Voices from the Dark Years

by Douglas Boyd

  On 17 November the Franco-Polish Interallié resistance network was rolled up by the SD. Among those arrested was Mathilde Carré – a petite, pretty, well-dressed, green-eyed law graduate of the Sorbonne, who began the war as a nursing aide for the French Red Cross while in the process of divorcing her reservist officer husband. Confessing in her memoirs, written during the twelve years she would spend in British and French prisons during and after the war, that she had been driven by ‘the animal pleasure of the body which my soul disdains’,16 she was called at her trial ‘a dangerous nymphomaniac’. Her accuser was Polish undercover agent Roman Czerniawski, who had no complaints about the months she had spent as his mistress, working for Interallié. Mathilde’s denial that she also slept with other comrades was countered at the trial by one witness offering to tell the court where on her body she had a beauty spot, ‘except that she doesn’t have one anywhere, and that is the truth’.

  Mathilde was dubbed La Chatte – the She-Cat – by her unfortunate comrades and became known by the even more cuddly nickname das kleine Kätzchen, meaning Little Kitten, to the Abwehr officers for whom she worked after being ‘turned’ by an unassuming Scharführer in the GFP named Hugo Bleicher, who perfectly merited the description of a ‘grey man’. Of average height and build with prematurely greying hair, he passed unnoticed when in civilian clothes, the only distinguishing feature his thick spectacles that hid the pale, unsmiling eyes in his impassive face. When, after the war, he ran a small tobacconist’s shop near Lake Constance, not far from the Swiss border of the Federal Republic, no one guessed that the man behind the counter wearing a beige cardigan and peacefully smoking his pipe had put behind bars more Allied agents than any other Abwehr officer in France – and been so respected by them for his humane and intelligent methods of questioning that he was even invited to the wedding of his two most famous captives, Odette and Peter Churchill.

  No stranger to imprisonment himself, Bleicher had been a POW of the British during the First World War, after which he was employed as a bank clerk and later an import-export businessman in Morocco. Able to speak fluent, slightly accented French and English, he never rose beyond NCO rank, despite often being referred to as ‘Colonel Henri’.

  Mathilde epitomised the women so feared by British Intelligence, who would let their feelings or desires override political loyalty at the drop of a garment. After one night in a freezing cell at La Santé prison, she was installed in Bleicher’s comfortable quarters and had no qualms about opting for comfort. Asked by the judge at her trial whether she was compelled to go to bed with him that first night, she replied, ‘What else could I have done?’ Swiftly convinced by Bleicher that Britain’s eventual defeat was only a matter of time, she had no wish to be shot in La Santé. Asked her feelings for the men and women she had delivered to imprisonment, torture and, in thirty-five cases, death, she replied, ‘There was nothing I could do about it.’17

  One of her victims was army officer Pierre d’Harcourt. In 1942 he was living near the Porte d’Orléans. Recruited by a personal friend, he was told to hand over his information to a contact from another network who was in radio communication with London. The woman he met in a restaurant was Mathilde Carré. Unaware that he was being watched from that first rendezvous, d’Harcourt continued passing information after she handed him on to ‘Felix’, an Austrian who claimed to be working for the German electrical giant Siemens. Walking home from a rendezvous with this new contact, d’Harcourt was accosted by two men in black suits, one of whom thrust a pistol into his back, while the other told him in poor French that he was under arrest. Making a dash for it, d’Harcourt was shot and wounded, to find himself confronted in captivity by the very people he had thought Resistance agents, next stop Buchenwald.

  Another victim of La Chatte was Christopher Burney, a young French-speaking English officer who arrived in France in May 1942 to contact an RF network that London did not know had already rolled up by Bleicher and Mathilde. Living on his wits, Burney managed to evade capture for eleven weeks before being picked up in a casual check of papers. Thrown into a sparsely furnished cell in the rue des Saussaies, expecting to be summarily shot, he was instead beaten up with his hands cuffed behind him and shuttled back and forth in black vans between Fresnes prison and various interrogations.

