by Matthew Cobb
The significance of the rail strike was not lost on the Parisian population. Bernard Pierquin wrote in his diary: ‘We are waiting for the insurrection, but when will it happen? At the moment, the Huns are moving out; the requisitioned hotels are emptying. There are no obvious signs of defence in the streets. But there is a warning sign of the fight to come: all the railways are on strike.’19 The Germans may have thought that matters were settled, but as Pierquin implied, it was only the beginning.
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On Sunday 6 August, Raoul Nordling, the Swedish Consul General in Paris, went to see a German military judge. Nordling, a portly 62-year-old with a moustachioed, jowly face and stick-like legs, had lived in France most of his life and was used to dealing with the Germans: he was on the board of the Swedish ball-bearing manufacturer, SKF, which had a major plant in Ivry, south-east of Paris, and which supplied the Germans.20 The German judge told Nordling of his concern for the hundreds of political prisoners in Fresnes prison, given that ninety French prisoners had been executed in Caen prison as the Germans prepared to evacuate. In particular, the judge warned Nordling of the threat to a member of the Swedish consul’s family who was in Fresnes prison, accused of sheltering Allied airmen.21
Worried for his relative and for the other political prisoners, Nordling contacted two acquaintances in the German administration who had previously helped him free a friend from prison. One of the men, Erich ‘Riki’ Posch-Pastor, was a dashing 26-year-old aristocratic Austrian officer, described by an anti-fascist friend as ‘a first-rate, extraordinarily helpful companion, cheerful, high-spirited and constantly on the look-out to put down the great German Wehrmacht’.22 Nordling’s other contact, Emil ‘Bobby’ Bender, was a young-looking man in his forties who was a member of German military intelligence.23 Nordling’s humanitarian concerns were drawing him into a complex web of espionage and influence; although he did not know it, both Posch-Pastor and Bender were in fact working for British intelligence. Over the next three weeks they were always at Nordling’s side, playing an essential, hidden role in the dramatic events that unfolded.
On a more official level, Nordling attempted to discuss the situation of the prisoners with Pierre Laval, but was told that the prime minister was unavailable.24 Nordling then telephoned the German ambassador, Otto Abetz.25 At first, the ambassador was in a buoyant mood, claiming that there was no threat to the prisoners because the German counter-attack in the west had transformed the military situation. But when Nordling mentioned the case of a professor who had been arrested because he refused to name students involved in the Resistance, the Nazi’s urbane mask slipped and he snarled furiously that the university was a nest of assassins that should be burnt down, and that the Gestapo was far too nice to such people. When Nordling asked Abetz whether he condoned the murder of the prisoners in Caen two months earlier, the German was chillingly callous: shooting them was the only solution, he said.26 This reinforced Nordling’s fears – the prisoners were clearly in mortal danger.
Having got nowhere with Abetz, Nordling met with René Naville, a Swiss diplomat, and discussed what could be done to save the prisoners. Naville suggested that all the prisons in Paris and its surrounding region could be put under the protection of the Red Cross, which he also represented. The Germans might accept the idea if there were some guarantee about the treatment of the German garrison in Paris. So Naville went to the German embassy, where he discovered that Ambassador Abetz was busy making preparations to leave the capital, and was too preoccupied to see him. An aide suavely told him that the issue had been drawn to the attention of SS General Oberg, who was dealing with the matter.27 Meanwhile, Nordling had finally secured a meeting with Laval, but the prime minister was too focused on his politicking to properly take in anything that Nordling said. The prisoners would have to wait until he had been able to see Abetz, Laval explained. Nordling left with nothing more than the promise of yet another meeting.
