The Resistance
Page 15
At the end of May the Free French decided to set up a permanent link with the Communists, and sent two men to France as part of Operation GOLDFISH. However, within a week one of the BCRA agents, Georges Weil, was arrested by the Gestapo and committed suicide by biting on the cyanide pill all agents were supplied with.345 At the same time, many members of Rémy’s CND circuit, including Paco, were arrested. The fragile link with the Communist Party was temporarily broken. Permanent radio contact with the Communist Party was finally established only in October 1942; even then, PCF security was so tight that it was often a month before a response was received.346
Despite the political differences between the Communists and the Free French, there was initially no sign of any discrimination against the PCF in terms of the resources sent from London. While Combat’s monthly budget at the end of 1941 was a mere 30,000 francs a month,347 in July 1942 the BCRA told the Communist Party they would receive 3 million francs – Rémy later gave them a further 2 million francs a month out of his own funds.348 (The modern equivalents of these three sums would be around £6,000, £150,000 and £100,000 respectively.)349 The PCF was also promised an ‘important shipment of machine guns, pistols, explosives and grenades’ which was so substantial it had to be sent by sea.350 With the supplies from London, explosives stolen from quarries and weapons hidden during the summer of 1940, the Communists had access to large amounts of weaponry: in September 1942 the police in Rennes seized 300 kilogrammes of arms and explosives, while in October the Paris anti-terrorist brigade seized a major stash of about 2 cubic metres of cases containing Mills grenades, pencil-timer detonators and plastic explosives, all from London.351
Some of these weapons were employed in operations by an elite PCF hit squad made up of ultra-loyal party members, called the détachement Valmy (no connection with the newspaper of the same name). Tragically, the détachement Valmy was as much involved in settling accounts in paranoid Stalinist purges as it was in fighting the Nazis,352 but in some cases it made good use of the British weapons. In particular, its activities began to change after an unprecedented mutiny by its members. In August 1942 the détachement met as a ‘soldiers’ soviet’ and complained about the way in which they were being used by the Party, demanding to be allowed to attack the Nazis, like their comrades in the PCF’s recently founded, broadly based fighting structure, the FTP. They got their wish. In the morning of 10 September 1942 the détachement carried out two Mills grenade attacks on German soldiers in Paris. Forensic examination of the shrapnel from these and other explosions left no doubt in the Nazis’ minds: the Communists were being supplied with British weapons.353
This confirmed what the Nazis already suspected: the Communist Party was becoming more serious and professional, as the ramshackle Bataillons de la Jeunesse were replaced by the more effective FTP. As part of the overall rapprochement between the Free French (re-branded as the Fighting French in July 1942), the FTP proclaimed themselves to be ‘the vanguard of the Fighting French on the soil of the Fatherland’.354 The Nazi solution to the FTP threat was simple and brutal: more repression.
