by Matthew Cobb
Shortly after the capture of Michelle’s group, the Germans trapped the résistants from Chelles and the Hémery group. Both times, things seemed to be going well as the Resistance fighters thought they were being taken on a short drive to pick up the weapons from a German garage on the passage Doisy, a claustrophobic passageway running between two roads in the 16th arrondissement. Then the shocking truth was revealed as German soldiers made them get out at gunpoint, herding them into a cellar where they were held for a while before they too were taken to the rue des Saussaies. While they were in the cellar, a German civilian came over to the prisoners and promised to help them escape by leaving the door open. Every time they were about to take advantage of this unusual generosity, a guard passed and they had to stop. Finally Jean Favé from Chelles managed to escape. While the guards were questioning Dr Blanchet, Favé simply walked out of the cellar. As he later recalled: ‘As I left, I heard someone shouting in a foreign language behind me. Two men watched me go by. Further on, a German woman raised her arms. I saluted her, saying that I was on their side. And then I walked out into the street.’50
In a final coup, at around 15:00, the Germans trapped a group of FFI fighters from Draveil in exactly the same way as the others, but this time the conclusion was more abrupt. The résistants thought they were going to pick up some arms; they clambered into a lorry that took them to the rue Leroux, near the Arc de Triomphe. As the vehicle pulled up, a hail of bullets rang out from all sides, and the seven members of the Draveil group were shot dead. Their bodies were left on the pavement.
In her flat opposite the Gestapo headquarters, Suzanne Chocarne complained that evening of the ‘hellish noise of all sorts of material and people being loaded up and driven off – women, men, civilians and soldiers, all mixed up’.51 Among the human cargo being taken away were the thirty-four Resistance prisoners captured earlier that day. Jean Favé had escaped, while Michelle Boursier had been released, along with two other résistants – one because he was a veteran of 1914–18, the other because he had convinced the Germans he was a hapless hitchhiker.52 Dr Blanchet had been taken to a separate Gestapo office on rue de la Pompe where Friedrich Berger, the Gestapo agent in charge of the operation, shot him in the head. The remaining men were driven off to the nearby woods of the Bois de Boulogne. During the night, while Laval was negotiating with Abetz, while Blumentritt was pleading with von Kluge and while Chaban was pedalling his weary way through the thunderstorm, the sound of machine-gun fire and explosions could be heard from the Bois. The next morning, the park-keepers discovered an awful scene next to a well-known beauty spot, the Cascades (‘waterfall’). All the résistants were dead, and horribly mutilated – from the position of their bodies it appeared that they had been machine-gunned as they got off the lorries, and were then finished off with grenades. Most were under twenty-five years old; Pierre Bezet, an FFI fighter working with SPIRITUALIST, was eighteen, while the youngest, Jacques Delporte, was just seventeen.53 In total, forty-two résistants were murdered in the operation – thirty-four in the Bois de Boulogne, seven at rue Leroux, and Dr Blanchet, whose body was dumped with those of his comrades.
The next day the bodies from the Bois de Boulogne were taken to a garage where they were cleaned and prepared for burial. Twenty-four-year-old Louis Pauwels helped with the grisly task and wrote about it in his diary:
We scrub their cheeks, their foreheads and their chests, which are covered with mud and blood. And then holes appear, surrounded by a purple halo, while the rest is pale flesh under the ripped shirts that we lift up, under the trousers that we have to tear off. Those who had been hit with grenades have their stomachs ripped out, or their shoulders torn off, or their head smashed up, pouring out the contents. We throw sawdust down before leaning over the bodies, we throw it everywhere so our feet will not be covered in blood and guts.
When they are clean, we realise that we are bathing in the smell of a butchers’ shop, in the smell of something fetid, that comes in waves, and we remember the eyes, and the noses and the hands. It is part of us. We realise we are standing over dead men . . .
One body has been identified, that of a young doctor and when I turn round, his father is there, a fat red-faced man, on his knees. He raises up the white paper that covers the bodies, he kisses his son’s head, which is tilted to one side, he kisses the chest with its holes, he runs his hand through his son’s hair and touches behind the hair where the blood has dripped . . .
