Paris '44: The City of Light Redeemed

by Mortimer Moore, William

  That evening yet another train left Pantin, feeding another twenty-four hundred résistants into Germany’s concentration camps. With a heavy heart Nordling telephoned Erich von Posch-Pastor, who immediately agreed to contact Colonel Garthe at the Hôtel Lutetia and call Nordling back in the morning. As soon as Nordling put the phone down it rang again. The Marquis de Mun, head of the French Red Cross, had encouraging news. The evening’s prison train to Germany was stopped at Nanteuil-sur-Marne. It was not yet certain whether this was due to mechanical failure or resistance sabotage, but the latter seemed more likely. But rescuing twenty-four hundred prisoners was a lot to expect from one of P1’s small sabotage teams, and Mun’s information was that a replacement train was on its way to transfer the prisoners and continue to Germany the following morning.179

  FOR THE TRAIN THAT ROSE VALLAND WAS DETERMINED TO STOP, the endgame began in early August. A shipment of 148 cases—much of the Rosenberg collection, Weil-Picard’s and choice objects belonging to dispossessed Parisian Jews—filling five railway wagons, was waiting to leave from Aubervilliers. In order to streamline their final thefts, M-Aktion—Baron von Behr’s second plunder organisation devoted to stealing general antiques—would join another forty-six wagons to the train. The demands of the front meant that shipments were continually delayed so that by 7 August, Train 40044 remained in the Paris area. Rose consulted Jacques Jaujard, who agreed that the Resistance should stop the train. Everyone knew the Allies would soon arrive; why let the Germans steal any more?180

  For striking Left-wing cheminots, obstructing a train filled with beautiful artefacts created by French hands was their pleasure. Rose felt quietly satisfied that the ERR’s staff were finally leaving, with men like the ghastly Dr. Bruno Lohse recalled by the Wehrmacht a second time. It also meant good-bye to the less unpleasant Dr. Walter Borchers. Before he left, Borchers kept a promise he made to Rose, ensuring that statues taken from Edouard Rothschild’s collection did not leave the Louvre complex. More personally he offered Rose his book collection, but she turned this final act of conqueror’s patronage back on him, saying that if he did not take them with him they would be regarded as spoils of war. Outside, the SS guards were replaced by Georgians, turncoat Soviet prisoners from the Russian front.181

  On 9 August Rose wrote chillingly, “Von Behr and Lohse have departed, saying that they will be back in a few days. It would be preferable that these two personnages were not here for the last acts of the Occupation. They would have the temptation to erase, not only evidence of their actions, but also their witnesses.” After four years cataloguing Nazi theft, Rose desperately hoped that France’s stolen heritage could be recovered. But where artefacts were offered as gifts the ownership question was harder to reverse. On 11 August five paintings and a tapestry left the Jeu de Paume “as presents no doubt”, Rose writes. Then, “A Foujita, representing a reclining nude woman, with contrasting shades of black and white, was offered to the Japanese ambassador who had the good taste to refuse.”182

  On 12 August the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg’s Paris operation ended; but the cheminots prevented Baron von Behr’s last train from going anywhere. When, on 16 August, the guards finally left the Jeu de Paume, Rose’s diary entry ends expressively, “Ouf! ” Until the Allies arrived she would guard her beloved museum herself.183

  MID-AUGUST SAW THE LAST GREAT SINGLE TRAGEDY to befall the Resistance in Paris. While most résistants who bore arms in the ensuing weeks were already under orders, there were youngsters linked to both the OCM (Organisation Civile et Militaire) and JCC (Jeunesses Chrétienne Combattante), bursting with enthusiasm, hoping to be given weapons so they could harass the departing Germans before they left France. Their leaders, Jacques Schlosser, Guy Hémery and others were in their twenties and had Resistance experience. Unfortunately they became vulnerable to infiltration and denunciation once they contacted a businessman called Wigen Nercessian. While his surname suggests Armenian ancestry, Nercessian was a White Russian from the bourgeois-aristocratic expat community that escaped to France after the Russian Revolution.