In summer 1942 SS General Karl Oberg, in charge of security in Occupied France, decreed that the adult male relatives of any convicted ‘terrorist’ would be sentenced to death, while the female relatives would be given forced labour.355 On at least one occasion, this policy had its desired effect. Fosco Focardi, a member of the détachement Valmy, was instructed to plant a bomb outside a Paris cinema, the Rex, which was frequented by Nazi soldiers. But in the middle of the operation Focardi had second thoughts. As he later told the police:
When Paris [his comrade] planted the bomb, which was due to go off in ten minutes, I realized that the attack could have terrible consequences. I thought, like each time in fact, that my brother, who is imprisoned in Poissy, could be taken as a hostage. Obeying a sudden impulse, I went and found the bomb and removed the detonator. I told my comrades that the times of the film had changed, so no one would be coming out of the cinema when we expected, which made the attack pointless.356
Most of the time, however, the dangers did not deter young people from taking arms against the Nazis. In spring 1942 five teenage school students from the Lycée Buffon in Paris decided to act, following the arrest of one of their teachers, Raymond Burgard, who had taken over the leadership of the Valmy newspaper (no relation to the PCF hit squad). Burgard was arrested during the Easter holidays; on the first day of term, the five youngsters organized a demonstration, involving children from other schools. Around a hundred school students took part, chanting Burgard’s name and throwing leaflets in the air. Although the school authorities closed the gates to trap the demonstrators, everyone managed to escape – some by hiding in the cellars. But the five ringleaders were identified to the police and had to go into hiding; over the next few months they carried out a number of (rather ineffectual) attempted bombings and assassinations. Betrayed to the police, they were tried and sentenced to death. After the judge had passed sentence, he asked the five young men if they had anything to say. Pierre Grelot’s reply summed up the courage, dignity and determination of his generation: ‘I am proud to merit this sentence.’357
After several months in solitary confinement, the five lycéens were executed on 8 February 1943. Their final letters, written on the day of their execution, betray not the slightest bitterness, only a certain frustration at leaving the battlefield when victory seemed to be in sight (one of the decisive events of the war – the German surrender at Stalingrad – had taken place the week before; the news had penetrated even into the heart of the Nazi prisons). As eighteen-year-old Pierre Benoît wrote:
My dear parents, my dear friends,
It is the end! They have just come to take us to the firing squad. Never mind . . . To die at the moment of victory is a bit annoying, but it does not matter! Things happen because of mens’ dreams . . . Life will be beautiful. We are singing as we leave. Be brave! It’s not so bad after six months of prison. My final kisses to you all, your Pierrot.358
Raymond Burgard was also sentenced to death. He was beheaded with an axe in Cologne in June 1944.
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Imprisonment, torture and death were the fate of many résistants. One now-forgotten organization, Turma-Vengeance (‘turma’ is Portuguese for ‘group’), paid a particularly heavy price, with nearly 600 members killed.359 Vengeance was set up in January 1941 by two physicians, Dr Victor ‘Vic’ Dupont and Dr François Wetterwald. Three years later, both men were in Buchenwald concentration camp, betrayed by a Nazi agent within the organization. In 1941 Vengeance organized one of the most spectacular breaches of Nazi security, through the work of telecommunications engineer Robert Keller, known in intelligence circles as ‘source K’. Sabotage of telecommunications equipment was punishable by death, but Keller – a father of four – nevertheless volunteered to intercept messages on the main Paris–Berlin cable. A house was rented in the Paris suburbs, right next to where the cable passed, and on 15 April 1942 Keller engineered a fault on the line; as expected, the Nazis called him in to solve the problem, which involved digging up the road in front of the house, with the approval of the watching Germans. In the middle of the cold wet night, Keller and his two technicians clambered into the trench and installed a complex wire-tap device which diverted the signal into the house. The next day the repairs were completed to the satisfaction of the Nazis, and messages were transmitted and received as normal. Except there was a team in the house transcribing everything and passing the material on to Vichy Air Force Intelligence and then on to MI6 in London.
