by Douglas Boyd
François Papon succeeded in the civil service until 1981, when evidence linked him with Jewish deportations from the Gironde département. Accused in January 1983, he displayed scant respect for the court or his judges and exploited his poor health to delay hearings. Sentenced to ten years in prison for his role in sending 1,560 Jews of all ages to their deaths, he was released after three years thanks to a specially introduced law of March 2002 permitting liberation of prisoners whose health was endangered by incarceration. Of nearly thirty prisoners over 80 years of age in French prisons, Papon was the second to be released. On 25 July 2002, the European Court of Human Rights declared his trial to be ‘inequitable’.
Philippe Pétain returned voluntarily to France in April 1945, by then partially incontinent and not truly lucid. He was sentenced to death on 15 August for high treason and aiding the enemy, but de Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Transferred to a military prison on the island of Yeu, Pétain survived to die aged 95 in 1951.
Dr Marcel Petiot was identified and arrested at a Paris Metro station on 31 October 1944. He defended himself vigorously to the examining magistrate, claiming to be the head of fictitious Resistance network ‘Fly-Tox’, but no résistant had ever heard of him. His story of having provided false medical certificates for STO evaders likewise rang false when he could not name a single man helped in this way.
The mystery of the burning bodies in the rue Lesueur was unravelled when it was discovered that Petiot had been arrested on 23 May and spent the eight missing months in Fresnes prison for allegedly helping people escape from France – which posed the question why he had not come forward at the Liberation to claim his reward as a patriot. Petiot’s military discharge papers of 1918 recorded signs of mental disturbance, which had not prevented him from qualifying as a doctor. So popular was his first practice at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne in Burgundy that he had been elected mayor in 1927 – until dismissed for petty theft and shoplifting, and suspected of drug trafficking. After that, he fled to the anonymity of Paris, opening his consulting room near the Opéra in 1933.
Police investigations connected numerous missing persons with Petiot. When more than forty suitcases filled with men’s and women’s clothing were found at the home of a friend of his, the truth at last came out. Telling Jews threatened with deportation to come to the apartment in rue Lesueur with only their most precious possessions, he gave them a lethal injection under the pretence that it was a sedative – and banked the proceeds. Charged initially with twenty-seven murders, of which he admitted nineteen, he eventually confessed to having killed sixty-three people in this way and was found guilty on 132 of 135 indictments. Sentenced to death, he called across the courtroom to his wife, ‘Avenge me!’ He was guillotined on 25 May 1946.6
Louis Petitjean was arrested by his colleagues in February 1944 for helping refugees and escaping Allied aircrew and other Resistance activities. He was unable to obtain his release until May 1945, even though the superior officer who had him arrested was himself sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour after the Liberation. Reinstated in the RG, Petitjean lost fifteen months’ seniority and pension rights for the time spent in jail.7
Police-Gestapo co-operation, according to an interview Knochen gave to Historia magazine in 1972, was crucial after the Wehrmacht’s refusal to round up Jews because the task would otherwise have been impossible. Around 30,000 police worked directly for the German security organisations: in Marseille, 1,000 French supported a German staff of fifty; in St-Étienne there were 344 French for only ten Germans.
Pierre Pucheu was displaced by Laval’s return to power in April 1942 and slipped through Spain to North Africa, hoping to change sides. Arrested in Casablanca on 11 August 1943, he was condemned to death by a military court and shot near Algiers on 20 March 1944.
Louis Renault surrendered himself in ill health to a judge on 23 September 1944 and was jailed at Fresnes. Beaten up during the night of 4 October by communist detainees, he died in hospital on 24 October 1944 from head injuries. In 1945 de Gaulle nationalised the Renault company. Not until 1967 were the family shareholders compensated. In contrast, the company Sainrapt et Brice was permitted to keep as legitimate earnings profits of 360 million francs from construction contracts for the Wehrmacht.8
Heinz Röthke, who had declared that even a baby born in Drancy must be gassed in Auschwitz because it was a ‘future terrorist’, died peacefully in 1968 in Wolfsburg, where he had a legal practice.
