Voices from the Dark Years
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‘Having no literary pretensions, I never intended to publish my notes. Yet now, when so many want to forget it all happened, we must go on record.’ Pierre Mignon, farmer, patriot and survivor of the extermination camps
‘History tends not to repeat itself exactly. Next time, it could be worse.’ Renée de Monbrison, who wore a yellow star in the Occupied Zone
‘If I could not be your sword, at least I have been your shield.’
Marshal Philippe Pétain, in his last message to the nation before being abducted to Germany by the SS in August 1944
‘Everything I did was for France and the cause of peace.’
Pierre Laval, shortly before he was executed for high treason at Fresnes prison on 15 October 1945
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people contributed to the research for this book by reliving with me their experiences during the dark years of the German occupation of France. They recalled moments of anguish and joy, of shame and triumph, of fear and elation. They unearthed personal papers, showed me treasured mementoes and lent precious documents, manuscripts, photographs and books on trust. Many said at the end of our meeting, ‘I haven’t helped you much’, but research is like an iceberg: it is the nine-tenths below the water-line that gives balance and perspective.
From Bordeaux in the south-west of France to Schirmeck in Alsace, survivors asked to remain anonymous after telling me things they had never divulged to anyone else. To them goes my greatest gratitude. Among those I can thank, in Tarn-et-Garonne, Andrée Fourcassié, née Giraud, was my unassuming guide to the misty timescape of the past, opening doors I should never otherwise have known existed; Chantal Fraïsse welcomed me to the Archives Municipales of Moissac; Joseph and Paulette Gouzi offered hospitality, shared memories and lent precious unpublished documentation; Jean-Claude Simon made available photographs of the Maison de Moissac rescue operation; and Françoise Blanchard, née de Monbrison, unlocked the rich resource of her family’s published and unpublished records of the occupation.
In Paris, Naomi Wilson shared her research for a PhD thesis on women’s experience of the occupation. In Gironde, Christian Chabrier, Jacques de La Bardonnie, Cathérine and Robert Hestin and many other neighbours and friends dug into their personal memories; Trudi Higgins supplied correspondence from Ste-Foy-la-Grande; Maj. Len Chaganis unearthed material on Operation Cockade; and the wife of dying hero Henri Salmide (formerly Heinz Stahlschmidt) put aside her grief to talk to me. In Lot-et-Garonne, Guy de La Bardonnie generously shared both published and unpublished resources. In Charentes, Philippe Delaurain gave me the benefit of his encyclopaedic knowledge of the occupation, as well as access to his unsubsidised museum Le Musée de la Poche, which told so well the story of the Royan pocket of resistance until it had to close for lack of funds. And fellow BBC-pensioners Don Craven and Brian Johnson helped me track down the Morse Vee-sign used for so many broadcasts to Occupied Europe.
With good reason, historical writers thank the spouses or partners who tolerate the solitude imposed by their craft and their spending more time with the dead than the living. For a person as sociable as Atarah, this is doubly hard; her enthusiasm and active support is more valued than she imagines. Among my predecessors on the research trail, American historian Robert Paxton deserves acclaim for first shining the light of enquiry on the dark years at a time when nobody in France wanted to talk about them. On a professional plane, my thanks go to agent Mandy Little for getting the first edition published and to commissioning editor Mark Beynon, editor Rebecca Newton, proofreader Alwyn Harrison and designer Jemma Cox at The History Press for this edition.
AUTHOR NOTE
1. All translations are by the author, unless otherwise attributed.
2. All reasonable steps have been taken to clear copyright material. If any copyright has been inadvertently infringed, please write to the author, care of the publisher.
3. All photographs are from the author’s personal collection, unless otherwise stated.
CONTENTS
Title
Quote
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part 1
Defeat and Occupation
1 From Sitzkrieg to Blitzkrieg
2 Pétain Quells the Panic
3 An End to the Killing
4 ‘Trust the German Soldier!’
5 Behold the Man!
6 The Lie that was True
7 The Number of the Beast
Part 2
Life, Love and Loot under Pétain’s New Order
8 Clearing up the Mess
9 Of Cheese, Plays and Books
10 Of Bread and Circuses
11 Courage of a Quiet Kind
12 Culture and Crops
13 Saving the Children
14 The Women’s Ordeal
15 ‘We have Learned of the Scenes of Horror …’