  Still miraculously alive, either because of his military rank or value as a hostage, he was eventually transported early in 1944 to Germany in the company of thirty-one male agents and four women. The women were shot in Ravensbruck and the men hanged in Buchenwald shortly before the war in Europe ended, with the exception of the few like Burney who managed to escape after nearly two years of starvation and ill treatment.

  Mathilde’s defence in court rested entirely on her claim that a woman did not have the same choices as a man. That her inevitable death sentence handed down by a French court in 1949 was commuted and she was released is due to the lateness of her trial. By then, everyone in France had had enough of the war. Five years later, Mathilde – now a rather dumpy little woman approaching her 40th birthday – disappeared. Whether because an old enemy had caught up with her at last, or she changed her identity so that none of them could, remains a mystery.

  After the departure on 19 November 1941 of the 100,000th French volunteer from Paris Gare du Nord to Germany, one might think Goering would be all smiles on meeting Marshal Pétain a week later at St-Florentin. Yet, blocking all the marshal’s requests, Goering shouted, ‘Tell me, Marshal. Who won this war? You or us?’ Visibly shaken by this gross discourtesy, Pétain replied with a quiet sarcasm that escaped Fat Hermann, ‘I had not previously been quite so aware how badly we had been beaten.’

  More or less at the same moment, 1st Battalion of the LVF was taking its first four casualties under fire 60km from Moscow. Doriot, who was present, later described the fighting in a frozen birch forest:

  The thermometer showed minus 10 degrees C in the morning, but it was down to minus 37 by dusk, and minus 41 the following day. Men don’t function at those temperatures. Hands are too numb and joints all stiff. In the front line, the ground is as hard as stone and you can’t dig in. Automatic weapons become unreliable.

  Another LVF man described the problem of urinating at those temperatures: ‘Each guy has to have a mate holding his gloves, because by the time he’s finished pissing, his hands are too frozen to put them on for himself.’

  On 1 December in Paris Ernst Jünger was depressed after censoring some last messages written by executed hostages. If death came as a mercy to the mutilated bodies of convicted résistants after long torture, many hostages selected at random were still hoping right up to the last moment that they would live. Shot by soldiers wearing the same uniform as Jünger, they had written to wives and sweethearts and children and parents, spelling out their small cares to avoid mentioning the main thing on their mind. A hairdresser wrote:

  Come to Vannes to collect my suitcase. Alfred must look after my bicycle because when he is old enough to work, it will belong to him. As to the clippers and scissors, do what you like with them. Be good to each other.

  Another man’s postscript read:

  Ask the Kommandantur to release my body so that you can bury it at home.18 I die innocent. Remember me.

  Jacques Grinbaum, aged 21, having been selected as one of fifty-three hostages from Drancy to be shot with forty-two others at dawn on 15 December at Mont Valérien, wrote to his parents and sisters aged 12 and 14 a letter that reads like a school essay. As his last night drew on towards dawn, he added:

  P.S. It is 3.15 a.m. I am calm, very calm, waiting.

  P.P.S. It is 5.40 a.m. Still holding up. I have made my confession. I love you Daddy, Mummy, Jacqueline and Yvette. Please keep my things which you can get from the Kommandantur and the Red Cross. Courage. Good luck!19

  That month, safe in their literary bubble, the August members of the Prix Goncourt jury deliberated, as was their custom, come war or peace, after a good lunch in the Drouaut restaura
nt. Outside, on the streets of Paris the pace of attacks on German servicemen and French policemen accelerated, with civilians also killed and wounded by stray bullets and grenade fragments. As the assassination campaign brought forward the shoot-on-sight curfew to 6 p.m., large bilingual posters announcing death sentences in red print with black borders were everywhere to be seen. The four weeks to Christmas included attacks on French and German police on traffic duty, grenades thrown into a Wehrmacht canteen, a bomb in a café frequented by off-duty soldiers, sentries attacked with revolver and grenade, a Wehrmacht medical officer wounded on the Boulevard Magenta, a lieutenant wounded on Boulevard Péreire, a major twice wounded in the rue de la Seine and various attacks on collaborationists. In default of the culprits, on one day alone – 15 December – ninety hostages were shot at Mont Valérien and another twenty-five in the provinces.