SS Division Das Reich: Of the hangings in Tulle, in which they participated, SS officer Wulf and Sargeant Hoff had ‘no recollection’ at their trial in July 1951. Sentenced to ten years and life respectively, they were freed the following year. Lieutenantt Schmald, who had made the selection of those to hang, was shot by the Maquis in August 1944, muttering, ‘Ich hatte Befehl’ (‘I was ordered to do it’).9
The killers of Oradour were tried – some of them – by the Haut Tribunal Permanent des Forces Armées sitting in Bordeaux from 13 January to 12 March 1953. Strangely, General Lammerding was not extradited to give evidence, although known to be practising as a civil engineer in the British Zone of Germany. Forty-three men were condemned to death in absentia, most of them having been killed during the subsequent fighting in Normandy. In the dock were seven Germans and fourteen Alsatians – one volunteer and thirteen conscripts. Whether for political reasons – Alsace had been German in 1944 but was part of France in 1953 – or for diplomatic reasons with the Cold War at its height, or because of a need to cover up the alleged Maquis atrocities, the sentences were not exemplary. The senior German accused was sentenced to death; four others were given forced labour of ten to twelve years; one was acquitted. The Alsatian volunteer was also sentenced to death; nine of the conscripts were given five to twelve years’ hard labour; the other four received five to eight years’ hard labour.
In the Limousin, the sentences were considered outrageously inadequate, yet in Alsace there was public indignation that the malgré-nous conscripts should be sentenced at all for obeying German orders, no matter what they had done. Since the accused had spent eight years in custody, the Alsatian conscripts were released immediately, as the judges had known would be the case when passing sentence. All the Germans, except the man sentenced to death, were liberated a few months later. The two death sentences were commuted and both men were released in 1959.
Pierre Seel survived Natzwiller and tried unsuccessfully to live down the stigma of being a ‘notorious homsexual’ by leading an outwardly normal married life. But his past caught up with him, he was rejected by his family and eventually ‘came out’ by writing his memoirs.
Heinz Stahlschmidt was given French nationality and lived in Bordeaux under the name Henri Salmide. He married his fiancée Henriette, but had to wait fifty years for the city to thank him. On 20 May 1994 Mayor Jacques Chaban-Delmas awarded him the Bordeaux medal. Six years later, his heroism was officially acknowledged by the nation when President Jaques Chirac invested him with the Légion d’Honneur on 14 July 2000. Stahlschmidt/Salmide died during the writing of this book, in June 2006.
Paul Touvier, head of the Lyon Milice, went undercover in 1944 after releasing a few prisoners and making deals with the Resistance, hoping to be left in peace to spend the money he had amassed through extortion. Sheltered on religious premises and with false papers, he enjoyed contact with his family and was married in church, fathering two children by his second wife.
Condemned to death in his absence at Chambéry on 10 September 1946 for complicity in the murders of Hélène and Victor Basch and seven Jews machine-gunned at Rillieux, Touvier was arrested after participating in several armed hold-ups in Paris the following year. In an attempt to save his own skin, he betrayed other members of his gang of former collabos. Sentenced to die by firing squad at Lyon, he ‘escaped’ en route and was sheltered by another succession of priests and religious houses, even living in his home town of Chambéry under an assumed name for some time.