After a few months Keller and his team had to move the operation to another suburb – the locals had become suspicious of the comings and goings and decided that the house was a nest of Gestapo agents who were listening to all the phone calls from the village. In the middle of December 1942 the second tap came online. However, within a week the Gestapo came to Keller’s house to arrest him, but he was not at home. That evening, to prevent his wife
from being harassed, Keller turned himself in. He had been betrayed to the Nazis by René Bousquet, head of the French police. Keller was deported to Bergen-Belsen, where he died.360
In retrospect, the existence of so many Resistance groups seems bewildering, and even wilfully counter-productive. At the time, however, the situation was more complex than this. The unification of the Resistance would eventually be a military necessity – if they were to strike effectively against the Nazis, then the highest degree of coordination would be required. But in terms of both security and politics, the scattered nature of the Resistance was a positive advantage. The presence of so many small, unconnected groups made it more difficult for the Nazis and Vichy to persecute them, and the effects of betrayal were inevitably less extreme as a result. Furthermore, the broad nature of the Resistance, with its wide range of voices, approaches and attitudes, showed that this was not a movement restricted to one particular section or region, nor was it the mere expression of a single individual or leadership. The Germans, Vichy and the French public all recognized that the Resistance represented something important and widespread. It was certainly not the voice of the majority, but its many voices had a moral authority that grew as the war progressed. Nevertheless, there was pressure for the Resistance groups to combine in one large organization. This was discussed throughout 1942, but there were major problems. Although Frenay was keen for Combat to fuse with Libération, Emmanuel d’Astier was utterly hostile, mainly due to his profound political and personal distrust of Frenay (this was mutual).361 Many rank-and-file résistants found the whole situation deeply depressing, as did Moulin. As he wrote to London in August 1942:
We should not hide from the fact that in paramilitary terms we are in a period of acute crisis. Virtually everywhere, the militants want fusion. The lower-level cadres feel the same way, as most of them are fed up with a competition which, in certain regions, has turned into a self-serving squabble.362
For most of the year, progress on fusion was at a dead halt. First there was the Pucheu affair, which gave d’Astier more reasons not to budge. Then, in the second half of April, d’Astier suddenly left for London, without a word to Frenay or Moulin. D’Astier had hoodwinked SOE agent Francis Basin into giving him a place on the next Royal Navy submarine that surfaced in the Bay of Antibes, the P42 (HMS Unbroken).363 After a two-week voyage – the submarine had other missions, including attacking a German convoy off Genoa – the P42 arrived in Gibraltar. Following intensive questioning by MI5, d’Astier was finally flown to London. When Basin realized that d’Astier had fooled him, he sheepishly contacted SOE and asked whether he should also send Frenay. ‘No thank you, one is quite enough,’ came the reply.364
Unlike Moulin and Pineau, d’Astier did not make a good impression on the Free French. Passy and d’Astier took an instant, visceral, dislike to each other. D’Astier could not see beyond the fact that Passy was a right-wing military man and a spy, while what really irritated Passy was not d’Astier’s politics but his pretension: ‘a mixture of a condottiere and Machiavelli . . . an anarchist in court shoes’ was Passy’s caustic description.365 De Gaulle, however, was delighted with his visitor and decided to send d’Astier to the USA to drum up support. As a result, the leader of Libération spent nearly three weeks on the other side of the Atlantic.366
D’Astier’s sudden departure was not entirely bad for the Resistance: practical coordination between the movements became much easier, simply because there were fewer rows. Furthermore, d’Astier’s trip enabled the Resistance to get a measure of the full range of forces working in France under the control of London. The situation was unbelievably complex – there seemed to be almost as many intelligence services as there were Resistance groups. The Free French had two services – Colonel Passy’s BCRA and a service under the orders of the Minister of the Interior – both of which sent people to France without telling the other. SOE had two separate and sometimes competing sections intervening in France – ‘F’, which ran the independent SOE circuits in France, and ‘RF’, whose circuits were linked with the Resistance. There was also an SOE section running escape lines (‘D/F’), a separate British Intelligence escape service (‘MI9’) and a complex network of intelligence circuits run by MI6 and by Polish Intelligence. Predictably, in a war in which secret services jealously protected their own patches, d’Astier’s suggestion that a coordinating committee should be set up to make things simpler was dismissed out of hand.
