by Douglas Boyd
Photostat of the Royan bombing mission telex.
On Friday 5 January 1945 six Pathfinder Mosquitoes and 217 fully laden Lancasters, plus a Lancaster as airborne command post, took off from aerodromes in Britain, headed for Royan. Between 3.50 a.m. and 4 a.m., the first bombs dropped on the town, and not on the military fortifications outside. A second wave of Lancasters appeared at 5.30 a.m. and dropped their cargoes onto the flaming debris below, causing high casualties among civilians who had emerged from shelters to rescue the first victims. A total of 1,576 tonnes of high explosive and 13 tons of incendiaries destroyed the town centre. Trapped in the burning debris were the bodies of 284 female and 158 male civilians – and thirty-seven Germans.5 The exact number of French civilian wounded was never agreed. The declared number of dead was also modified, as body parts were recovered during reconstruction up to five years later. The cost of all this destruction with hardly any damage to the 249 blockhouses in the Royan pocket was seven aircraft shot down by German flak crews.
Allied embarrassment resulted in alibis ranging from poor visibility over the target confusing the marker aircraft to an accusation that the French casualties must have been collabos and deserved what they got. As to the first alibi, the town was clearly visible by the bomb-aimers during the raid, due to the marker flares and parachute flares. Even more embarrassingly, the navigator’s maps found in shot-down Lancasters had aiming points exclusively in the town area,6 as indicated by the mission teletype. As to the second, many people remaining in Royan at this late date – after hundreds of civilians had been allowed to leave, to reduce the numbers the German had to feed – were refugees living there under false identities or with no papers at all, and of whom there were no records. It was little consolation that anyone could now obtain papers claiming to have been born in Royan, since all the état civil registers had been destroyed.
Historian Peter Krause avers that General Royce’s adjutant in Vittel asked de Larminat in Cognac to give the go-ahead the previous evening, after the ‘target for tonight’ had been decided once meteorological conditions over the Continent were known. The telephone line being out of action, the adjutant’s signal was encoded and sent by radio, received at de Larminat’s HQ at 7.50 p.m. on 4 January. Because staff were at dinner, the signal was not decoded until 12.40 a.m. There was a further delay until 5.30 a.m., when it was translated and finally handed to de Larminat at 8 a.m., by which time Royan was a smoking pile of rubble.
Apart from a truce between 9 and 18 January, during which the Red Cross supervised the evacuation of the wounded and all remaining civilians in the town, the tragedy did nothing to stop the fighting on the ground. The status of FFI men taken prisoner, at first judged terrorists under the Armistice of June 1940 by their captors, was only resolved after de Larminat threatened to shoot ten German prisoners for every FFI fighter executed after capture. At first the Germans refused, but then agreed that all FFI forces taken prisoner would be treated as POWs, on the grounds that the Armistice had been vitiated by their own invasion of the Free Zone in November 1942.7
On 14 April 1945 – the day after the raid on Dresden – a second huge bomber fleet took off from UK bases: 1,200 B-17 Flying Fortresses headed down the Atlantic coast of France and dropped 7,000 tonnes of bombs, generously distributed throughout the Royan pocket. De Larminat’s men cowering in their shelters on the landward side of the minefields reckoned there were more ‘amis’ above the pocket than Germans in it. This was followed up twenty-four hours later by a final US raid, in which three-quarters of a million litres of napalm were dropped in the first use of this new weapon on French soil. Photographs taken afterwards of the town centre of Royan, which had rivalled Biarritz for elegance before the war, resembled those of Ground Zero at Hiroshima – an unbroken wasteland where only a few twisted metal girders poked above the smoking mounds of rubble to show where major buildings had stood.
