that job—the location of almost all the Allied arms anyway. He’d learned that a month earlier, after the first wave of OCM résistants were arrested. (Dohse was not bluffing here. A French report filed after the war said the Germans discovered “several” stockpiles of arms in August 1943, weeks before Grandclément’s arrest.) All Dohse asked now was for Grandclément to give him a bit more information, and then Dohse would free his wife, his imprisoned fighters, and together, Grandclément and the new OCM could battle the Communist scourge.
Dohse knew he had him when Grandclément asked for twenty-four hours to consult his top two lieutenants, men named Chazeau and Malleyrand. The SD chief agreed to let him leave detention.
The Resistance boss and his men met at a safe house, where a fourth fighter joined them, Roger Landes, head of Scientist, an SOE-run outfit in Bordeaux. Grandclément made his pitch, but it did not go over well. Landes thought it an unequivocal betrayal and drew his automatic pistol. The only reason he didn’t pull the trigger, he later said, was because two women were in the house, and he didn’t want them implicated and questioned by the SD and Dohse. Landes said he wanted nothing to do with such a deal and was appalled Grandclément was considering it.
The next day, however, Grandclément dutifully returned to Dohse, his mind made up. He loved his wife and hated the entrenched Communists, and his rationale seemed to be that as long as he and his freed fighters battled someone, the battle for France was just. He did the deal with Dohse. Grandclément gave up the locations of arm stores, and Dohse freed dozens of prisoners, including Grandclément’s wife.
Grandclément then began meeting with résistants, pitching his fight-the-Communist-only campaign. The rebels were bewildered—some outright opposed his angle. And no wonder: Grandclément’s collaboration with Dohse became quite transparent, Grandclément even going so far as to show two German officers résistant compounds. The threat of Grandclément’s betrayal became even more effective than anyone he actually betrayed. Rebels fretted over whether he would mention their supplies or their names to Dohse, and fled or hid accordingly. That threat crippled the Resistance in southwest France.
And here we get to the game Dohse seemed to be playing all along. A traitor everyone knows can be as dangerous as a traitor no one does. Dohse didn’t just want Grandclément to fight Communists; he wanted Grandclément to tell everyone he was fighting Communists. Viewed in this light, the brave and noble Roger Landes, who went from cell to Resistance cell warning men about Grandclément’s deal with Dohse, actually helped the SD’s efforts. Fearful of a Nazi arrest, résistants began to flee the region.
Dohse then pressed his advantage. First, he kept some OCM résistants behind bars, breaking his promise to Grandclément to free them. And then Dohse began to arrest more French agents, be they from OCM or Scientist or from other Resistance groups, the arrests and interrogations piling up by the dozens and then scores. All told, roughly 250 fighters were nabbed in the months following Grandclément’s interrogation. Suddenly, Dohse didn’t need Grandclément’s intel. He had dozens more scared men just as willing to talk about the fighters still on the outside. Even circumspect SOE chiefs weren’t safe: Roger Landes had to leave the country. For a period of a few months, Dohse single-handedly wiped out the Resistance in southwest France, the whole of his jurisdiction. No one, not even Bömelberg, could claim that.
Of course, no one, not even Bömelberg, had Dohse’s autonomy. Dohse had allowed his best suspect to leave detention, and no other German agent had questioned his wisdom. He would have scoffed at the dissent anyway. Dohse hated military protocol, military dr
ess. He almost never wore a uniform. He spent his weekends in the coastal spa town of Arcachon with his mistress, an hour’s drive from the demands of the SD office. He secretly thought Hitler and the Nazis were done for in 1943, and even as he became known as the most cunning Nazi of them all, he began dreaming of a civilian postwar life in which France were free and he imported champagne and cognac. He may have betrayed Grandclément as much as Grandclément betrayed his résistants, but Dohse also treated those he imprisoned with respect: He saw them as combatants to be detained and not as terrorists to be tortured. Dohse even went to the German high command with what would today be seen as a successful counterinsurgency strategy. He claimed that he could be more effective in Bordeaux if he could grant suspects the humanity that was their right. If he could build a rapport with insurgents, he could wipe out their need to rebel. The idea went nowhere in Hitler’s Europe, but the respect he held for certain Resistance fighters was real. “I found in you a dangerous adversary,” a résistant named Jean Duboué once told Dohse, “but an honest enemy with a strong sense of honor.”
At the same time, of course, he was not above using torture. Dohse would go about his careful interrogation, but if the information wasn’t to his liking, he brought in the brutes, a coterie of henchmen who allegedly included a former trainer to the boxing champ Max Schmeling. Dohse never harmed a suspect himself and always left the room before the day turned nasty. Even here, by leaving before the assault began, he was playing the angles, imagining how he might save himself in a postwar world in which Germany was not the victor. Literally keeping his hands free of blood might keep him from any future war crimes indictment. Like a mafia don, Dohse made it hard to trace the more horrific acts back to him.