As Chaban had explained in London, the Free French and the Resistance had also heard that the prisoners were in danger, but they could not agree on the best course of action. Despite the urgency of the situation, Parodi insisted on his habitual justification for doing nothing: ‘Everyone agrees,’ he said in a message to London, ‘that it would be impossible to attack the prisons without provoking a widespread massacre.’ Instead, Parodi suggested that Eisenhower should broadcast a threat to the Germans, warning them they would be tried for war crimes if any of the prisoners were harmed.28 A discussion by COMAC of the prisoners’ situation showed that ‘everyone’ did not agree with Parodi: the three members of COMAC sent a telegram to London requesting that enough automatic weapons and grenades to arm 1000 men be immediately parachuted into the Paris region, ‘to enable us to carry out plans to free the prisoners’.29 There was no reply, and no weapons arrived.
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The collaborators in local and national government began to worry what would become of them in the event of an Allied victory. Members of the Senate had the idea of setting up a new parliamentary assembly that might be looked on positively by the Allies, and would prevent the Gaullists from taking power. These politicians not only had an acute instinct for self-preservation, they were also profoundly fearful of what might come with liberation, something even worse than the triumph of the Free French: ‘We must at all costs avoid Paris falling into the hands of a Communist revolutionary committee,’ they wrote.30 The chairman of the Paris municipal council, Pierre Taittinger, drew similar conclusions and argued that Laval and Pétain should immediately bring the government to Paris, so they could negotiate with the USA when the Allies arrived.31 When this idea was put to Pétain, the old man prevaricated and then naïvely said he would ask the Germans for permission.
Prime Minister Pierre Laval was more lucid, and more desperate, and leapt at the idea – he would find a way of negotiating with the Allies, thereby saving his skin and stopping de Gaulle from taking power. Laval knew that his time in office might soon be over: the fascist politicians Marcel Déat and Jacques Doriot, and the head of the Milice, Joseph Darnand, were planning to remove him from power.32 The Germans had not yet given the green light to a coup against Laval, partly because of the fluidity of the military situation, but above all because there was no mass political support for an openly fascist government – a coup would merely create unnecessary instability. The French fascists were too deluded to recognise this reality and continued to live in cloud cuckoo land – Doriot and a henchman sat in a hunting lodge near Metz, imagining which ministerial positions they would give their cronies if they were in government.33 Although Laval was equally deluded in his own way, he was determined to make his own pipedream come true. On the evening of 8 August he left Vichy for Paris, taking his wife and daughter with him. He would never return.34
When Laval arrived in Paris the next morning, he headed straight for the prime minister’s official residence in the Hôtel Matignon, in the 7th arrondissement. He explained his plan to the Paris municipal council and the regional government, the Conseil Général of the Seine (the members of both bodies were all Vichy appointees). Laval said he would ensure that the Allies and the Germans declared Paris an ‘open city’ that would be neither defended nor attacked, just like Rome two months earlier. Edouard Herriot, who had been President of the National Assembly in June 1940, and was now in a prison hospital in Nancy following a nervous breakdown, would be brought back to Paris to preside over a National Assembly meeting. If the timing were right, the assembly would be in session when the Allied armies arrived, thereby short-circuiting de Gaulle’s claim to power.