We bring in the coffins, we unscrew the lids, we throw in sawdust and we pick up the bodies by their arms and legs. They seem to come alive in our hands, and it is hard to fit the tallest into the coffins, we have to push on the wrists and the knees, so that everything fits in, so that everything disappears, except in my heart, except in my sleep, except for a second in 10 or 20 years’ time, when I will suddenly stop smiling when I am happy.54
*
‘Captain Jack’ was in fact a Gestapo agent whose real name was Guy de Marcheret d’Eu, and the whole thing had been a set-up from beginning to end. Born in Russia in 1914, Marcheret claimed he became a naturalised German in 1942. Together with another Gestapo agent, Karl Rehbein, Marcheret had been trapping Resistance fighters and downed Allied airmen in the Paris region for several weeks. Late in the evening of 11 August, Marcheret’s scheming led to the arrest of four résistants and seven Allied airmen at a rendezvous in an apartment on the boulevard Sébastopol; all eleven of them were deported on the 15 August convoy from Pantin.55 Marcheret and Rehbein had been put in contact with the various Resistance groups caught in the trap at Porte Maillot through a well-meaning but naïve résistant called Wigen Nercessian, who knew Abbé Borme. Nercessian and Borme both genuinely believed that they had found a much-needed source of weapons and – like the résistants themselves – appear to have abandoned elementary security procedures when faced with such an attractive possibility. That was exactly what the Germans had been banking on.
In 1949 Marcheret’s case finally came to court. In his defence, he claimed that the Germans had put a ‘photo-electric cell’ in his brain to control his behaviour; nevertheless, he was convicted and executed.56 Berger, who ordered the executions and murdered Dr Blanchet, managed to escape to Germany and although he was convicted in his absence was never punished; the case against Rehbein – who continued to be an active Nazi – was dismissed because he was a serving German officer.57 In 1946, a monument was erected on the site of the massacre at the Bois de Boulogne, and the two oak trees on either side each bear a sign that reads: ‘Passer-by: Respect this oak. It carries the traces of the bullets that killed our martyrs.’58
6
Thursday 17 August: Twilight
Jean Galtier-Boissière watches the Germans leaving Paris: ‘On every street there are dozens, hundreds of lorries, crammed buses, mobile artillery pieces, ambulances full of wounded men on stretchers. The vehicles follow each other, overtake each other, drive in opposite directions. At the Strasbourg-Saint-Denis crossroads and in front of the railway stations, German gendarmes in chain-draped uniforms control the traffic . . . On the rue Lafayette shiny sports cars drive by on their way from the luxurious hotels around l’Etoile, carrying splendid monocled generals accompanied by elegantly dressed blondes, looking as though they are off to a fashionable beach. Near the Galeries Lafayette, a bespectacled soldier stands in front of his broken-down lorry, vainly trying to get somebody, anybody, French or German, to tow his vehicle. He smiles at each refusal, without losing either his temper or his confidence. Grenades dangle from his belt.’1
At 04:30, as the blood from the bodies in the Bois de Boulogne was soaking into the soil, the French fascist Marcel Déat and his gang fled Paris.2 As he wrote in his diary: ‘We gather together the final packages, of which there are many. With difficulty we all squeeze into the car . . . I have my machine gun and my Colt, the chauffeur has my 92 pistol, a milicien is with us . . . We leave as quickly as we can. Everywhere there are endless convoys.’3 At the same time, a furi
ous Field Marshal Walter Model turned up at von Choltitz’s headquarters in the Hôtel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli. Model had come from Berlin carrying a handwritten order from Hitler giving him command over all German troops in the west, replacing the suspect Field Marshal von Kluge. Model first went to Army Group B headquarters at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, but he found the place deserted except for a drunken doctor. So he continued on to Paris and hauled von Choltitz’s aide, Lieutenant von Arnim, from his bed. Von Arnim was ordered to guide the small armoured convoy to von Kluge’s headquarters at La Roche-Guyon, so that von Kluge could be relieved of his command and sent back to Berlin where a grim fate awaited him. Von Arnim recalled that the journey through the early morning streets took place in an intimidating silence.4
Model had spent most of the war fighting on the Eastern Front and had a reputation for toughness and utter loyalty to Hitler; when he got to La Roche-Guyon, he immediately set about trying to whip the Western Front into shape. One of the first people to attract his bird-like, monocled eye was General Bayerlein, whose Panzer Lehr Division had been withdrawn from the hell of the Falaise pocket because of exhaustion, and ordered to the safe side of Paris. Model was scornful of such behaviour, saying that in the east, divisions ‘rested’ at the front.5 A disconsolate Bayerlein was ordered back west along with his tanks and his utterly drained men. Luckily for him, events moved so swiftly that the order was never put into effect.
