The Resistance
Page 10
Suddenly, we set out into the Boulevard Saint-Denis, just like that, moving into the traffic. It was the same technique as before. The first group charged in, the rest followed. The contingent took shape. We had barely marched a few hundred metres when a convoy of German vehicles pulled up in front of us. Danger! And that was the end of the demo. They turned round and drove into us. The French police were there, too. The balance of forces had completely changed. Shots rang out. The Germans were firing at us. I remember we scattered. Some of us ran onto the pavement on the right and disappeared into the small roads going off the boulevard. The others ran onto the pavement on the left, and tried to hide in doorways. They were caught. I was so stunned I just stood still. In front of me, everything was confused. Everything happened so quickly.198
Six Jeunesses Communistes members were arrested, including Smulz ‘Titi’ Tizselman. Six days later Titi – ‘a Communist Jew,’ said the Nazis – was executed, together with his comrade, Henri Gautherot, under new laws that allowed the Nazis to respond with unrestrained violence to any illegal action.199 The next day the Nazis used the events as a pretext to turn on the Jewish community in the eleventh arrondissement, which was also the district of Paris with the greatest number of anti-German leaflets and graffiti, launching the first large-scale round-up of Jews in France, helped by the Parisian police.200 As a Nazi report put it:
Following a demonstration that was led by Jews, and to intimidate the whole Jewish community, around four thousand Jewish men aged between eighteen and fifty, irrespective of nationality, were arrested in a lightning action on 20 August, and were interned in the Drancy camp. The collaboration of the French police (around 2,500 officers) was good.201
Two days after the executions, on 21 August, Pierre Georges and Gilbert Brustlein waited on the platform of the Barbès-Rochechouart Métro station at 8 a.m. Although only twenty-one years old, Georges – better known by his pseudonym, Fabien – was an experienced Communist militant. At the age of seventeen Fabien had seen action in the Spanish Civil War, and had just been appointed military leader of a shadowy, tiny, underground Communist group, which, until very recently, many historians thought was a figment of Communist Party mythology – the Bataillons de la Jeunesse (Youth Battalions).202 Their mission that morning had been decided by the highest echelons of the Party leadership. As the Métro rattled into the station, a group of German sailors prepared to get on board, accompanied by their officer, who wore a magnificent uniform.203 Just as the doors began to close, Fabien pulled out a lady’s revolver and shot the officer in the back.204 Alfons Moser fell forward into the carriage and lay dead on the floor, his feet sticking out over the platform. Fabien and Brustlein escaped without difficulty. ‘Titi is avenged,’ said Fabien to his comrades.
*
Titi might have been avenged, but the Communists’ campaign against the Nazi troops was just beginning. A few hours later, Fabien’s group tried to kill an officer in the Bastille Métro station. There was even what now appears to have been a copycat action. On 27 August Paul Colette shot and wounded Hitler’s chief Vichy ally, Pierre Laval, during a ceremony in Versailles.205 Although the Nazis and Vichy blamed the Communists, Colette appears to have acted alone. However, this attack severely heightened the atmosphere of tension and repression that hung over the Occupied Zone in general and the Paris region in particular. Over the next few weeks Fabien’s group carried out a series of largely ineffective sabotage attempts – of the sixteen attacks on the railways that took place up to the end of October, only six were even vaguely successful, and no serious damage was done. But above all they prepared for further attacks against German soldiers, with a near-complete disregard for security. On 6 September Bernard Laurent took a shot at a German soldier, a mere 150 metres from his own house. Even more dangerously, Brustlein bought three revolvers off a contact, André Hubert; another militant, Roger Hanlet, foolishly let Hubert’s new girlfriend see the guns and boasted about how he had helped sabotage the railways. Alarmed to discover what her boyfriend was mixed up in, the girl confessed everything to her ex, Maurice Cocrelle.