It is hard to arrive at total casualty figures for the Royan pocket, but in the assault on the Pointe de Grave pocket across the mouth of the Gironde between 14 and 20 April French losses were approximately 400 dead and 1,000 wounded, with 600 dead, eighty missing and 3,230 taken prisoner on the German side. All this was to restore national pride, because the German capitulation was signed just over two weeks later.8
NOTES
1. D. Lormier, La Poche de la Rochelle (Saintes : Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 2003), p. 29.
2. Some sources say 20 October.
3. Thornton, The Liberation of Paris, p. 122.
4. D. Lormier, La Poche de Royan (Saintes : Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 2002), p. 21.
5. Some sources give forty-six German dead.
6. P. Lelaurain, Le Musée de la Poche de Royan (Le Gâ: Vauclin, 1996), p. 19.
7. For more detail, see Lormier, La Poche de Royan.
8. For a comprehensive account of the situation in Le Havre and other northern towns, see D. Boyd, Normandy in the Time of Darkness (Hersham: Ian Allan, 2013).
26
AFTER THE WAR
WAS OVER …
Otto Abetz was sentenced by a French court to twenty years’ imprisonment in 1949, but released in 1954. He died in a car accident in May 1958.
Ernst Achenbach successfully practised law in Germany post-war. Retained by IG Farben and claiming amnesty for alleged war criminals, he would have probably represented his country at the European Commission, but for evidence of his wartime activities assembled by German lawyer Beata Klarsfeld.
Klaus Barbie was employed post-war by US Intelligence and allowed to escape to Bolivia under the name of Klaus Altmann. In 1971 a Munich court ruled it impossible to prove he knew what happened to his deported victims. After an attempt to kidnap him failed, persistent campaigning by the Klarsfelds resulted in his extradition to France in 1983 to go on trial for crimes against humanity. During the 1987 trial Barbie showed no emotion, even when confronted with witnesses he had sadistically tortured over long periods, and whose relatives he had killed to make them talk. Condemned in July 1987 to life imprisonment, he died of cancer on 25 September 1991.
Paul Baudouin left politics in 1941 to work for La Banque d’Indochine. Condemned in March 1945 to five years’ hard labour for his role in the Armistice, he was released in January 1948 to return to his banking activities.
Karl Bömelburg left France with Pétain in 1945 and disappeared completely.
Pierre Bonny’s bolt-hole betrayed by his rival Joseph Joanovici, he was condemned and shot at Montrouge on 27 December 1944.
René Bousquet was tried in 1949. Scores of high functionaries and dignitaries including bishops and archbishops testified to his pre-war civic record and his non-collaborationist attitude during the occupation. Even the president of the Jewish community of Châlons, who had spent the war in Switzerland, said he had ‘heard nothing against’ Bousquet, while admitting that all the Jews left in Châlons had been deported, of whom only one survived. Acquitted, his Légion d’Honneur returned to him, Bousquet flourished as adviser and later secretary general of the Banque d’Indochine, also serving as director of UTA airline and standing unsuccessfully as an anti-Gaullist candidate for the Marne département.
In 1977 French lawyer Serge Klarsfeld published documents proving Bousquet’s active participation in the genocide of French and foreign Jews. Accused of crimes against humanity, 84-year-old Bousquet was assassinated by a mentally unstable writer on 8 June 1993 just before the scheduled start of the trial. Whether this was coincidence or conspiracy is unproven, but the death did prevent a trial in which he might have said embarrassing things.
Francis Bout de l’An was never prosecuted and died of natural causes at his home in Italy in 1977.
Aloïs Brunner was rescued by the Vatican ratline and given asylum in Damascus, protected by Syrian security services until ‘outed’ by the Klarsfelds in 1982. French demands for his extradition in 1989 were refused, but Brunner was condemned in his absence to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity on 2 March 2001
.
Lazare Cabrero was charged with murdering Grumbach with intent to rob. His defence was corroborated by Madame Courdil, who said that a French colonel, conveniently deceased, ordered the passeurs to kill refugees who could not keep up, in case they were found by the patrols and forced to divulge details of the escape network. On 29 May 1953 Cabrero was acquitted.1
Collaborators executed without trial during L’Épuration – the purge after the Liberation – were conservatively numbered at 105,000 between the Liberation of Paris and February 1945 by Adrien Tixier, a post-war Minister of Justice.2 Some 300,000 other persons were accused of various crimes, of which 124,613 received prison sentences and 6,763 were sentenced to death by military tribunals. Approximately the same number was condemned in civil courts, 767 being executed. Fifty thousand others were stripped of civic rights, but most of the tens of thousands of civil servants dismissed or suspended for collaboration were eventually reinstated and recovered their pension rights.