Model’s arrival meant that within the space of a few weeks, all the main German commanders in France had been replaced (twice in the case of the Commander of the Western Armies). The disruption to the German military organisation created an atmosphere of uncertainty that affected the whole line of command. Coupled with the unrealistic and increasingly shrill demands from Berlin, the situation was becoming catastrophic. As Model was throwing his weight about in La Roche-Guyon, German troops in the Falaise pocket were faced with annihilation: 100,000 of them were trapped in an area thirty-five kilometres from east to west by seventeen kilometres north to south. Canadian troops had just captured Falaise, completely destroying the 12th SS Panzer Division combat group that had been delaying them, and were now pushing south together with British units. Troops from the Third US Army were moving north from Argentan, closing the mouth of the ‘pocket’. For the Germans the only way out was through a tiny gap that was closing fast. The Field Marshal might have wanted his men to ‘rest’ at the front, but the front meant death and destruction. To stay alive, the Germans would have to flee.6
*
At 07:00, with the sun already hot in the clear sky, Raoul Nordling’s car drew to a halt and his two German associates, the spies ‘Riki’ Posch-Pastor and ‘Bobby’ Bender, got in. Together with Nordling’s nephew and the head of the French Red Cross, the men were determined to prevent the remaining political prisoners in the Paris region from being deported or shot. First, they went to Fresnes prison, in the southern suburbs, where the German commanding officer told Bender he would be happy to release the prisoners if he were given the order. So Nordling and his group set off for the Hôtel Meurice in Paris to get a written order from von Choltitz. While Bender and Posch-Pastor went upstairs to see von Choltitz, Nordling waited in the foyer. Suddenly, SS General Carl Oberg stormed through the door. As Nordling later recalled: ‘With a bull’s neck and a stiff gait, a monocle stuck on his left eye, he swept up the staircase to von Choltitz’s office. Ten minutes later, he left the building.’7 Nordling was then called upstairs for his first meeting with the military commander of Paris.
Five years later, Nordling recalled von Choltitz as a ‘fat little man, with a calm face, looking as though he was indifferent to the debacle which was beginning to affect the Germans in Paris’.8 Von Choltitz listened politely as the Swedish consul explained why the German Army must at all costs avoid a massacre of prisoners in Paris, which would otherwise cast a terrible slur on its reputation. Von Choltitz replied by saying that he was not interested in civilian prisoners; anyone who fired on his troops would be executed on the spot as a terrorist, but if this was not the case, he could see no reason not to release all civilians. All that was required was the relevant paperwork from the German military administration of France and from the SS.
However, the relevant office was about to be evacuated, and the man whose signature was required, Major Huhm, would be leaving the Hôtel Majestic at noon. Nordling rushed over to the administrative headquarters to be greeted with the smell of burning paper; it was snowing ashes as compromising files were destroyed. After some negotiation, Major Huhm agreed to give Nordling and the French Red Cross ‘the control, surveillance and responsibility’ ‘for all political prisoners in Fresnes, Cherche-Midi, la Santé, Villeneuve Saint-Georges, St-Denis, in the hospitals of la Pitié, Val de Grâce, and St-Denis, in the camps at Compiègne, Drancy, Romainville, and in all other places of detention and in all evacuation trains currently en route, without exception and whatever their destination’. In return, Nordling agreed to secure the release of five German military prisoners for each French political prisoner.9 As Nordling later recalled, this final clause was somewhat absurd, as he held no German prisoners, nor was he in any position to ensure that the agreement was enforced.10
There was a moment of tension as Huhm discovered that the all-important stamp, without which the document would carry no weight with German underlings, had been packed away deep in a tea chest. It was eventually retrieved, and the document was duly stamped. The final step was to obtain Oberg’s approval, so the group drove to the SS headquarters on boulevard Lannes. During his meeting with von Choltitz, General Oberg had apparently dismissed the question of the prisoners with a terse ‘I don’t give a damn’, before scurrying out of the hotel and returning to his packing.11 Bender soon returned with the document duly signed by Oberg, but the SS general had added an alarming codicil: ‘There are no longer any civilian prisoners in Paris, nor in the region, given that an order for total evacuation was given on 15 August.’ Nordling might have his piece of paper, but Oberg was apparently confident that the Swedish diplomat would find that the cupboard was bare.
