Voices from the Dark Years

by Douglas Boyd

  On 6 July four captured women SOE agents – Andrée Borrel, Sonja Olschanezky, Vera Leigh and Diana Rowden – were transferred from Karlsruhe prison to Natzwiller. As Nacht und Nebel prisoners, they were to be killed without trace. That evening they were individually taken to the sick bay, told to undress and, told they were being innoculated for typhus, given an injection of phenol by SS Untersturmfrer Dr Werner Röhde or his assistant. Their bodies were immediately thrown into the four-body camp crematorium by Hauptscharführer Peter Schraub. At least one of the women recovered consciousness sufficiently to scar Schraub’s face with her fingernails before being forced in alive and the door slammed after her.9

  Georges Mandel served as député in the National Assembly (1919–24 and 1928–40, holding posts in four successive governments 1934–36) and as Minister of Colonies from April 1938 to May 1940. Equally opposed to policies of the Left and the pro-German Far Right between the wars, he was also briefly Interior Minister in Reynaud’s short-lived cabinet. Refusing the Armistice, he sailed from Bordeaux aboard the Massilia to continue the fight from North Africa. Arrested by Vichy officials on disembarking in Morocco and returned to France, he was handed over to the Germans in November 1942. After a stay at the concentration camps of Oranienburg and Buchenwald, he was returned to Paris on 4 July 1944, to be kept as a hostage in the Santé prison. While being ‘transferred to another place of detention’ on the night of 7–8 July, in a joint operation the SD and Darnand’s Milice gunned down Mandel in the forest of Fontainebleau, claiming it was the work of résistants in revenge for Henriot’s killing.

  On 9 July 12th SS Panzer Division was driven out of Caen by Canadian 3rd Division pushing in from the west and British 1st Division from the north. What remained of the ancient capital of Normandy was a bombed and shelled wasteland but 200km to the east in peaceful Villers-Adam, Madame Robert’s landlady was selling off the surplus fruit and vegetables from her garden to hungry and thirsty German soldiers passing through eastbound, who grew fewer in number until the only ones left were technicians dismantling the underground V1 factory.10

  In Paris, between 28 July and 2 August, police recorded finding nine bodies shot and left in the streets bearing a card stating, ‘this man shot a German soldier. For this, he has himself been shot.’ Many others had been removed and buried before the police got there.11 Streets near major German installations were covered by a blizzard of ashes as every paper that could not be removed was incinerated. In working-class districts schoolboys and students were hacking down the lime trees that lined the boulevards and using pickaxes to prise up the cobblestones, piling them into makeshift barricades, ineffectual against tanks.

  Anxious to remove from Toulouse twenty children she had hidden in a technical school, Shatta Simon asked 20-year-old Henri Milstein to organise a summer camp for them and other children in remote countryside on the Black Mountain, where the Foreign Legion now does its training. Milstein’s campers eventually numbered 200 children with false papers; however, tragedy gave them a near miss when a Maquis unit ambushed a German patrol nearby, killing four soldiers but allowing one to get away and lead the revenge squad back. Milstein was returning from buying vegetables on a bicycle towing a small trailer when he ran into one of the road blocks. His identity card had been borrowed from an old classmate in Moissac, so the photograph did not resemble him. Even worse, he was using a pre-war military map to find his way around the countryside. For four hours he meditated over his likely fate until a French-speaking officer arrived to interrogate him.

  The first question, ‘Why all this food in your trailer?’, was reasonable enough. It could have been destined for the Maquis group who had killed the soldiers.

  The second was, ‘Why do you have a military map in your pocket?’

  Luckily for Milstein, it seems the officer had been a Scout himself before the movement was banned in Germany after 1933. Initially sceptical of a Scout camp in the middle of a manhunt, he eventually accepted Milstein’s word that he had 200 hungry young mouths awaiting dinner and waved him on his way without even querying the ID card. Not long after the narrow escape on the Black Mountain, Milstein was stopped at a Milice ID check in Toulouse railway station. With no chance of playing the Scout card there, he recalled that the tailor in Moissac whom his sister had married had a client who was a police commissioner in Toulouse. Blurting out that he was visiting the client to take measurements for a new suit, his mind went blank when asked for the commissioner’s name, which he had only heard by chance. In the nick of time it came to him and the papers were thrust back with the ultimate benediction: ‘You can go.’