On paper, this plan had a lot going for it. The Americans were deeply suspicious of de Gaulle, whom they considered unreliable, and of the Resistance, which they saw as tainted by the participation of the communists. Moreover, Herriot, an international figure who had been prime minister three times before the war, was a personal friend of both Roosevelt and Stalin. The scheme had been hatched nearly four months earlier by one of Laval
’s close associates, André Enfière.35 Enfière had subsequently made several trips to Berne in Switzerland where the US spy chief Allen Dulles assured him that such a transitional government would have the support of President Roosevelt.36 For Laval, the most important thing about the plan was that he would be at the heart of events: ‘The Germans will be evacuating Paris in a matter of weeks, if not days. My place is here. I have come back to Paris. I will stay here whatever happens,’ he told the assembled politicians.37
And so on 13 August a convoy of six large cars swept out of the Hôtel Matignon and headed eastwards to Nancy. Early the next morning the convoy was back in Paris, carrying Laval’s precious cargo: Herriot, the man who could stop de Gaulle. At 05:00, the Prefect of the Seine département, René Bouffet, who had his offices and his official apartment in the Hôtel de Ville, was summoned down to the courtyard, still wearing his dressing gown. There he found Laval, Ambassador Abetz, and Monsieur and Madame Edouard Herriot. Laval’s plan was taking shape, and the presence of Abetz indicated it had German backing. Herriot was still the President of the National Assembly, but he could not stay in his official residence as it was occupied by a high-ranking Luftwaffe officer. Laval decided that until the German could be persuaded to vacate the premises, Herriot would have to remain in the Hôtel de Ville and should not receive any guests. Even though Pierre Taittinger had ordered Herriot’s room to be decorated with a massive bouquet of red and blue flowers (the colours of the capital), it was still effectively a prison cell.38
In Vichy, Laval’s project was making Pétain’s entourage increasingly uncomfortable, as it threatened to make the marshal and his cronies irrelevant. To regain the initiative, Admiral Gabriel Auphan – the man who ordered the scuttling of the French fleet at Toulon in 1942 – was sent to Paris on Pétain’s behalf with instructions to negotiate with the Allies and the Free French and ensure an orderly transfer of power.39 Although in reality the Resistance and the Free French had lost too many people and made too many sacrifices to accept such a proposal when they were on the verge of seizing power, the Allies might indeed be interested in Pétain’s ploy – it would give them yet another opportunity to undermine de Gaulle. Auphan arrived in Paris on the evening of the 11th, and the next day he sent Algiers a message explaining his mission. Auphan was ignored and met with silence.40
Parodi was also alarmed by Laval’s manoeuvres and sent an urgent message to Algiers asking how soon de Gaulle would arrive in Paris, what would be the General Delegate’s powers in the intervening period, and above all what he should do in the meantime. Shortly afterwards, Parodi sent another message explaining that he had heard ‘from a highly reliable source’ that Pétain was discussing a transfer of power with an American general, and that Vichy was highly confident that the manoeuvre would succeed. Parodi closed with a bitter remark: ‘Once again, I ask for instructions and I draw your attention to the fact that you have not sent any weapons to arm the forces that are under the direct control of the Delegation.’41 It would be a week before Algiers sent Parodi a bland reply about Laval’s manoeuvres, simply telling him not to worry. By this time Paris would be on the verge of insurrection, Laval and Pétain long gone. The weapons never arrived.42
As the world of collaboration began to disintegrate, fascist writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle drew some drastic conclusions. On 7 August, he wrote in his diary: ‘Hitler pleases me no end, despite his mistakes, his ignorance and his blunders. He presented me with my political ideal: physical pride, style, prestige, warrior heroism – even the romantic desire to give oneself totally, to destroy oneself in a headstrong gesture, uncontrolled, excessive and fatal.’43 Four days later, Drieu took this model literally: in the afternoon he went for a walk in the Tuileries gardens, drank a half-bottle of champagne then returned home to his tidy apartment, where he tried to commit suicide with poison. He failed.44
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Like many other Parisians, middle-aged housewife Odette Lainville decided to write a diary to record the historic events that she could sense were imminent.45 In her first entry she described how she went to church early in the morning, then dyed some sheets red and blue to make a massive tricolour flag that she planned to drape over her balcony when liberation came. Her work complete, Odette went out for a walk: ‘I went down to be in the cool shadow of the trees in the Jardin du Luxembourg, near the irises, not far from the old statues and the delightful merry-go-round. One of the main alleys is full of German lorries that have escaped from the Front, cluttered with tanks and ammunition; the Huns have set up a kind of park that is shut off by chains and barbed wire.’46 In the heart of Paris, the Germans were following Hitler’s orders and readying themselves for the inevitable Allied onslaught.