In mid-October Brustlein and a group of Jeunesses Communistes members, including another veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Spartaco Guisco, were sent to Nantes. The idea was for the Communist Party to show that it could strike outside the capital, and to get the Nazis to turn their repression away from Paris for a while. The group – which was part of a double operation, the other militants being sent to Bordeaux – was to carry out some sabotage and then kill a German. Having attracted the attention of the local police by camping outside the house of a known Communist Party member, the Nantes group tried to blow up a German troop train but succeeded only in destroying a fifty-centimetre stretch of rail after the train had passed. Then, early in the morning of the next day, Monday 20 October (Guisco’s thirtieth birthday), Guisco and Brustlein wandered the streets, looking for their victim:
Spartaco elbowed me; there, in front of us, two superbly dressed officers were walking across the square. We quickly made towards them, and followed them to the pavement of the Rue du Roi-Albert. ‘You take the one on the right, I’ll take this one.’ I took out my two 6.35-millimetre revolvers and Spartaco took out his 7.65. We were on the pavement, just behind them, half a metre away. We fired . . . [in fact Spartaco’s gun jammed]. As he collapsed, the officer in front of me began to make inhuman, terrifying screams. The other officer turned his head slightly. I turned round and ran; Spartaco followed me. We ran down the street; we reached a boulevard; a tram was passing – we waved our arms, the tram slowed down, the conductor reached out and hauled us aboard.206
The storm was about to break. Completely by chance, Brustlein had killed Lieutenant-Colonel Karl Hotz, the military commander of Nantes and probably the most important Nazi in the west of France.
The reaction in Nantes was overwhelmingly hostile. Hotz was a well-read Nazi whose sophisticated ways went down well with the Nantes middle class – his good manners apparently blinded them to his strict application of Nazi anti-Semitic policies.207 Far more important, the assassination raised the immediate prospect of vicious Nazi reprisals against local hostages. From the very beginning of the Occupation, the Nazis had taken hostages – mainly local politicians and dignitaries – to ensure that the population was acquiescent. The worst that had ever happened to any of them was imprisonment. But new laws allowed the Nazis to make extreme responses: following Fabien’s action at Barbès-Rochechouart in August, they had executed three hostages in Paris; a further twelve were shot on 20 September.208 Hitler furiously criticized the Paris military commander, Otto von Stülpnagel, for his apparent lack of ruthlessness: ‘If there is another assassination,’ he ordered, ‘there must immediately be at least 100 executions for each German killed.’209
Within three hours of Hotz’s murder, Hitler was informed. He overruled von Stülpnagel and personally ordered the execution of fifty hostages, to be followed by a further fifty if the culprits were not captured within forty-eight hours. That evening the stakes were raised even higher, as the group of Bataillons members sent to Bordeaux killed German military adviser Hans Reimers.210 The Parisian press announced a reward of 15 million francs for information leading to the arrest of the culprits. Jean Guéhenno noted acerbically that the sum was printed ‘in huge capitals, as though it was a new prize in the Lottery’.211 The Vichy Minister of the Interior, Pierre Pucheu, tried to convince the Nazis that the threat of mass executions was an overreaction – like von Stülpnagel, he feared it would make collaboration more difficult. When this failed, Pucheu suggested the Nazis should select hostages whom he considered to be particularly dangerous – Communists. He even went so far as to impose death sentences retrospectively, to provide the Nazi policy with the veneer of Vichy ‘justice’. Pétain went on the radio, denouncing the murders and calling on those responsible to give themselves up. Even Brustlein’s Communist mother, who knew nothing of her son’s role in the affair, thought that the culprits should hand
themselves in.212
On 22 October forty-eight hostages were executed in reprisal for the assassination of Hotz.213 Twenty-seven men – including Communist and trade union leaders and two Trotskyists – were taken from the Chateaubriant internment camp, where around five hundred and eighty political prisoners were held, while a further twenty-one were executed in Nantes prison. Among all these deaths, the one that encapsulated the tragedy in the public imagination was that of Guy Moquet, only seventeen years old, son of a Communist deputy and a close friend of fellow Young Communist Maroussia Naïtchenko. Moquet had been arrested in November 1940 outside the Gare de l’Est in Paris for giving out Communist Party leaflets. In his last letter to his parents, he wrote:
I am going to die! All I ask you, in particular my dear Mother, is to be brave. I am, and I want to be, as brave as those who have gone before me. Of course, I want to live. But what I want with my whole heart is that my death serves a purpose . . . seventeen and a half years! My life has been short! I have no regrets, apart from leaving you.214
His final words, which inspired generations of people during and after the war, were: ‘Those of you who remain, be worthy of us.’