Theo Danneker hanged himself in prison in 1945.
Joseph Darnand enlisted the rump of the Milice at Sigmaringen in the SS Division Charlemagne, escaped to Italy with the help of priests, but was extradited and shot on 10 October 1945.
Louis Darquier de Pellepoix lived undisturbed in Spain despite a death sentence imposed by a French court in his absence. He disclaimed all responsibility for the rafle du Vel d’Hiv, accusing Bousquet of having made all the arrangements, yet famously announced during an interview with L’Express in 1978 that ‘at Auschwitz, only fleas were gassed’. He died on 29 August 1980.
Marcel Déat escaped from Sigmaringen into Italy with his wife, helped by priests. After spending two years in Genoa awaiting his turn on the Vatican ratline to South America, he moved to Turin in 1947 and died there on 5 January 1955.
Fernand de Brinon claimed he had acted to prevent a repeat of the slaughter he had witnessed on battlefields during the First World War. At Sigmaringen, Darnand, Déat and Luchaire wanted to go down fighting with the SS Charlemagne Division, but de Brinon fled. Learning of Pétain’s trial while staying at Innsbruck, he decided to return to France, saying, ‘They will shoot me, but at least I should like the chance to explain myself.’3 Arrested in Bavaria, he was condemned and shot on 15 April 1947.
Alphonse de Châteaubriant left Sigmaringen for Austria in 1945 and lived there under the alias of Dr Alfred Wolf. Condemned to death in his absence on 25 October 1945, he died of natural causes in a Tyrolean monastery in 1951.
Roger Delthil was first reinstated as mayor of Moissac and a senator after the Liberation, but in the in-fighting between the parties post-Liberation was then divested of his public functions a second time for being one of the senators who voted full powers to Marshal Pétain at the Casino in Vichy.
Jacques Doriot died when his car was strafed by Allied aircraft in Germany on 22 February 1945.
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle went into hiding at the Liberation and committed suicide in Paris on 15 March 1945.
The Drancy guards got off lightly. Ten were accused, two disappearing while on bail before trial, together with their commanding officer. Despite harrowing evidence of maltreatment of old and sick detainees, five gendarmes who had stolen prisoners’ meagre rations, maltreated the sick, run the black market and escorted deportations were reintegrated into the force. Two men sentenced to two years’ imprisonment were released after one year.
Marie-Rose Dupont waited twelve months after the shame of being exhibited to the crowd in Moissac before her hair was fully regrown. She was still corresponding with Willi, but never mentioned her public humiliation to him. Leaving Moissac, she found work in a hairdressing salon at Nice. When a male colleague fell in love with her, she told him about Willi and accepted his decision to tear up all her letters and photographs, saying, ‘We’ll pull the curtain on the past. It’s all over and done with.’
After setting up home in Moissac – she to re-open her salon and he as travelling rep. for a hair-products company – it seemed that everyone had forgotten the shearing, until the day she came into the salon and found her 8-year-old son sitting in one of the chairs with a pair of clippers in his hand, totally bald. She never spoke of her humiliation in September 1944 again until interviewed by the author in January 2006.
Rodolphe Faytout was sentenced to hard labour for life, but pardoned by President Coty and released in the fifties. Forbidden to return to his home in Gironde, he nevertheless did so and kept a low profile for the rest of his life, treated with disdain but never attacked by his surviving victims or the relatives of those whose deaths he had caused.