  It was for most French people another grim 14 July. Women queuing halfway round the block for bread in Paris whispered about the criminal-law prisoners in the Santé prison who had mutinied because they were at risk of being shot as hostages, setting fire to their cell blocks in the night. At dawn, miliciens from Lycée Louis-le-Grand had crushed the mutiny by summarily shooting twenty-eight prisoners against the prison wall. In Nîmes, gendarmes refused to form a firing squad to execute résistants arrested by the Milice. Themselves placed under arrest and imprisoned in Marseille, they were set free a few days before the town was liberated.

  After Hitler was nearly killed on 22 July by a bomb planted in a top-level briefing at Rastenburg, anti-Nazi Wehrmacht officers in Paris locked up in Fresnes prison all their SS, SD and Gestapo colleagues, including Gen Oberg and Knochen. When news came through that the Führer was only slightly wounded, Abetz tried to smooth things out by ostentatiously pouring champagne for all in the Hôtel Continental on rue Castiglione and pretended for public consumption that the entire event had been some kind of military exercise.12 Although the French press carried news of the attempt on Hitler’s life next morning, there was no coverage of the arrests in Paris, nor of Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel being ordered to return to Berlin, charged with high treason. On the battlefield of Verdun, he ordered his driver to stop the car and tried to blow out his brains with his service pistol. Managing only to blind himself, he was taken to hospital to recover and stand trial, the suicide attempt being covered up in Pariser Zeitung by a fictitious report that he had been attacked by Maquis ‘terrorists’. Von Stülpnagel was among the conspirators who died slowly on 30 August, strangled to death in Berlin-Plötzensee.

  With the war now unwinnable for Germany, the strategically useless Luftwaffe was ordered to bomb villages in the sparsely populated Vercors area of eastern France, destroying several of them in reprisal for Maquis activity. Approximately 30,000 ground troops then cordoned off the area where 3,500 maquisards found themselves in the ultimate nightmare of a pitched battle against vastly superior numbers of trained and regular forces with air superiority. After the landing of 200 glider-borne paras in the heartland of the Maquis, men who had thought the Allies would reach them within days now realised that their only safety lay in flight by night to avoid the daylight strafing. By 23 July the Maquis of Vercors was a spent shadow.

  In the defeat of 1940 the French army had abandoned casualties to be cared for by the Wehrmacht, but there was no such recourse now, when they would be shot as terrorists. Gradually compressed into a smaller and smaller area, surgeon-captains Ferrier and Ganimède had forty volunteer stretcher-bearers carry the worst cases over difficult terrain into a cave whose entrance was hidden in scrub. After days of hiding, it was decided that the walking wounded should attempt a breakout with a small escort of medical attendants. More days of waiting followed for those left behind, the noises of battle coming from all directions as their comrades were hunted down. Medical supplies were few, food was running out and the only liquid was moisture seeping through the roof of the cave.

  In the afternoon of 27 July bullets sprayed the Red Cross flag at the entrance. Three German prisoners released as spokesmen explained that they had been correctly treated during their captivity and that there were women and wounded in the cave. It was a waste of breath. Eighteen wounded were immediately shot lyi
ng on their stretchers, and twelve more killed the next day. Ferrier and a civilian doctor were taken to Grenoble and shot with the chaplain Yves Moreau. Six female nurses were deported. Only Ganimède managed to escape after being interrogated by the Gestapo.13

  In Paris, Édith Piaf was now earning 20,000 francs for just one appearance – a white collar worker’s annual salary – of which little remained at the end of each week. The little woman in a black dress who had begin by singing to theatre queues and the patrons of terrace cafés, turning tricks on occasion, spent her earnings like water on husbands, lovers, fellow artists, song-writers and a host of hangers-on. On 22 July she was due to sing at the prestige classical music venue La Salle Pleyel, but got stage fright when shown the concert platform, large enough for a full symphony orchestra. Conquering her nerves, she went on to give the performance of her life.