16 The Protests Gather Strength
Part 3
1944 – The Beginning of the End
17 Soap and Sabotage
18 Casualties in the Great Game
19 Happy New Year!
20 Dancing in the Dark
Part 4
The Price of Liberation
21 Atrocities on Both Sides
22 Murderous Midsummer
23 ‘Hell is the Other People’
24 A Carpet of Women’s Hair
25 Death of a Town
26 After the War was Over …
Further Reading in English
By the Same Author
Plates
Copyright
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
BCRA
Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (eventual title of the London-based co-ordinating centre of Gaullist intelligence networks)
BEF
British Expeditionary Force
CGQJ
Commissariat Générale aux Questions Juives – main body charged with enforcing anti-Semitic laws
CNR
Conseil National de la Résistance
EIF
Eclaireurs Israélites de France – the Jewish Scout movement
ERR
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg – Nazi cultural agency
FFI
Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur – Free French forces inside France
FTP
Francs-Tireurs et Partisans – left-wing Resistance movement
GFP
Geheime Feldpolizei – German Military Police
GP
Groupe de Protection – Pétain’s bodyguard
LVF
Légion des Volontaires Français contre le bolchevisme – French volunteers fighting in German uniform on the eastern front
MSR
Mouvement Social Revolutionnaire – a fascist movement
OKW
Oberkommandantur der Wehrmacht – German Army High Command
PCF
Parti Communiste Français – French Communist Party
PPF
Parti Populaire Français – Doriot’s extreme pro-German party
PQJ
Police aux Questions Juives – special anti-Jewish police force
RG
Renseignements Généraux – French equivalent of Special Branch
RHSA
Reichshauptsicherheitsampt – Himmler’s umbrella organisation running the SS and SD
RMVE
Régiment de Marche de Volontaires Etrangers – temporary Foreign Legion regiment of volunteers in 1940
RNP
Rassemblement National Populaire - Déat’s extreme right-wing party
SD
Sicherheitsdienst – Amt VI of RHSA co
vering external security
SNCF
Société des Chemins de Fer Français – French state railway system
SOL
Service d’Ordre Légionnaire – forerunner of the Milice
SPAC
Service de Police Anti-Communiste – anti-Communist police units
STO
Service de Travail Obligatoire – organisation of compulsory labour in the Reich
UGIF
Union Générale des Israélites de France – umbrella organisation by which the Germans organised the fate of the Jewish community
INTRODUCTION
The seed of this book was sown at a diplomatic reception in Bordeaux by an elderly Englishman, who confided to me out of earshot of the French guests that he first saw the city through the bombsight of an RAF Lancaster during the Second World War. When I asked whether he had been targeting the immense bomb-proof shelters, constructed by the Todt Organisation for the long-range German submarines that wrought havoc among the Atlantic convoys, he laughed: ‘With all that Jerry flak coming up at us, all I cared about was dropping my load and getting back home in time for breakfast.’
Since befriending a French assistant from Normandy while at school in Canterbury, I had known that RAF strategic bombing raids killed thousands of innocent French civilians during the war and destroyed entire towns, but it was not until after meeting the bomb-aimer that this book took shape as an account of the occupation of France, not as seen from London and Washington, but as lived by the French people.
President John Francis Kennedy observed that the great enemy of the truth is very often ‘not the lie ... but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic’. Due to the way the media were used for propaganda purposes in wartime, two contradictory myths became the accepted bases for the history of the occupation. In France, people said that Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had fought ‘to the last drop of French blood’ before running away in 1940. Conversely, standing alone against German-dominated Europe, Britain fortified itself with the counter-myth that the French army had cracked and run because our erstwhile allies lacked moral fibre.
‘It would never happen here,’ people boasted, forgetting how Britain’s cleverest and most privileged sons voted by 275 to 153 at the Oxford Union in 1933 that ‘this House would not fight for King and Country’. So it could well have ‘happened here’, but for the 20 miles of water between a largely unprepared Britain and her abandoned Continental allies.
Similarly, it is easy to pretend that the British would never have collaborated if conquered, yet London in the 1930s saw street fighting between fascists and communists and window-smashing of Jewish-owned shops. Long into the Second World War many Britons of all social strata were both anti-Semitic and either supported Hitler or wanted an accommodation with him.
On screen and in print, the German occupation of France is polarised as a period when the French people united against its alien occupiers and a handful of traitors working for them. The truth is that about 1 per cent of the population was actively pro-German and about the same proportion was committed to resistance before 1944. Finding work, food and heating, tilling one’s fields or running a business, or simply trying to keep a family together, were so time-consuming in that era of shortages, fear and repression that most French people could do little about the occupation except take François Mauriac’s advice: ‘Have eyes that see nothing.’
The largest single organised faction of the essentially urban resistance was the French Communist Party (PCF). Yet, controlled from Moscow by the Comintern, it hampered the French war effort for the first twenty months of the war in line with the non-aggression pact signed between USSR and Germany in August 1939 as a prelude to the two signatories carving up Poland. Similarly, in Britain the communist Daily Worker was banned for its defeatist stance.
When Hitler ignored the pact and invaded USSR in June 1941, the PCF leadership was instructed by Moscow to launch a campaign of assassination of German personnel and thereby provoke retaliation by the execution of hostages. On 13 August, two communist activists hacked a German soldier to death with bayonet and chopper. Eight days later, 22-year-old Pierre Georges, who styled himself ‘Colonel Fabien’, gunned down an inoffensive Kriegsmarine sub-lieutenant in a Metro station on his way to work at a naval clothing store.