Lucienne Goldfarb was rewarded for her role as police informer by protection that continued after the Liberation during the years when she ran a highly lucrative brothel known as ‘10-bis’ on rue Débarcadère in the XVII arrondissement of Paris – during which time her professional name was Katia la Rouquine (Red-haired Katie). She sprang to fame again at the age of 74 – half a century after the deaths of Manouchian and his twenty-one comrades. Her friend Christine Deviers-Joncour, ex-mistress of Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, gave her 1 million francs in November 1997 ‘to look after my mother and children’ because Deviers-Joncourt expected to be sent to prison for her part in the petroleum bribes scandal that caused Dumas’ fall from power.
Georges Guingouin was elected mayor of Limoges by its grateful population in 1945, the PCF leadership having done everything possible to undermine his election campaign. Labelled a Titoist deviant, he was expelled from the party in 1952 and thus deprived of its political protection. In the aftermath of the 1953 amnesty for collaboration crimes, many counter-accusations were levelled at former résistants. Guingouin was among those arrested for alleged assassination of collaborators during the Liberation. He survived a murder attempt in prison before being released in June 1954. Not until 1998 did PCF leader Robert Hué publicly apologise for the harassment of this renegade communist. Asked for his reaction, Guingouin replied, ‘I’ve reached the age of serenity. It’s a problem for the Party and no longer concerns me.’4
Dr Josef Hirt, the collector of Jewish skulls from the Natzwiller gas chamber, is thought to have committed suicide in the Black Forest on 2 June 1945.
Helmut Knochen was sentenced to death by a British court in Germany during June 1946 for a massacre of Allied aircrew. Extradited to France, he received a second death sentence, also commuted to life imprisonment. After serving seventeen years, he was released in 1962, returned to work as an insurance agent in Offenbach, married a second time and retired in Baden-Baden to die there on 4 April 2003.
Charles Krameisen was at first disbelieved, until the bodies began to emerge from the wells at Guerry. Accorded French citizenship in recognition of his suffering, Krameisen may have spent time in an insane asylum, but his grandson communicated with the author in February 2014 to say that he led a normal life afterwards.
Joseph Kramer was condemned and hanged by a British court at Hassel on 13 December 1945.
Inspector Henri Lafont was, like Bonny, betrayed by Joanovici and shot at Montrouge on 27 December 1944.
General Heinz Lammerding was never brought to trial, despite abandoning an alias to live as a civil engineer under his true name in Düsseldorf. He died on 13 January 1971 at Bad Tölz, Bavaria.
Pierre Laval cabled the Spanish government on 17 April 1945: ‘It is neither the statesman nor the friend who is asking your help, but simply the man. I ask you in my own name, as well as in that of my wife and my faithful friend Maurice Gabolde, for permission to enter Spain and await better days. Today it is a tired and worn-out old man who is writing to you, and in memory of our long friendship, I thank you in advance.’5 Returning from Spain to give evidence at Pétain’s trial, he was tried by a court that refused to hear his defence. He was shot in Fresnes prison on 15 October 1945.
Joseph Lécussan and other miliciens involved at St-Amand-Montrond were shot in 1946.
Jean Leguay, the key planner of the rafle of July 1942, pursued a
successful post-war career with the perfumery company Nina Ricci in the US and later in France. He was never prosecuted before his retirement in 1975, but subsequently became the first collabo to be indicted for crimes against humanity, dying on 3 July 1989 before being brought to trial.
Jean Mayol de Lupé, the aging chaplain of the LVF, was arrested by the Americans in March 1945 and condemned by a French court on 14 May 1947 to fifteen years’ imprisonment and confiscation of his property. Released in May 1951, he retired to Lupé and died there in June 1956.
Bernard Ménétrel, Pétain’s doctor, was imprisoned in Fresnes on his return to France in May 1945, but released for health reasons in 1946 and died accidentally the following year.
Karl Oberg was condemned to death in Germany, but returned to France for a second trial with Knochen in October 1954. His death sentence in 1954 was commuted to twenty years’ imprisonment. In 1965, he was granted a presidential pardon and returned to Germany, where he died the same year.