This lack of coordination produced confusion and led to some embarrassing mistakes. SOE’s ‘F’ section came a cropper when it swallowed some of the fantasies of André Girard (‘Carte’), a forty-year-old artist who claimed to have a large group of ‘apolitical’ and deeply anti-Gaullist résistants, together with a substantial intelligence network. This was music to London’s ears, and SOE soon provided Carte with vast amounts of money and arms and even his own British-based radio station, Radio Patrie, which claimed to broadcast from within France.367 Girard had contacts with Vichy Intelligence, including with Henri Rollin of Vichy police counter-espionage,368 and a number of minor Vichy officers, but his group never really spread outside the privileged and comfortable region of the Côte d’Azur. Nevertheless, Carte managed to persuade the deputy leader of ‘F’ section, Major Donington, that his group involved leaders of the Vichy army, and that he could mobilize up to 300,000 troops. ‘F’ section believed this because they were desperate to work with an armed group that was not under the influence of de Gaulle. However, Girard’s increasingly bizarre behaviour led to splits within his small organization and growing suspicions in London, while the careless loss of a set of uncoded file cards carrying details of the circuit’s members soon led to the arrest of dozens of people. After the war, SOE’s official historian wrote diplomatically that ‘it is impossible to separate the bluff from reality’ in the Carte affair.369 At the time, SOE’s verdict was rather sharper. For over three months at the beginning of 1943 ‘F’ section tried to get Girard to come to London to explain himself; for over three months Carte repeatedly made excuses. When he finally arrived they decided that he was ‘virtually mad’ and forbade him from returning to France.370 He was eventually dispatched to the USA, where he lived until his death in 1968.
Free French operations were equally chaotic. Moulin complained to London about the way in which ex-Prime Minister Édouard Herriot ‘had been contacted nineteen times by nineteen different agents, each of whom claimed to be the sole legitimate representative of de Gaulle’.371 This reflected badly on the Resistance and made it much more difficult to plan and carry out work seriously. Things got so bad that at the end of August 1942 Moulin sent a furious message to London:
INFORM YOU THAT ONLY SERIOUS DIFFICULTIES HAVE ENCOUNTERED IN MY WORK COME FROM GAULLIST AGENTS STOP IF ISSUE NOT SETTLED IMMEDIATELY WILL REGRETFULLY ASK YOU TO ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION STOP IN THIS FIELD DISORDER IS EXTREME STOP.372
Moulin did not resign, even though the situation was not resolved, mainly because there was no easy solution. Some attempts to find an answer verged on the bizarre. To ensure that Resistance and intelligence work did not interfere with each other, London helpfully suggested that Moulin should give Pineau two different code names – one as head of Libération-Nord (‘Berval’) and the other as a BCRA agent (‘Francis’), and that when Moulin met ‘Berval’ the pair would have to ignore everything that they had decided when Moulin met ‘Francis’.373 This did little to ease Moulin’s frustrations, or to convince him that London had any real understanding of what life in the Resistance actually involved.
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There is a popular image of the Resistance which could be from a comic book – a man in a black leather jacket laying explosives on a railway track, accompanied by a woman in a beret carrying a Sten gun, the pair of them on the run from the Gestapo. Those things did exist, more or less, for some people, some of the time. But for the leaders of the Resistance, this was not their everyday life. True, they lived in permanent fear of betrayal or di
scovery. But apart from that, their lives were remarkably humdrum – neither Frenay nor Moulin harmed anybody during their time as résistants. Claude Bourdet, a leader of Combat, later recalled his situation, cleverly mixing the prosaic and the dramatic:
At root, my own life, until I was arrested, was that of a kind of civil servant, a bureaucrat writing memos and sitting on committees; nothing distinguished it from the life of an ordinary bureaucrat except its precarious state, a habit of looking both ways when leaving a building, and the frequent presence of an automatic pistol under my left arm.374
Moulin’s life was not much different. When Daniel Cordier, aged twenty-two, was parachuted into the Non-Occupied Zone in July 1942 to act as a radio operator, Moulin decided he needed a secretary, and gave Cordier the job. The young man, a slight elf-like figure, was appalled to find that de Gaulle’s personal representative in France was living in a miserably small room near the station. As befitted his apparent taste for secrets and mystery, Moulin had two lives – his clandestine existence in Lyons, where he was known as ‘Max’ or ‘Rex’, and an official, public existence in Provence, where he was registered as a retired civil servant. Together with a young woman called Colette Pons, who may have been his lover, Moulin owned an art gallery in Nice – they made a tidy living selling early-twentieth-century paintings, including works by Renoir, Utrillo and Dufy. Apart from his sister, no one knew the full extent of the link between the respectable ex-prefect and the Resistance leader.