Oberg was wrong – there were still hundreds of Resistance prisoners in the region, fearful of the fate that might befall them. When Nordling and his group returned to Fresnes in the afternoon to free the first batch of prisoners, one woman initially refused to leave her cell because she was convinced that she was going to be executed. Madeleine Riffaud and her Intelligence Service friend, ‘Anne-Marie’, who had managed to escape from the Pantin train but were still on death row, heard the cries of joy as prisoners were freed. Eventually they were taken into the courtyard, where Nordling and Red Cross representatives oversaw the transfer. But there were also German officers present, who wanted to keep their hands on the two résistantes. The women were so sure that they would be shot at the last minute that they could not express any pleasure, and stayed close to Nordling and the others as they left the prison, lying flat on the floor of the bus that took them away, in case there was an ambush.12
At Romainville prison in the north-eastern suburbs, things did not go so smoothly. The SS commander refused to recognise von Choltitz’s order, stating that he was under the orders of the SS at Compiègne. Many of the SS guards in the prison were drunk and out of control, but there was nothing Nordling could do. At Compiègne, to the north-east of Paris, it was much the same story – the German prison commander threatened to shoot the delegation on the spot and warned them that the Gestapo and the SS were on their tail. Empty-handed, Nordling and his group returned to Paris, driving on side-roads by the light of the moon, hiding from German patrols and from the waves of Allied bombers that passed overhead.13 While they were returning home, the Germans at Compiègne dispatched a train full of prisoners – convoy I-265, carrying 1,255 men – to Buchenwald. The youngest person on the train was 15-year-old Serge Tissandier; he was one of the lucky 656 who returned. Of this convoy, 471 men died, while others simply disappeared – only five managed to escape.14
The prison at Fontainebleau, fifty kilometres south-east of Paris, had not been included in the paper drawn up by Major Huhm. Fourteen Resistance fighters were taken out of the prison by the Germans; some of the men had been seized the previous day, in a swoop that netted a large number of members of Ceux de la Résistance, including 32-year-old Georges Papillon and 18-year-old Brigitte Servan-Schreiber. Brigitte was severely beaten, then released; on her return to Paris, she showed a horrified comrade the awful bruises that covered her back and her thighs.15 Papillon was not so lucky; he was among the fourteen prisoners who were taken to a nearby quarry that afternoon and killed. A month earlier, the Germans had executed twenty-two Fontainebleau prisoners in similar circumstances. The bodies of the thirty-six victims from Fontainebleau were discovered only in December 1944; one of them was never identified.16
Earlier in the day, Nordling’s group had gone to the Drancy transit camp in the north-eastern suburbs. The camp was composed of four-storey prefabricated buildings, built in a massive U-shape that was 200 metres long and 40 metres wide. It was in turmoil. There were no German soldiers to be seen anywhere, and groups of inmates were wandering about in the courtyard, gesticulating and shouting. Nordling was walking into a camp that the Germans had abandoned. In fact, just as Nordling arrived, the SS commander, Alois Brunner, left the camp for the last time. The final words he spoke to an inmate were: ‘To hell with the camp.’17 Brunner, like most of the Germans, was fleeing.
That morning, Brunner carried out his final, cruel wish in Drancy: fifty-one Jews – forty of them political prisoners from Fresnes, including André Amar, the husband of Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar – were made to march from Drancy to the railway station at Bobigny about two kilometres away.18 They were then loaded into a wagon that had the words ‘Juden terroristen’ (Jewish terrorists) chalked on it; this was attached to a small train carrying Luftwaffe men and materiel out of France. Three wagons had been reserved for Brunner: one carried the SS captain and his entourage; another carried German police; the third carried the fifty-one prisoners bound for Buchenwald.19 The youngest was 12-year-old Georges-André Kohn, who was first subjected to vile Nazi ‘experiments’ and then murdered just days before Germany surrendered, in May 1945.20