  For the mass of Parisians, life was somewhat more gloomy. Between 27 July and 30 August, such was the disruption of the food supplies that butter was rationed at 80g per person and milk tankers coming into the capital had LAIT painted on the roofs in the hope that they would not be attacked by Allied aircraft. The press hinted that women and children should leave before things got worse, but there could be no mass exodus as there had been in 1940 because few people had private transport and the only trains were controlled by the Germans.14 On 28 July Laval scurried to Abetz insisting that Je Suis Partout be banned after critic Alain Laubreaux wrote, ‘Napoleon said of Talleyrand, his foreign secretary, that he was shit in a silk stocking. Now we have only the silk stocking.’

  On 31 July, Aloïs Brunner’s last mass deportation from Drancy included 300-plus children taken from orphanages run by UGIF and 115 wives of French POWs held in Germany, most of whom survived incarceration at Bergen-Belsen. On 1 August, what remained of the artworks in the Jeu de Paume were packed in 148 cases, loaded into five freight cars, whose numbers were noted by the indefatigable Rose Valland and passed to SNCF résistants. They, in turn, made sure the cars were shunted hither and thither in the Paris suburbs until overtaken by Leclerc’s advance units. With no further justification for staying in Paris, the art looters were scrabbling for priority jobs back home, to avoid being given forty-eight hours’ notice to report to the Russian front.15 Ordered to leave Vichy and take refuge east of the Rhine, Pétain refused. On 6 August he wrote to Laval:

  On separate occasions I have discussed with you reports of the Milice’s actions in the hope that improvement would result. I must stress the deplorable effect on the population, which might understand arrests carried out by the Germans themselves but can never condone the fact of Frenchmen delivering their own compatriots to the Gestapo and working in collaboration with them.

  When shown the letter, Darnand – to whom the marshal should have addressed it – replied to Pétain:

  In the course of these four years, I have received compliments and congratulations from you. You encouraged me. And today, because the Americans stand at the gates of Paris, you start to tell me that I shall be a blot on the history of France? It is something that might have been thought of earlier.16

  On 9 August, with British and Canadian forces launching a new offensive south of Caen, Laval reached Paris in the evening. At his trial, he protested three priorities on that day: ensuring the capital’s food supply in his capacity as one of the mayors of greater Paris; persuading the Germans to neither defend nor destroy the city; and the restoration of parliamentary democracy by calling a National Assembly. Édouard Herriot, 72-year-old former president of the Chamber of Deputies, was confined as a hostage in a nursing home, due to poor health. Laval negotiated his release on 12 August, hoping that he would head a new government, but Herriot asserted that under the Third Republic constitution only Jules Jeanneney, former President of the Senate, could call a national assembly. Jeanneney, however, was in Grenoble. Herriot’s subsequent re-arrest by the Gestapo infuriated Abetz and Laval, who tried to persuade Herriot to flee with him to Switzerland, only to receive the reply, ‘Switzerland is too expensive, and I have no money!’ Had it not been tragic, it would have been comical. Herriot understated the situation when he called it ‘infinitely confused’ as he was driven away by the Gestapo to a secure sanatorium near Potsdam.17

  From this moment, there was no doubt about the eventual fate of the self-made millionaire-politician from Auvergne, but Laval went down fighting. He summoned the eighty other mayors of Greater Paris and persuaded them all to sign a pledge of support for him as president of their collective and as head of the government.18 Also in Paris was Darlan’s deputy Admiral Auphan, entrusted by Pétain with one of the most useless pieces of paper ever signed by a head of state: his authority to invest his executive powers in ‘a college of notables’, should he be unable to exercise them. Finding such a group at this time being impossible, Auphan handed the paper to de Gaulle after the Liberation, who regarded it as null and void.

