by Matthew Cobb
Some writers and résistants have argued that London knew all along that the PROSPER circuit was insecure, and cynically used it to misinform the Nazis about the date of the Allied invasion, thereby sacrificing several hundred French members of the PROSPER circuits and the British SOE operatives themselves.597 Governments and military commanders in the Second World War regularly killed civilians and sacrificed soldiers to pursue strategic aims, but there is no proof that this was the case with PROSPER. Although Suttill was certain in May 1943 that the invasion was imminent, there is no evidence that he had been manipulated – it is more likely that, like millions of French people who took the growing number of Allied bombing raids as a sign of approaching invasion, he simply believed what he wanted to believe.598
Whether D-Day was around the corner or not, the Resistance still had to resist. A key way of gaining support from the population and weakening the Nazis’ grip on the country was to stop the departure of young men to Germany under STO. On 14 October 1943 résistants in Paris attacked the STO office on the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois where the files on 100,000 STO candidates were kept. They intended to set fire to the building – without the names, men could not be called up. But their plan failed, so instead they stole around 65,000 files, saving tens of thousands of young men from deportation.599 Five months later, half a ton of documents were stolen from the STO offices in Cahors and thrown into the river Lot by a watermill in the centre of the town. The mill wheels churned up the documents and left an enormous mess along the banks of the river, attracting the amused interest of passers-by and showing the effectiveness of the Resistance.600
At around the same time, a small group of FTP and Combat members destroyed the central STO files held in the Place Fontenoy in Paris, just behind the École Militaire. Helped by a civil servant who worked in the STO offices, they entered the building pretending to be a maintenance team. After pistol-whipping the young lad who was guarding the room where the files were held, they smashed down the door. Léo Hamon, who led the operation, recalled:
We spread out our banana-shaped incendiary devices, then lit a match, and the whole place went up like a dream. We got out of the room, picked up the lad, who was still a bit stunned, shook him and said, ‘Go on, get the hell out of here!’ Then we hurried out . . . We made our way towards our car, still trying not to look as though we were running, and then the cry went up: ‘Fire!’ So we pelted off in the car, past all the official drivers waiting for the high-ranking administrators, and crossed Paris with the barrels of two pistols pointing out of the rear window, ready to shoot at anyone who tried to follow us.601
The group made a clean getaway, and Hamon was thoughtful enough to send a food parcel to the young man they had knocked out, together with a brief note that concluded: ‘You risked your life – next time, make sure it is for, and not against, France. Get well soon.’602
For the Allies, action against STO was useful because it disrupted the Germans’ industrial plans – as far as London and Washington were concerned, the main role of the Resistance was to carry out military and industrial sabotage. In the summer of 1943 SOE agent Harry Rée came up with a novel approach – he got the bosses to help. On 16 July 1943 there had been a catastrophic RAF raid on the Peugeot plant at Montbéliard-Sochaux, near Besançon, which left the factory intact but killed 110 civilians and seriously injured another 154. The British were desperate to stop production at Sochaux, which made tank parts and components for the new Focke-Wulf night-fighter plane. Rée was able to meet the head of the Peugeot company and convince him that the RAF would stop trying to destroy the plant if they would help the Resistance sabotage production.
Even before Rée arrived on the scene, the Sochaux plant was causing the Germans problems. Although the Peugeot company had been enthusiastically pro-Vichy at the beginning of the Occupation, by the autumn of 1942 management had changed their attitude. A number of factors – workers refusing to do their job properly, anti-German feeling in the population and the bosses’ desire to protect their investments from Nazi expropriation – had led to some spectacular delays. For example, out of 100,000 cylinder heads ordered in November 1941, only 1,000 had been delivered by July 1944, while in May 1942 the Nazis complained that sixty per cent of the Peugeot 2T vehicles were useless because they had faulty clutches. Following the agreement with Rée, Peugeot management turned a blind eye to eighteen major sabotage operations, some of which put key parts of the plant out of action for several months.603
SOE tried to repeat the tactic at the Michelin tyre plant in Clermont-Ferrand. On 11 March 1944 SOE agent Pearl Witherington reported that after negotiating for five months she had been unable to convince Michelin management to let her Resistance contact, Villiers, sabotage the plant. Worse, Villiers’ sabotage leader had been arrested when he tried to set fire to the factory. Witherington was scornful of Michelin’s motivations and drew the necessary conclusion:
They refuse to believe the RAF will have time to bomb Clermont-Ferrand before an allied landing,’ she told London. ‘In the meantime they are working turning out material and making money . . . They are playing for time . . . I hate to suggest this bombing of MICHELIN but Villiers and I think it would give the management a lesson and force Villiers’ hand if Clermont-Ferrand were bombed.604
Three weeks later, following an RAF raid, she reported:
Michelin was well pin-pointed and destruction complete in main factory. People in Clermont say many of the incendiaries were duds. Casualties: about 16 killed and 20 injured.605
Attacks on vital targets could sometimes lead to terrible reprisals. On the night of 1 April 1944 the Resistance blew up the railway line at Ascq, near the Belgian border. A train carrying around 400 men and 60 armoured vehicles of an SS Panzer Division was derailed, but none of the troops were hurt, and only minor damage was done. Nonetheless, the Nazis immediately went on the rampage, killing the stationmaster and one of his workers. The soldiers were then sent into the town where they knocked on the doors, demanding the men get out of bed and help repair the railway, promising the women that their menfolk would soon return. Shortly after the events, one anonymous survivor described what happened next:
We were made to walk for about 15 or 20 minutes until we went through a hole in the fence onto the railway line, beaten with rifle-butts as we went . . . There were German soldiers, with a machine gun, on the ground by the track . . . I thought we were going to be put on to the train. As I walked, I saw around 20 or 25 bodies on the ground, and I realized we were going to be shot. We walked a few metres more. The man at the head of our group was a gamekeeper; he was shot at point-blank range by a German. I saw him fall – I was fifth or sixth in line. That was the signal for the Germans by the railway to start shooting. I leaped forward and fell to the ground, holding my head in my hands. The shooting carried on. Then everything went quiet. The Germans were walking up and down the path. After a moment, another group of prisoners arrived. They passed barely one metre from my feet and then the shooting began again. After this round of shots, I heard two victims still breathing; a German must have heard them, because there were two shots right next to me. I was kicked twice in the ribs and once in the shoulder, as though to make sure I was dead . . . Eventually a locomotive came and took the train away – it seemed to take forever. I could still hear noises and the sound of Germans on the track. I still didn’t dare move. Then a comrade in front of me began to crawl away. I was afraid that the Germans might see him and come and finish us off, but I did the same. Together with a third man we crawled through the fields to the Rue Mangin. Then I fled to the other side of the village.606
In total, eighty-six men, aged between fifteen and seventy-five, were killed that night.607
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The existence of Resistance operations against the railways raises the question of what was done to stop the deportation of the Jews. The answer is shamefully short: nothing. Eighty-five rail convoys of Jews left France for the concentration camps, transporting o
ver 70,000 people to their deaths, including 10,000 children. Not one train was stopped or even significantly delayed. Amazingly, this is not only true for France; it is also true for the whole of Occupied Europe, with two exceptions.608
This inaction may seem incomprehensible, but such responses flow partly from the hindsight of history. Today the Holocaust is often seen as the overwhelming feature of the Second World War, but the Allies did not fight the war to save the Jews – indeed, at the time few were aware of the vast extermination plan the Nazis were putting into place. The vicious anti-Semitism was plain for all to see, and only the hopelessly naive could suppose that the convoys of deported Jews were heading anywhere pleasant, but the appalling reality was literally unimaginable. It was known that people died in concentration camps – of starvation, beatings, overwork or disease – but not that the Nazis had built a machine for murdering millions of people.
When news gradually began to leak out about the horror of the camps, it was rarely believed. In May 1942 reports reached London from Poland, describing the extermination of whole Jewish villages by gas, but these were generally considered to be an exaggeration.609 In October 1942 J’accuse, a small newspaper produced by the ‘French forces against racist barbarism’ (one of many guises adopted by the Jewish section of the MOI), published an account of what was happening, written by someone working for the Germans:
You should know . . . that all Jews who are deported are killed as soon as they arrive in the camps. They are killed by gas. I heard from an officer that 11,000 people deported from France were killed in this way.610
Nearly fifty years later, Trotskyist résistant and concentration camp internee David Rousset recalled his own reaction:
I think it was in 1943 that I first had information about the existence of the gas chambers. I refused to publish it because I did not believe it . . . It was only when I arrived in Buchenwald that I understood that, in fact, anything was possible and that, effectively, the gas chambers were not quite so incredible . . . my response was the same as that of most people – we simply did not believe that such things were possible.611
This was not a failure of the imagination, but a psychological defence mechanism for people faced with overwhelming horror. Pierre Francès-Rousseau was in a camp linked to Auschwitz; even when he was made to sort through the clothes and shoes of those who had been gassed, he could not bring himself to accept what was taking place.612
Those who did accept the horrific reality had doubts about whether they should make it generally known, for fear of the terrible demoralizing effect the news might have. The editor of J’accuse, Adam Rayski, recalled that he and his comrades had ‘a substantial internal debate’ before deciding to publish what they had heard:
We were seized by doubt: would the effect of this information on the Jewish population not be disastrous? Would it provoke a reinforcement of resistance, or a despairing collapse of morale? If people panicked when they heard this, would the résistants be able to deal with it? Would they succeed in driving out fear and transforming despair and pain into the determination to fight?613
Rayski soon realized there was nothing to lose, and that the population had to be mobilized. In March 1943 the MOI publication Notre parole (‘Our Word’) set out seven tasks for every Jew, man or woman, old or young, in Occupied France. They were: leave home; hide the children among sympathetic French people; join a Resistance organization; if caught by the Nazis, resist or flee; organize demonstrations and barricades in the French camps; try to escape from the convoys; organize sabotage in the German prison camps. The article concluded with a rousing call to action:
Use every hour of your life to wound the Hitlerian beast! Strike it wherever you can! Smash the machines! Destroy all produce! Join the partisans! Arm yourselves and fight for the destruction of the brown-shirted barbarians, if you do not want to be destroyed yourselves! This is the fighting programme of each Jew who does not want to walk into Hitler’s abattoir. This is the programme that can be summarized in these words: STRUGGLE AND VENGEANCE!614
But although many young Jews did join the Resistance, there was no wave of action along the lines called for by the authors of Notre parole, and the Jewish Resistance organizations never involved more than around two thousand people.615 In fact deportation was not used only against the Jews – the trains that left France also carried tens of thousands of résistants (over 88,000 in total). There was, however, a terrible difference in the survival rate: only three per cent of Jewish deportees made it back, as against fifty-two per cent of the résistants.616 The Resistance did virtually nothing to stop any types of deportation (and, strikingly, none of the Jewish Resistance organizations ever called for such action). The lack of action against the convoys of deported Jews did not reflect a French indifference to Jewish suffering.