  Nercessian himself was an honest resistant, but he was compromised from early 1944 when he arrived in Marseilles to work with an escape line helping Russian prisoners reach Spain. After this group was denounced and several members captured, Nercessian felt around like a blind man for new resistance contacts and fell in with one Madame Rousselin, the English wife of a French naval officer. She introduced Nercessian to Charles Porel, who claimed to be both an Austrian Jew and a British agent empowered to provide funds. Nercessian was thrilled to receive fifteen thousand francs which enabled him to return to Meudon where his parents lived.184

  Unaware who Porel was really working for, Nercessian continued his clandestine work and became friends with Abbé Borme, president of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul for the 13th Arrondissement. Seeing that Nercessian appeared well funded, Abbé Borme advised Guy Hémery to ask him for weapons. On account of his connection to Porel, Nercessian replied, “It’s possible.” Porel told Nercessian that weapons were not his department and referred him to “Captain Jack”.185

  Captain Jack, who presented himself as a classic Englishman complete with Oxford accent, questioned Nercessian about his resistance contacts. Their second meeting was planned for 11 August at the Régence Café on Place du Théatre Français. Nercessian was accompanied by Guy Hémery and Jean Favé. “‘Captain Jack’ led the discussion, while Porel remained virtually mute,” Nercessian wrote. “The résistants would provide the men and the lorries while British Intelligence would provide the weapons and, as a precaution, further lorries. ‘Captain Jack’ wanted to know the size of the résistants’ lorries in order to gauge whether they could pass through a depot’s entrance, whose whereabouts he was not yet prepared to say.” A rendezvous was arranged for mid-August.186

  As with the arrest of Jean Moulin, an incident occurred which should have warned anyone used to clandestine life that things were not quite right. Jean Guerin, a young résistant involved in arranging the early meetings, was arrested on 7 August. But it appeared an isolated event, as it was doubtless meant to. When young résistante Michelle Boursier—codenamed Diane—a senior member of the Jeunesse Chrétienne Combattante, lunched with her immediate superiors at a restaurant in the Latin Quarter on 15 August to finalise details, she believed their command chain went via Abbé Borme to the true Resistance, totally trusting her comrades and their connections.187

  As arranged, at 10am on 16 August, Diane’s group arrived on the Rue Drouot where they learnt their lorry had broken down near the Gare de l’Est. “So, all on bicycles we pedalled off to the Porte Maillot where we arrived around 11.30,” Diane later wrote. “Guy Hémery was there, near the Metro entrance. Not far away from the Avenue de la Grande Armée and Boulevard Pereire, stood ‘Captain Jack’ along with three lorries provided by him parked by Luna Park. He told us to help ourselves to one and Bellenger agreed. As we climbed up into this lorry our own lorry, which someone had managed to get going, finally arrived with four résistants armed with machine-guns on board.”188

  When Bellenger suggested they now use their own lorry, Captain Jack firmly insisted that they should use his. He also told the four armed résistants to give him their weapons so that, supposing they were stopped by the Germans none of them would arouse suspicion by being armed. Bowing to his apparent Britishness and seniority, they consented. Captain Jack now had fifteen unarmed young résistants aboard his lorry. “There will be two stops,” he said. “At the first, no one is to move. At the second we will be at our destination, in a garage where we should obtain weapons.”189

  Diane’s misgivings began when the tarpaulin flap fell back down, plunging the young résistants into half-light. She had never seen that driver before. No one sat beside him. No one was checking the route on a bicycle. The lorry pulled away and, mere minutes later, stopped. Looking through the flap a résistant saw German vehicles surrounding them.

  “Voici les Fridol
ins,”* he said.

  Amid banging on the sides of the lorries, machine-gun bursts into the tops of the lorry canopies and shouts of “Raus”, the youngsters were ordered out. A few, who possessed revolvers, considered fighting, but soon recognised their situation was hopeless and jumped down from the lorry. Diane was third out, injuring her legs as she landed. Surprised to find a girl, the intimidating machine-gun bursts briefly stopped, then continued until all of them were standing in the road—probably the Avenue de Salonique—with their hands up. Their captors were twenty SS, two Gestapo and a Milicien in civilian clothes, all armed. For a few moments the Germans kicked them around, paying particular attention to Diane. Then they were ordered back onto the lorries and driven to the Gestapo HQ in the Rue de Saussaies.190