  The last consolation for some after 7 December, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the US declared war against Nazi Germany the next day, was that the course of the war in Europe was altered inexorably. Thinking ahead to when they might need them as a bargaining counter, on 12 December 200 Gestapo and 360 Feldgendarmerie arrested 743 French Jewish VIPs and scooped up another 300 from Drancy, transporting them to the German-controlled concentration camp at Compiègne.

  Danneker had brought two Viennese Jews to Paris to set up a French Judenrat, or Jewish council, that would organise the elimination of French Jewry on the same pattern that was working so well in Eastern Europe. Entitled L’Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF), its first task was to amass a fine imposed on the whole community of 1 trillion francs for the murder of German soldiers. In his note to Abetz dated 7 December, Danneker considered this entirely logical because the men had been killed by preponderantly Jewish communists. UGIF was henceforward to regroup all the existing agencies and be the sole channel through which Jews could communicate with those who wished to destroy them. Approving Danneker’s use of anti-Semitic Parisian police inspectors to hunt down Jews in the capital, Pucheu now created a force specialising in this work – La Police aux Questions Juives (PQJ).

  The mass of the gentile population had more immediate problems than concerning themselves with these measures. Reporting a protest demonstration at Frozes near Grenoble on the night of 16 December, Gendarmerie Captain Piozin reported: ‘Milk supplies in the area are so irregular that the population is getting violent. Only children under six get even a part of their allocation. The demonstration was broken up by the Gendarmerie.’

  In Corsica, bakers were reportedly selling bread at 30 francs a kilo – way above the legal price – and peasants were routinely slaughtering undeclared pigs to sell the meat on the black market.20

  In Moissac, Dr Moles’ recipe for combating black marketeers was to set up a municipal market where vegetables had to be sold at the official prices – and a subsidised canteen where the poor and homeless could find at least one decent meal a day. In the following month he went a step further and created a municipal depot where everyone could buy milk for their children. When whole truckloads of black market produce were occasionally stopped at routine checkpoints, the offenders were prosecuted, with prison terms likely. The grey market, however, was widely patronised by poorly paid gendarmes, who bought direct from peasant producers what they could not find in the shops, and usually turned a blind eye to others in the same situation.

  One of the trades enjoying business-as-usual throughout the occupation was ladies’ hairdressing. Women careful of their appearance forewent food, if necessary, to have their hair done professionally. The parents of Marie-Rose Dupont21 were church-going peasants with a small property not far from Moissac who prospered in the grey market boom. But life had been so hard for them before the war that when Marie-Rose was only 14 her mother, desperate to be rid of a mouth to feed, tried to engage her to a well-off older man. For the first time in her life, Marie-Rose refused to obey her parents. Since the alternative to marriage was to earn her own living, she started work as a hairdressing apprentice and two years later, in 1936, opened her own salon in Moissac. A hasty marriage to a work-shy alcoholic husband, who sold off all her possessions, left her divorced with a 12-month-old son in 1939.

  After the defeat in June 1940, she was relieved to find that the regular customers still had their hair done regularly. Even refugee women seemed able to find money for this. Apart from the problem of procuring shampoos and dyes, which were in very short supply, life had never been better for Marie-Rose. The problems of being a single working parent were alleviated by her parents’ help looking after her son in the daytime and she was able to spend all her Sundays with him. All the family was pro-Pétain, so when the marshal came to Moissac and addressed a full house in the local cinema Marie-Rose heard him repeat the phrase, ‘J’ai fait à la France le don de ma personne’, and felt like weeping. Around her, many people did shed tears. This was the Messianic side of Pétain.