A deadly cycle of assassination and reprisal was launched. This had nothing to do with French interests. Moscow’s aim was to tie down in a restive France many thousands of German troops who could otherwise have been sent to the eastern front. The Comintern always played a long game, and the second aim of its strategy was to divide and confuse the French people, leading to a power vacuum at the end of the war, in which the tightly-disciplined PCF could take over the government by political means or armed uprising.
The Maquis was altogether different, being initially composed of autonomous bands of young Frenchmen who took to the hills and forests to escape conscription for labour service in Germany. As a neighbour of mine recalled, ‘What could we do when young men with guns knocked on the door at night, demanding clothes and food against handwritten receipts they said would be redeemed by General de Gaulle after the Liberation?’
Despite lengthy negotiations and extensive bribery by de Gaulle’s emissary Jean Moulin, charged with uniting the mutually hostile factions of the Resistance into one integrated command structure, internecine conflict between the various political groups continued. Only after the Liberation were the myths of concerted heroic resistance to the invader invented to unify a divided nation.
Charles de Gaulle has rightly become the symbol of resistance to the German occupation of his country, but when it began he was just a substantive colonel, stranded with a handful of companions in a country whose language he did not speak very well and whose policies he often rightly mistrusted. To most of his compatriots, he was a runaway correctly condemned in absentia by a court martial to a traitor’s death.
Thousands of French servicemen in Britain after Dunkirk rejected de Gaulle’s appeal and chose to return home even when this lay in the Occupied Zone. Their legitimate head of state, Marshal Philippe Pétain, was a First World War hero and a popular and respected political figure of the inter-war years. Many of his original policies were laudable, if naïve – and yet the cruelty of his regime has become legendary. ‘I hate lies,’ he said just after the Armistice to a population disillusioned with its leaders. ‘I think of those who are suffering, of those who do not know where tomorrow’s food is to come from, of the children who will not hear this year the church bell of their own village.’
How could the man who said that go on to cause the death of so many of his citizens, including men who had lost their sight and limbs to win the same medals that decorated his own uniform? The marshal was old and too tired to stay on course when manipulated by more devious colleagues. Yet what perverted his policies above all else was the absolute power with which his fellow-politicians voted to invest him. When the National Assembly killed the Third Republic at Vichy, making Pétain a dictator, one solitary voice cried out, ‘Vive la République, quand même!’
Politics makes strange bedfellows, but no pair more disparate than Pétain and Philippe Laval have been harnessed together by its exigencies. Prime Minister Laval seems to epitomise the schemer avid for power who cares not whence it comes. A socialist deputy and lawyer who made his reputation successfully defending left-wing activists against the interests of the 200 families said to own France, he avoided military service 1914–18 and slipped around the semi-circular Chamber of Deputies to sit with the Conservatives, causing one enemy to comment that such a 180-degree turn was to be expected from a man whose name read the same from left or right. The energy with which Laval promoted the worst excesses of the Vichy regime earned him death by firing squad. Few mourned his passing, yet he argued to the last that he had acted throughout the occupation as a pacifist and patriot.
The term ‘collaborator’ came after th
e Liberation to mean a particular form of treason exemplified by Pétain and Laval. If French citizens, actively pro-German from political conviction, anti-Semitism, or because they thought Hitler was bound to win the war, were definitely collabos, what of the companies that made vast profits from the occupation and the great wine chateaux who slaked the German thirst for claret, burgundy and champagne? In Paris and other big cities, luxury commerce thrived and huge, untaxed fortunes were made on the black market while the aged and poor suffered hypothermia and malnutrition, yet many profiteers bought protection from one Resistance group or another and were never accused of any crime.
It was undoubtedly collaboration of the most shameful kind when uniformed Paris policemen rounded up 12,884 people in the summer of 1942 – including 4,051 children who were brutally separated from their mothers and left terrified in a huge sports stadium with no food, water or usable toilets – as a prelude to being herded into cattle trucks, destination Auschwitz. But did Louis Renault, who avoided a probable death sentence after the Liberation by dying from injuries sustained in prison while awaiting trial, have any choice about making vehicles for the Wehrmacht? The alternative was to see his factories dismantled and his workmen sent to Germany.
Lower down the social scale, if the only work available in coastal villages of the Occupied Zone was labouring on the Atlantic Wall, why should a man with a wife and children to feed have refused it, even had he been given the choice? In the Free Zone, if the only job a woman could find was as a shorthand-typist or telephone switchboard operator in a Vichy government department, did that make her a collaborator? And what about all the men who wore the many uniforms of Pétain’s regime in the police, gendarmerie, the Army of the Armistice and as miliciens?