  On 11 August 1944, in what should have been the ultimate insanity, Klaus Barbie packed 650 prisoners into his last deportation train to leave Lyon’s Gare Perrache. With the rail network disrupted by strategic bombing and Resistance sabotage, the nightmare of the transportation was to last even longer than for previous shipments. The filthy cattle trucks become stinking ovens in the summer heat as the train was repeatedly rerouted and shunted into sidings while priority traffic was allowed to pass. The journey was made even longer by a diversion to off-load the résistants at Natzwiller camp, the Jewish prisoners being bound for a destination further east. On 10 August all the communist-organised railway workers had been called out on strike. Two days later, all civilian rail communications between Paris and the outside world were cut, the unions demanding a pay increase, better food distribution and the release of their comrades arrested by the Milice. Despite a feeble bleat about their ‘selfish attitude’ from Vichy, the strike was maintained.19

  On 13 August, with Allied armoured spearheads only hours away from Drancy, Aloïs Brunner assembled his last victims for deportation. At this stage in the retreat, collective insanity is the only reason that can be advanced for him being allocated a locomotive and forty-eight freight wagons from a railway system in severe crisis, where priority should have gone to evacuating German wounded and moving vital military resources. Unimpressed by Brunner’s SS uniform or his mania for killing Jews at such a time, a sane Wehrmacht colonel requisitioned the train at gunpoint for his men and equipment, leaving Brunner stranded – an action that saved 1,416 of the 1,467 prisoners.

  In Paris that day the Resistance learned that the Germans had commenced disarming French police in St-Denis, St-Ouen and Asnières. ‘Colonel’ Rol, the PCF Resistance boss and de Gaulle’s Paris representative Alexandre Parodi jointly instructed senior police officers to bring their men out on strike, to cease maintaining order for the enemy, and to stop arresting résistants. On no account were they to allow themselves to be disarmed. Police who did not obey the instruction were to be considered ‘traitors and collaborators’.20

  NOTES

  1. Thornton, The Liberation of Paris, p. 111.

  2. Bédarida, Les Catholiques dans la Guerre, p. 113.

  3. Boulet, ‘Histoire de Moissac’, p. 152.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Full report by A. Feytis, ‘Fusillée dans sa Robe de Mariée’ in Sud Ouest, 30 September 2004, pp. 1–11.

  6. Quoted by L. Chabrun et al., L’Express, 10 October 2005.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Amouroux La Vie, Vol. 1, pp. 357–62.

  9. See A. Kemp, The Secret Hunters (London: Coronet, 1988), pp. 776–8 and R. Kramer, Flames in the Field (London: Michael Joseph, 1995), pp. 115–27 and plates. See also documentation at Natzwiller.

  10. D’Anvers, Baboushka Remembers, pp. 234–5.

  11. Thornton, The Liberation of Paris, p. 127.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Amouroux, La Vie, Vol. 2, pp. 82–4.

  14. Thornton, The Liberation of Paris, p. 118.

  15. Nicholas, The Rape of Euro
pa, p. 292.

  16. Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich, p. 187.

  17. He was liberated there by Russian troops in April 1945.

  18. Laval, Unpublished Diary, facsimile copy in Appendix VI.

  19. Thornton, The Liberation of Paris, pp. 132–3.

  20. Ibid., pp. 134–5.

  23

  ‘HELL IS THE

  OTHER PEOPLE’

  On the night of 14 August 1944 a fleet of 396 Dakotas took off from Italian airfields to drop 5,000 US paratroops over southern France. In the second stage of Operation Anvil, after a violent naval and air bombardment of the German defences, 25,000 French metropolitan, French colonial and US soldiers landed between Toulon and Cannes after dawn from an invasion fleet of 2,000 transports and landing craft escorted by some 300 warships. On the same day, the Police Nationale went on strike to ingratiate itself with the increasingly active FFI. In Toulon and Fréjus gendarmes were told to go home and stay there until the fighting was over; in Hyères most of their colleagues lay low on their own initiative until the conflict had passed through. In many places FFI fighters occupied police and gendarmerie stations manu militari, refusing to hand them back.1