&
nbsp; After the 1967 Statute of Limitations annulled Touvier’s sentences, he tried, with help from Church dignitaries, to regain his civil rights in order to inherit property and was pardoned by President Pompidou in 1971. An article in L’Express and legislation regarding crimes against humanity caused him to go underground once again in convents and monasteries where he was visited by his wife and children. The perseverance of gendarme Jean-Louis Recordon finally tracked Touvier down to the priory of St-François in Nice, where he was arrested on 24 May 1989 after the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchainé made it impossible for the government not to arrest him. Thanks to an able defence by a Catholic barrister, the first case was withdrawn, but Touvier was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment at the Yvelines Assizes Court in 1994. He died in Fresnes prison aged 81 and was honoured with a Requiem Mass, at which the eulogy praised a ‘sensitive and delicate soul … whom God would pardon as earthly Justice had not’.10
Xavier Vallat was tried in 1947 for his conduct as General Commissioner of Jewish Questions and his part in drafting the Second Statute of the Jews. Unrepentant, he accused prosecutor Kriegel-Valrimont of being racially disqualified to appear in a French court. Sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, Vallat was released from prison with ‘national indignity’ two years later. He then became a passionate Zionist in the belief that the existence of a Jewish state was the way to rid France of Jews permanently.
Otto Von Stülpnagel committed suicide while awaiting trial in Paris Cherche-Midi prison on 6 February 1948.
P.G. Wodehouse was released from German detention before his 60th birthday and allowed to live in Berlin in return for making several indiscrete, but not treacherous, broadcasts over Nazi English-language radio. Sent back to France in September 1943 to avoid the Allied bombing of the German capital, he was briefly imprisoned after the Liberation, returned to his US home and was knighted in 1975, a few weeks before his death, aged 93.
NOTES
1. Amouroux La Vie, Vol. 1, pp. 134–9.
2. Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich, p. 206.
3. Interview with Mittre in Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich, p. 217.
4. Obituary notice in The Guardian, 3 December 2005.
5. Quoted on www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WW laval.
6. Thornton, The Liberation of Paris, pp. 63–8.
7. Undated newspaper cutting loaned by Françoise de Monbrison.
8. Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich, p. 149.
9. Nossiter, France and the Nazis, pp. 272–3.
10. For further details, see http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Touvier.
FURTHER READING
IN ENGLISH
Bacque, J., Just Raoul (Toronto: Stoddart, 1990)
Berthon, S., Allies at War (New York: Caroll and Graf, 2001)
Burrin, P., Living with Defeat (London: Arnold/Hodder, 1996)
Pryce-Jones, D., Paris in the Third Reich (London: Collins, 1981)
Kedward, H.R., Resistance in Vichy France (Oxford: OUP, 1978)
Kramer, R., Flames in the Field (London: Michael Joseph, 1995)
Marshall, R., All the King’s Men (London: Collins, 1988)
May, E.R., Strange Victory (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000)
Nicholas, L.H., The Rape of Europa (London: Macmillan, 1994)
Nossiter, A., The Algeria Hotel (London: Methuen, 2001)
Nossiter, A., France and the Nazis (London: Methuen, 2001)
Paris, E., Unhealed Wounds (New York: Grove Press, 1985)
Paxton, R.O., Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940–44 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001)
Pechanski, D., Collaboration and Resistance (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000)
Seel, P., I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual (London: Basic Books, 1995)
Webster, P., Pétain’s Crime (London: Pan, 2001)
West, N., Secret War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1992)
PLATES
Few French people had heard of Colonel Charles de Gaulle (right) until he appealed for resistance to the German occupation over the BBC on 18 June 1940.
Marshal Philippe Pétain (above) was the legitimate President of France. He mistrusted his devious Prime Minister Pierre Laval (seen with him, left).