  Their betrayer, Charles Porel, was really Karl Rehbein, an experienced German agent who had previously uncovered many résistants across southern France. His controller was SS Hauptsturmführer Alfred Wenzel, based at 11 Boulevard Flandrin, an annex of the SS offices on Avenue Foch. Captain Jack was Guy de Marcheret d’Eu, the elegant twenty-eight-year-old son of a White Russian and an aristocratic French lady, sophisticated and multi-lingual, but of uncertain politics and loyalties. Pretentious and vain, working for the SD appealed to Marcheret’s love of role-playing.191 Porel told French interrogators in 1946 that, “Being an Anglophile, Nercessian could always be persuaded to work for the Allied services, and he was very happy. He never imagined that he was working for the Wehrmacht and believed everything I told him. Perhaps he was negligent in not checking a few things out.”192

  On reaching the courtyard of the notorious Gestapo building the youngsters were ordered out of the lorries and made to stand against a wall, guarded by two Miliciens. After a while a German officer took an ID parade. Afterwards Diane and the young men, bloody, bruised and desperately frightened, remained standing with their hands above their heads for several hours. Around early evening Diane was moved to a single cell and, after another hour, was called to an office where her personal belongings were returned and, surprisingly, she was released. The courtyard where she last saw her comrades was empty except for a German soldier hosing it down. What became known as “la grande fuite des Fritzs”, the German withdrawal from Paris, was under way.

  Captain Jack had other victims that day. The groupe Sicard, connected to Hémery, were also lured to a fake rendezvous. Captain Jack met them on Place Saint-Ferdinand where, guided insouciantly by Wigen Nercessian, they arrived on Place Victor Hugo. Their next stop was 14 Rue Leroux, a building controlled by the Kriegsmarine. Following three ambushes, fronted unwittingly by Nercessian but masterminded by Porel and Captain Jack, the SD captured thirty-four résistants. That night they were taken to the bank of the Cascade (the waterfall) in the Bois de Boulogne. One by one they were taken down from the back of the lorry and shot by SS men, and their corpses left where they fell.193

  At dawn the following day, on his way to work, Monsieur Lefebvre—the chief caretaker at the nearby École des Cadres de Bagatelle—saw the slaughtered résistants lying grotesquely beside the waterfall. Thirty-four became thirty-five because resistance Doctor Blanchet was shot by SS Captain Friedrich Berger at the SD’s Rue de la Pompe annex and his body dumped beside the others. With the police on strike, the Bois de Boulogne gardes managed as best they could, taking the victims to their depot on the Rue Chardon-Lagache (16th Arrondissement) along with seven more victims from Avenue Foch. “In all my career, I have never seen such a massacre,” forensic Dr. Paul told a post-war court of enquiry.194

  Told of her comrades’ deaths, Diane was invited to identify them, but recognised only nine, including Guy Hémery. The Red Cross identified the rest. With the Germans still in control, giving them family funerals was impossible, but Abbé Borme visited the Rue Chardon-Lagache to give the last rites to those young men he had unwittingly fed to the enemy.

  Together Abbé Borme, Nercessian and the résistante Jeanne (Sabine Zlatin) worked out Charles Porel’s role; Nercessian was distraught at having given Porel the addresses of Russian agents in Berlin. On 20 August Sabine Zlatin met Porel’s mistress Lydia Tscherwinska but, although tainted with collaboration, Tscherwinska was merely an innocent accoutrement of Porel’s undercover lifestyle. As for Porel himself, aka German intelligence officer Karl Rehbein, he had left Paris.

  General von Choltitz was not responsible for this massacre. He had virtually no control over SS and Gestapo activities in Paris; a fact confirmed by another incident. Informed by a senior SS official, possibly Oberg, that an abandoned SS lock-up still held the wives of well-to-do Frenchmen, von Choltitz immediately visited the prison to find Swiss consul René Naville already there. Von Choltitz was horrified that four of these elegant, well-connected women had been raped and murdered, their naked corpses left lying in a cell. Von Choltitz apologised to the other thirty women and released them. Describing the incident to fellow prisoners at Trent Park, von Choltitz said, “They just felt like it. Those swine made off at night without telling me, they left their quarters open, full of arms and a cellar filled with explosives and a picture of Hitler as its only guardian! They simply drove off.”195

  * The 2e DB’s ambulance drivers were mostly provided by the Groupe Rochambeau named after the French general who served in the American War of Independence. The women serving in the Groupe Rochambeau were hence called ‘Rochambelles.’ Other 2e DB ambulance drivers were Marinettes from the French Navy and British Quakers.