As Drieu La Rochelle was trying to kill himself, there was another air-raid alert in the capital. Sheltering under some trees by the side of the Seine, Odette watched a stricken Allied bomber falling to earth, leaving a zigzag of smoke behind it, followed by tiny white dots – parachutes. Closer to the scene, Spanish exile Victoria Kent saw the terrible aftermath: German anti-aircraft guns fired at the airmen, hitting at least one of them.47 Around 18:00, after sewing her dyed sheets together, Odette rode her bike to the other side of Paris, nipping in between speeding German lorries laden down with the most diverse booty: ‘a pile of mattresses as high as the Eiffel Tower’, a piano, cases and cases of Moët & Chandon champagne. Despite the real risk of being knocked off her bike by a lorry, Madame Lainville felt only one thing: ‘It’s marvellous! They really are moving out. They are shoving each other out of the way; it’s crazy. I am so happy!’48 When she got home, Odette took up her pen and celebrated the completion of her flag by writing a poem dedicated ‘to my old sewing machine’:
Rattle on, my machine, through the blue
Rattle on, my machine, through the red and white, too.
Our hearts are leaping, victorious
Gently rocked by three colours
Soon to feel glorious . . .
Rattle on, my machine, through the blue
Rattle on, my machine, through the red and white, too...
Glory to the Allies,
Glory to our nation!
In my heart you are as one
As I pray for liberation . . .49
In the midst of the preparations and the politicking, ordinary life continued. Swiss journalist Edmond Dubois went to a small church on the Left Bank to attend a marriage that was marked by the conditions within the capital. Because there was no electricity, the organ did not work and the hymns had to be sung unaccompanied. Because of the food shortages, there was no reception and the newlyweds were fêted in the sacristy. And because of the fuel shortages, the couple went off on their honeymoon by bicycle. They may not have got very far – German soldiers in the place de la République were stopping passing cyclists and simply stealing their bicycles in order to flee.
*
In the early hours of 12 August, three B-24 Liberator bombers took off from Harrington aerodrome in Northamptonshire. Painted matt black, the planes carried containers full of weapons and supplies, and three men in civilian clothes: Jedburgh Team AUBREY. ‘Jedburghs’ were joint military operations composed of three agents from Free France and Britain or the USA. Their mission was to carry out guerrilla warfare behind German lines, in conjunction with local Resistance movements. Of the ninety-nine Jedburgh missions sent into France in the summer of 1944, only one – AUBREY – had Paris in its sights.50
At around 01:55, the three men parachuted into a large field about thirty-five kilometres north-east of Paris. They were Captain Guy Marchant and Sergeant Ivor Hooker of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and Captain Adrien Chaigneau of the Free French Intelligence Service, the BCRA.51 They were to aid an underground group or ‘circuit’ set up by SOE to the north-east of Paris, which was called SPIRITUALIST after the code name of its leader.52 Marchant reported: ‘We all landed well (although the descent seemed faster than usual) and were met on the field (near Le Plessis-Bellev
ille) by Major Armand (‘Spiritualist’) in person. We walked with him to St Pathus while the remainder of the reception committee dealt with the containers and packages . . . We accompanied Major Armand to M. Leridan’s house where we ate, conversed and drank champagne until the early hours of the morning.’53
Team AUBREY was not the first clandestine Allied mission to Paris – throughout the war there had been a series of operations in the capital to support Resistance activity or collect intelligence. In 1944 there were a number of joint British, French and US operations known as SUSSEX; these were based in two Parisian cafés and worked with some of the armed Resistance groups in the countryside around Paris.54 The most important Allied operations in Paris at this time were completely secret, their existence unknown to more than a handful of people. These were two British intelligence circuits: JADE-AMICOL and ALLIANCE. JADE-AMICOL was part of MI6 and was based in the dilapidated Sainte-Agonie convent on the rue de la Santé on the southern edge of the 6th arrondissement. In August 1944 its leader was Colonel Claude Arnould (‘Ollivier’), a 45-year-old who had been involved in the French intelligence services before the war. Ollivier had set up JADE-AMICOL in the Bordeaux region, together with 30-year-old Philip Keun, and its headquarters had moved to Paris at the end of 1942. Henriette Frédé, Mother Superior of the dozen nuns who lived in the convent, was a willing participant in Ollivier’s work, enlisting her nuns to help carry messages, and above all hiding the radio transmitter and the vital coding sheets.55