The next day Jean Guéhenno wrote in his diary:
The list of forty-eight shot hostages . . . appears in the newspapers, hidden away on page three, through fear or shame. The forty-eight are of course called ‘Communists’. In Belgrade, Sofia and in Brussels, there are similar mass executions. It is the new order. One cannot think of anything else. This morning the young people at school were utterly appalled.215
As Guéhenno wrote those lines, things were getting worse: another fifty hostages were shot in Bordeaux. The next day his response to the rapid descent into barbarism summed up many people’s feelings: ‘We are lost in the horror.’216
Stunned by the public hostility to the campaign of shootings and by the terrible consequences of their actions, which had led to the death of Party leaders and of young people like themselves, Brustlein and his comrades roamed the streets of Paris, foolishly hanging out in known Communist bars and apartments. The police soon got a lead from Maurice Cocrelle, the jealous ex-boyfriend of the girl who had seen the guns used to kill Hotz. They began a tailing operation and over the next two weeks arrested thirty people more or less involved in the actions of the Bataillons. Through a mixture of threats, promises and physical violence, they managed to get some detainees to talk, and finally arrested and executed everyone involved, apart from Fabien and Brustlein, both of whom escaped. Fabien continued to play an important role in the Communist Party’s armed wing, while Brustlein made his way to the UK, returning to France after the war.
Despite the wave of repression and widespread public hostility, the Communist Party continued its activities. Although its attacks were concentrated in the Paris region, Charles Debarge, a twenty-nine-year-old miner who had played an important role in the June 1941 strike, had already begun a long campaign of sabotage and attacks in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais. On 29 July 1941 Debarge wrote in his diary that he had to be ‘relentless in supporting as much as possible our Russian comrades on the battlefield, and to work harder for our liberation’.217 The results of Debarge’s actions – which led to his death in 1942 – were meagre: one sentry was killed in Lens in April 1942, and a number of machines, electricity cables and railway lines were sabotaged.218 On the other hand, dozens of Debarge’s comrades were arrested and either executed or deported. And as a direct consequence of his most spectacular action – the killing of the sentry at Lens – thirty-five hostages were killed the same day and several dozen were deported.219
The turn to armed struggle was so unpopular that the Communist Party never admitted its role in the assassination of Hotz in Nantes, although the Party leadership was secretly pleased at the death of such a high-ranking officer.220 As far as Party members were concerned, it was not even certain that the assassination of Hotz was a political act: L’Humanité initially claimed that he was killed as part of a sex scandal, while a local Breton Communist publication said that the whole thing had been staged by the Gestapo to discredit the Resistance.221
On 23 October, the day after the forty-eight hostages were executed, de Gaulle spoke from London. He sharply distanced himself from the tactics the Communists were using, trying both to ride on the widespread opposition to the assassinations and to set himself up as the leader of the Resistance:
It is completely normal and completely justified that Germans should be killed by French men and women. If the Germans did not wish to be killed by our hands, they should have stayed at home and not waged war on us. Sooner or later, they are all destined to be killed, either by us or by our allies . . . But in war there are tactics. The war of the French must be carried out by those in charge, that is, by myself and by the National Committee. All combatants, those in the country and those outside, must observe precisely the advice I give for the occupied territory, which is not to kill Germans. This for a single, but very good reason, that is, at the moment it is too easy for the enemy to respond by massacring our troops, who are temporarily disarmed. On the other hand, once we are in a position to turn to the attack, you will receive the necessary orders.222