  Although the salon was prospering, the country was in mourning – for the defeat, for the hundreds of thousands of POWs languishing in Germany, for its own self-esteem – and public gaiety was frowned upon, especially dances. Since they could not be organised publicly, les bals clandestins took place, organised by word of mouth. Friends whispered of a rendezvous in a house with a room large enough for a dozen or so couples to dance to the music of a portable wind-up gramophone and, for an hour or two, the war was forgotten in the arms of one’s partner.

  Marie-Rose was not just good looking, but extremely beautiful, immaculately made-up and coiffed. As owner of her own salon, she could always swap a free permanent wave or hair-do for an article of clothing, so she was also well dressed. But she turned down all propositions for more than just a few dances. Given the total non-availability of contraception, casual sex was out of the question and she was certain that she never again wanted to be tied to a husband. For a single mother from a peasant home, she had good reason to feel pleased with her life – and no thought of what the future might hold. Why should she, when the only interference from Vichy was the visit of a gendarme on 27 March 1942, bringing her a harmless extract from the Journal Officiel obliging her and all other salon proprietors to collect hair clippings for mixture with rayon fibres in a specialised factory in Calvados producing up to 40,000 pairs of slippers a month?

  It was not only hairdressing that was paid in kind. Dr Paulette Gouzi recalled treating adults and children from the colonie and elsewhere who came to her door with bronchitis, stomach ailments, worms – but no money: ‘Many people were very poor. It was normal for us to treat them and not be paid. But a few days later they would return with some eggs perhaps, or a rabbit they had snared – or even a chicken.’

  In both zones, food was replacing money in the parallel economy. The prefect of Tarn-et-Garonne expressed concern at the growing rift between the poor town-dwelling consumer and the peasant producer, who was thriving in this time of universal shortages. So much so, that on 13 July 1942 he signed a decree requiring the gendarmerie to force producers to take their vegetables to open markets where prices were controlled. Like most such legislation, this was more honoured in the breach than the observance. Another area of social conflict which worried him was the growing xenophobia, directed not at the Italians who had arrived at the beginning of the century, but the Spanish refugees – especially those who did not work but lived off handouts from the Mexican legation, and therefore had both the money and the time to go hunting for extra food.

  Yet, in the big cities some still ate very well. Widely criticised after the Liberation was the extravagant way top French executives wined and dined their German clients in the best restaurants when they came to France, and accepting reciprocal hospitality when in Germany. By the end of 1941, 7,000 companies were accepting and fulfilling German orders for both civilian and military products. It was a figure that would double before the end of the occupation, when virtually all firms with fifty or more employees and many smaller companies were working 10
0 per cent for the Reich. In around fifty major companies, German commissioners were appointed to intervene directly in management decisions.

  What was the alternative? French industry was in a German vice. Since the occupation, German administration controlled the allocation of raw materials; any firm that refused their orders would have been obliged to lay off its workforce. Not only did working for the occupiers mean business, German contracts also made for a truce between management and labour, since the single-union representatives could literally see on which side their bread was buttered: the occupation authorities released extra food for factory canteens where the workers were behaving the way they wanted. A full stomach being a powerful argument, the initial reluctance of management and labour to deal with the only client in the market dwindled rapidly. Commercial giants like Paribas, Rhône-Poulenc, Ugine, Crédit Lyonnais, Société Générale and many others were, according to historian Annie Lacroix-Riz, more than eager to do business with the Reich.22

  A few refused to compromise. At the top of the scale, the enormous Michelin company had both the advantage of being based in the Free Zone and the clout to keep the invader at arm’s length. When Germany offered to release supplies of artificial Buna rubber to replace unavailable supplies of natural rubber from Indo-China in return for shares in the company and its subsidiaries in Belgium and other Axis-occupied countries, Michelin found a thousand ways to wriggle out of such a deal because its board foresaw the impossibility of a final German victory, whatever the next few years might bring. The price for such resistance was often harsh: when the president of Crédit Commercial de France refused to hand over 440,000 shares in Galeries Lafayette formerly owned by a Jewish shareholder, he was fired.