What does a hero look like? Farmer Louis de la Bardonnie (left) heard de Gaulle’s broadcast and responded, risking his life and those of his wife Denyse and their nine children (below). (Reproduced by permission of Jacques de La Bardonnie)
While he was on the run with false papers under various identities, she had to file for divorce to protect herself and the children from deportation to the death camps. (Reproduced by permission of Jacques de La Bardonnie)
After the Liberation, de Gaulle came to honour the Bardonnie family (left), but the only thanks they received from Britain for all the risks was this printed certificate below bearing Field Marshal Montgomery’s signature. (Reproduced by permission of Jacques de La Bardonnie)
Ordinary people did extraordinary things. Mayor’s secretary Marius Bouchou (right in naval reservist’s uniform) made false ID papers and accepted an RAF arms drop. Betrayed by a friend, he was deported to Germany and died of starvation and ill treatment. (Reproduced by permission of Cathérine and Robert Hestin)
Bouchou’s widow (front row right in the group above) returned from Ravensbruck concentration camp broken in health and spirit, unable to smile even at her daughter’s wedding. (Reproduced by permission of Cathérine and Robert Hestin)
Their journey to hell began at the Gestapo HQ in Castillon-la-Bataille, where torture drove some to suicide.
Hidden by a man who never returned home to reveal their hiding place, the airdropped weapons were found by accident in 1998.
Collaboration took many forms. Joseph Darnand (left) directed the murderous activities of the Milice and escaped at the Liberation with Vatican help.
French police chief René Bousquet (facing camera, right) took his orders directly from SS-Brigadeführer Karl Oberg (back to camera, right).
Victor Faynsylber (right) lost a leg fighting for France. He sent this photograph to Marshal Pétain, pleading for his wife to be exempted from deportation, but they and their children were murdered at Auschwitz.
On 16 July 1941 Paris police rounded up 12,884 men, women and children (below) for the SS to kill in Auschwitz.
De Gaulle’s political representative in France was Jean Moulin (left), who was tortured to death by Klaus Barbie (right).
Moulin’s military counterpart was General Delestraint (left), who was shot in Dachau after using his real name in a hotel register. Renée de Monbrison (right) spent four anguished years keeping her children out of Barbie’s clutches. (Bottom-right image reproduced by permission of Françoise de Monbrison-Blanchard)
German heroes? Yes! Kriegsmarine Feldwebel Heinz Stahlschmidt (above left) proved his love for his French girlfriend by saving 3,000 lives in Bordeaux. General Von Choltitz (above right) defied Hitler’s order to destroy Paris, through which German troops had been parading daily for four whole years (below).
Shatta Simon (with her son above, left) saved the lives of several hundred children after the town council gave her a house for them in Moissac (above, right). (Top-left image reproduced by permission of Jean-Claude Simon)
Prefect François Martin (left) broke the law by giving them genuine ID cards.
Many of the children had lost all their relatives. They came from hiding or concentration camps to live as Scouts and Guides in Moissac with camp-fire singsongs, school classes and music lessons (below) – a normal life in abnormal times. (Reproduced by permission of Jean-Claude Simon)
After Maj Helmut Kämpfe (above, left) was assassinated by maquisards in June 1944 his friend Maj Adolf Diekmann (above, right) unleashed the men of SS Regiment Das Reich on the civilian population of Oradour-sur-Glane. They destroyed the entire town (below).
The SS burned 197 men alive. After herding 240 women and 205 children, including infants, into the church (above),
they set fire to it too.
Bullet holes in the walls show they continued firing through the windows until everyone was dead.
At the concentration camp of Natzwiller/Struthof in Alsace (above), starving prisoners were worked to death in the quarry.
Camp commandant Josef Kramer hanged prisoners on his gallows (right) during roll calls that lasted hours in all weather. He was given a Christmas bonus for watching women prisoners die in his improvised gas chamber (above).
The Atlantic coast resort of Royan (above in its heyday in the first decade of the twentieth century) was in a pocket of German resistance. On 5 January 1945 the RAF was ordered to destroy the town ‘occupied by German troops only’.
The result (above) killed 284 female and 158 male French civilians – and just thirty-seven Germans because their positions were not in the town. Hundreds were wounded.
Most of the work containing the pocket was done by men like these three maquisards (below) with their parachuted Stens. German forces in the pocket included these Sikhs (above, right), who had changed sides when captured in the Western Desert. They held on until Berlin capitulated on 8 May 1945. The exhaustion of this surrendering Wehrmacht soldier (above, left) tells all.