  * Three of the most recent biographies are by General Mungo Melvin, Benoit Le May and Marcel Stein.

  * GT = Groupement Tactique, ie a ‘battle group.’ The 2e DB had three ‘battle groups’ on the US armoured division model.

  * In 1905 the French state deprived the Archbishop of Paris of his traditional residence at the Hôtel de Chatelet.

  * Ciroux joined the 12e Cuirassiers that day and stayed with the regiment for the remainder of the war.

  * OSS = Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.

  * In September 1943 the Italian Prime Minister General Pietro Badoglio pulled Italy out of its alliance with Germany with little warning and the following month declared war on Germany.

  * Fridolin was a name given to German soldiers and Occupation officials in France during WW2.

  Chapter 4

  Laval, Taittinger and Nordling

  17 August 1944

  AT 7AM, WITH “LA GRANDE FUITE DES FRITZS”—“the Great Flight of the Fritzes”—getting under way, Raoul Nordling and his French nephew Édouard Fiévet drew up outside the Grand Hôtel, from where the “Taxis of the Marne” had departed for the front in 1914. In Erich von Posch-Pastor’s office they met Count de Rohan-Chabot, a director of the French Red Cross. Next, Bobby Bender arrived. Rather than go through all the proper authorities, banging their heads against brick walls, Bender advised that they issue themselves with drafted orders from lower down the chain of command, which middle-ranking German officers—the grades commanding jails and railway stations—were unlikely to question, and go directly to the prisons and camps holding political prisoners.1

  They first visited Fresnes, south of Paris. A prison built in the 1890s and designed to be humane and innovative, Fresnes became notorious during the Occupation for imprisoning résistants. Only five days earlier, Jewish aid worker Suzanne Spaak had been shot in the execution yard. Things seemed perfectly calm when Nordling arrived at the gate, but the wide roads southwards were recognised by the Germans as potential routes for liberating armies. One of General von Aulock’s valuable 88mm guns was allocated to defend the jail’s approaches and give defilading fire if any Allied vehicle crossed the main junction a few hundred metres away.

  In the governor’s office, Bender asked if the governor was disposed to release prisoners in line with “new policy”.

  “That is my greatest wish,” he replied. “If I get the order, I shall release all the prisoners immediately.”2

  Even as the Allies closed in, Nazi offic
ialdom was more robust than they hoped. They returned to Paris and called at the Hôtel Meurice where defences were being prepared. The west section of the Rue de Rivoli was being cordonned off, while inside the hotel machine-gun positions were being created on the main staircase and at windows with the best view over the surrounding area. Sandbags were being passed between helmeted soldiers, and the atmosphere was tense. Nordling and Fiévet waited in the lobby while Bender and Posch-Pastor went to find von Choltitz. While Nordling waited, SS Standartenführer Karl Oberg arrived. Nordling registered Oberg’s bull-like demeanour and monocle screwed into his left eye socket. Ten minutes later Oberg majestically descended the stairs and left the building, Then Bender reappeared, saying von Choltitz wanted to see them. As they went upstairs Bender explained: Oberg had only come to say his good-byes before leaving Paris. When Choltitz asked whether Oberg objected to the release of non-military prisoners, Oberg replied, “I don’t care.”3

  At the first of several historic meetings, von Choltitz asked Nordling how he saw the situation.

  “It is of the greatest importance that a massacre of prisoners is avoided,” said Nordling. “The responsibility for such a catastrophe would rest on the whole German Army.”

  Although painfully aware of SS excesses, von Choltitz had to keep his position.

  “For me, as an officer,” said Choltitz, “there’s no such thing as civil prisoners. I only know about prisoners of war. Any civilians who fire on my troops will be regarded as Francs Tireurs and shot where we find them. This is not a matter of Francs Tireurs and so I see no reason to detain civil prisoners.”