These criticisms, and the brazen attempt by de Gaulle to pose as the sole leader of the Resistance, only reinforced the Communists’ conviction that the General in London could not be trusted. The Communists were even more galled by the fact that they were also criticized by their hated enemies, the Trotskyists. This small group pointed out that because of lack of public support, such a military campaign was not yet appropriate. Worse, they said, the Communists were actually weakening the chances of final victory by sacrificing their members in a largely futile campaign.223 Communist militants realized that the bulk of the population was opposed to attacks against the Nazis – they heard what people said in cafés, and they found it difficult to convince their close contacts. As Liliane Lévy-Osbert recognized, they were virtually alone:
People disapproved of anti-German actions, they did not want to fight, they rejected any idea of rebellion. They were particularly influenced by the fear of reprisals. Fear, timidity and terror faced with the appalling example of so many death sentences terrorized the population. Worse, people turned their anger and their criticisms against the ‘adventurers’ who threatened the lives of ordinary people. Which was what the Germans wanted. However, I think that, deep down, there may have been some kind of compassion and understanding for those young twenty-year-olds who were sacrificing their future.224
That kind of comprehension did indeed exist. In his diary, Jean Guéhenno tried to explain the actions of these young men, and why the campaign of military action continued, despite the repression:
You need to understand the pact that links comrades, the commitments they have made to each other, the support they have given each other, despite the risk, living and dying for each other. The assassin could be in the place of the hostage, just as the hostage could be in the place of the assassin – it’s a matter of chance. Everyone holds to this pact with an iron will, and does what he has to do. Yes, that is frightening, but it is also magnificent.225
While this was an astute attempt to appreciate the determination of Communist militants, Guéhenno understandably did not realize the situation of those involved. These were not hardened cadres but youngsters, with all the selflessness, enthusiasm and roller-coaster emotions that this implied. When Maroussia Naïtchenko and her boyfriend Georges Grünberger saw the name of Guy Moquet on the list of executed hostages in September 1941, the terrible consequences of their campaign were brought home to the two young lovers:
Georges was sitting on a seat of the Métro, on his way to work, reading the paper. Suddenly, he thrust it at me. I didn’t understand what he wanted. He had gone red, his lips were turning purple. Even before looking at the paper, I was frightened by his face . . . The list of hostages was there, and the name of Guy Moquet was among them . . . The shock produced by the news left us de
eply distressed . . . We got out of the Métro and went to work, completely overcome.226
In spring 1942 the few remaining members of the Bataillons joined the Organisation Spéciale (OS), the Communist Party’s newly-created armed wing. In turn, the OS eventually formed the basis of one of the main armed Resistance groups, the Franc-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP – Sharp-Shooters and Partisans). However, the balance sheet of the Communist Party’s initial turn to armed struggle makes depressing reading. The effect on the Nazi war machine was not even that of a fleabite on an elephant. Figures from the Vichy police suggest there were around twenty actions every fortnight.227 Given that most of these failed, and that at this time the battles of the Eastern Front were killing thousands of men each day, destroying military vehicles and equipment at a terrifying rate, the events in France were simply irrelevant from a strategic point of view, no matter how irritating they might have been to the Nazis. At this stage, armed struggle was limited to the Paris region, Normandy and the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, and involved fewer than a hundred militants. Despite subsequent Communist claims, fewer than fifteen German soldiers were assassinated in the first year of armed struggle. Sabotage, which was supposed to be at the heart of the campaign, was a near failure, with the notable exception of two derailments near Caen, in April 1942, which killed thirty-eight soldiers and injured thirty-nine.228