What could seem at best as passivity and at worst as callous indifference towards all deportees can be explained by the weakness of the Resistance and by the scale of the deportations. As shown by Georges Guingouin’s destruction of the railway line near Eymoutiers, stopping a train would have been straightforward; the real problems would have begun afterwards. Each convoy of deportees carried around a thousand people. Once freed from the cattle-wagons in which they had been locked, they would have to be clothed, fed and sheltered for the duration of the war. When the STO trains were stopped from leaving, freed workers simply went home for the night. However, deportees from the Drancy transit camp could have come from anywhere in the country and would have to be hidden either in the countryside or in willing households. That would have required an elaborate underground infrastructure that the Resistance simply did not possess. Even maintaining the maquis – groups of fit young men who had volunteered for gruelling conditions – was extremely difficult. As a result of all these factors, it seems that the Resistance never even considered the possibility of stopping a convoy.
Nevertheless, we know of two attempts to stop deportations, each of which, while small in scale, was significant. Léon Bronchart was a forty-four-year-old train driver from Brive who was a member of Combat and was involved in Jacques Renouvin’s Groupes Francs. On 31 October 1942, at Montauban station, north of Toulouse, Bronchart was told to drive a train of ‘political internees’ (this was the Vichy term for Jews and others who were not members of the Resistance) who were being transferred towards Limoges.
I immediately made up my mind and refused to drive the train. The stationmaster, the depot manager, the deputy depot manager, an inspector, all came to the engine to talk to me. Despite the advice, the coaxing, the warnings and the threats, I continued to refuse; when I had enough, I shut the locomotive down.617
Someone else was found to drive the train, and in December 1942 Bronchart was disciplined and fined by his managers. Then, on 29 January 1943, he was arrested in Brive for possessing copies of Combat – the same day as his comrade Jacques Renouvin was captured, also in Brive. Sentenced to deportation, Bronchart was sent first to Buchenwald, then Dora, where he helped sabotage the V2 rockets the prisoners were making, before finally arriving in Bergen-Belsen. After the war, he was given the title of ‘A Righteous Among the Nations’ for saving Jewish families in Brive.618
A far more effective and dramatic operation to save Jews occurred in Belgium in April 1943. This was the only known organized attempt in the whole of Occupied Europe to stop the deportation of Jews. Belgian Jews were herded into a concentration camp in Mechelen near Antwerp and housed in an old barracks. By the end of the war, over 26,000 Mechelen inmates had been deported to Auschwitz, all of them Jews, apart from 365 Gypsies. Nearly 16,000 of them, including virtually all the children, were gassed as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. Conditions in the Mechelen camp were appalling. The Nazis subjected their prisoners to systematic humiliation and degradation, drawing swastikas on Torah scrolls and religious books, making Hasidic Jewish men cut off their distinctive hairstyles and repeatedly threatening people with dogs.619
In early 1943 a you
ng Jewish Communist called Hertz Jospa hatched a plan to attack one of the rail convoys and free the deportees. The Belgian Resistance felt the plan was ‘too daring and too dangerous’620 – they thought such an operation would require at least twenty men armed with grenades and firearms to hold off the Nazi guards, and the Resistance would then have the responsibility of looking after hundreds of refugees. However, one of Jospa’s comrades, Youra Livchitz, a handsome young Jewish physician, was enthused by the idea, and managed to persuade some résistants to give him a revolver. Meanwhile, Jospa began to organize support for the operation. Twenty thousand francs were collected, enough to give each freed deportee fifty francs – the price of a tram ticket.621 Coincidentally, Communist prisoners in the Mechelen camp were planning to escape when the next convoy left. With the help of a secretary who worked in the camp, the Communists manipulated the list of deportees so they would all be in the same wagons. When a message was smuggled into the camp, announcing that the convoy would be attacked, the prisoners gathered the saws, files and knives they had been hiding. Then, on 16 April, the inmates were told the next convoy would be leaving three days later, on the eve of Passover. The Nazis had planned it so that over 1,600 Jews would spend one of the most important days in their religious calendar riding in cattle-wagons towards their death.