by Lynne Olson
Ordering choucroute for themselves, the Germans asked the waiter to bring a sausage in a bun for Rodriguez. It was his first taste of meat since the ham sandwiches he’d been served at the RAF base at Tangmere before he and Faye flew back to France in 1943. As he ate the sausage and sipped from a small glass of beer, he couldn’t help but think how surreal this experience was—sharing lunch with a Gestapo officer in a Berlin beer hall just a couple of days after he fully expected to die.
Once the meal was finished, his handcuffs were put back on and the three returned to the station. When their train arrived, they sat in a compartment occupied by three German civilians—an old man and two women—who stared at Rodriguez and his handcuffs but, to his surprise, not in a hostile way. Several hours later, one of the women offered Rodriguez part of a sandwich she was eating. He declined, but she insisted and he finally gave in. Then she handed him pieces of an apple—the first fruit he’d had since his arrest. Through it all, he thought of Faye and Vernon and how every revolution of the train’s wheels was taking him farther away from them.
Late that night, the train stopped at what looked like a deserted station. Rodriguez and his keepers were the only passengers to get off. About half an hour later, another train approached. When it screeched to a stop, the Gestapo officer removed Rodriguez’s handcuffs and turned him over to a tall, angular man in civilian clothes, who escorted him aboard. The train, it turned out, was a Swiss Red Cross convoy for British prisoners of war who were to be traded for wounded German POWs.
His escort, who was in charge of the convoy, took him to a compartment filled with uniformed British soldiers. A hush fell over the car when they saw the cadaverous Rodriguez in his shabby civilian clothes. After about ten minutes, he broke the silence, saying, “So, you’re all prisoners of war?” One of them nodded: “We come from different POW camps in Germany.” “Well then, I’m like you,” Rodriguez responded, “only in plain clothes.”
That was the extent of the conversation. He wanted to tell his countrymen what it was like to have been in the French resistance, to describe, for example, the extraordinary experience of transmitting military secrets to London from a beet field in the Corrèze. But after so many years of secrecy, he couldn’t bring himself to do so. An enormous gulf existed between him and them, and he doubted it could ever be bridged.
After traveling only a short distance, the train came to a stop. The leader of the convoy came back to tell Rodriguez they would proceed no farther that night. The convoy had made the brief journey from the last station, the leader said, because “we thought you would prefer to be on the right side of the border.” Leaning closer, he added, “We are in Switzerland.”
Before those on the train settled down for the night, they were warmly greeted by a bevy of Red Cross workers, who offered them white bread and hot tea. One of the workers gave Rodriguez a thick beige wool sweater and warm pants to replace the grime-caked clothing he was wearing. When he stammered his thanks, the man replied that he was sorry the clothes were not new. Rodriguez wanted to tell him that he had never received a more generous gift. “Life was worth living, after all,” he later wrote about the man’s kindness. “The physical warmth from the sweater matched the warmth I felt in my heart, which just a few days earlier had despaired about my fellow men.”
The next day, the train proceeded on. At every stop, the passengers were greeted by Red Cross volunteers, who gave them tea, bread, chocolate, and other sweets. When the train finally arrived in Geneva, Rodriguez was met by the military attaché of the British embassy, who told him the details of his exchange.
Faye had been right. On the orders of SS head Heinrich Himmler, Faye, Rodriguez, and Vernon were among a handful of captured Allied intelligence agents who had been held as hostages for a possible exchange. Rodriguez’s status as a Briton and MI6 agent had helped his case. Pressured hard by Kenneth Cohen, Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6, had ordered his agency to do everything in its power to save him. After months of negotiations involving MI6 and the Foreign Office, the Germans had agreed to swap him for Berthold Schulze-Holthus, an Abwehr spy who had been caught by the British in Persia.
After thanking the attaché for his help, Rodriguez asked him to send a telegram to the War Office urging it to take immediate steps to arrange similar exchanges for Faye and Vernon. The officer agreed to do so but cautioned that the chance of more exchanges was extremely slim. He also told Rodriguez that he was not to return to Paris right away but was to be sent directly back to Britain. Accompanied by a British colonel, he was to take a train to Marseille, then board a hospital ship for home.
For Rodriguez, a delayed return to the real world seemed heaven-sent. Overwhelmed by what had happened to him over the past few days, not to mention the previous seventeen months, he needed a period of quiet to come to terms with all of it. He had been alone for so long that he was having trouble adjusting to having other people around him. Retaining his devotion to his daily prayers, he now recited them in his mind rather than saying them out loud: “I could not abandon what had constituted my only consolation for so many weeks and months.”
On the hospital ship, he was kept in bed for the first day. A tall man, he weighed only 116 pounds. During a physical exam, the doctor noted that when he pressed Rodriguez’s abdomen, he could feel his backbone. Twice daily, he was given a cocktail of chocolate, glucose, and eggs to fatten him up, a concoction he loved so much that he kept drinking it long after he left the ship.
Despite his emaciation, Rodriguez was judged healthy enough to be allowed out of bed for the rest of the voyage. He spent most of his time outdoors, walking on the ship’s bridge and savoring the chill wind in his face. “It was the antithesis of life in a prison cell, and it made me drunk with happiness,” he observed. “For me, paradise was the present.”
He was always by himself. He spoke to no one, not even at meals, and when someone approached him, he fled, avoiding any presence that might distract him from his constant thoughts of Faye and Vernon in Sonnenburg. He wondered if the bureaucratic machinery was already in motion and if they would be saved in time.
After five days at sea, the ship reached the English coast on February 2. A final physical exam revealed that Rodriguez had gained more than ten pounds during the voyage. When he arrived at Victoria Station in London, Kenneth Cohen’s female assistant, whom he knew well, was waiting for him. They fell into each other’s arms. He was welcomed equally enthusiastically by MI6 officials, who extensively debriefed him. During his time in the British capital, he was promoted to captain in the army’s intelligence corps.
In mid-March, Rodriguez finally returned to Paris. He was reunited with his mother and sisters, whom he hadn’t seen for more than two years. And in the Alliance office on Champs-Élysées, he had a joyous homecoming with Marie-Madeleine, Monique Bontinck, and other survivors of the network.
For her part, Marie-Madeleine tried to hide her shock when she saw him: haggard, gaunt, with a glassy look in his pale blue eyes, and looking like a ghost. His wrists still bore the marks of the manacles he had worn for weeks prior to his release. He refused to talk about his own experience, she said, and “his only thought was for the others.” He told her about his reunion with Faye at Schwabisch Hall and a bit about their incarceration at Sonnenburg, declaring, “We must act with all speed if we’re to save him.”
She, in turn, informed him that the news on that front was not good. On January 27, almost two weeks after Rodriguez’s release, Berlin radio had announced that Faye was still alive and that the Germans were prepared to let him go in exchange for a German collaborator under a death sentence in Paris. Declining to do so, de Gaulle’s government ordered the collaborator executed, despite efforts by at least one French official to commute the sentence. No one yet knew what had happened to Faye.
In the days to come, Rodriguez endlessly walked the streets of Paris, seeking to keep faith with the me
mory of his friends who’d been executed or were still in captivity. “I cannot abandon my poor dead,” he remarked. As he had promised, he went to see the families of the agents who had died at Schwabisch Hall and passed on their final messages. He continued to have, as he put it, “an intense need for loneliness” and would cross the street when he saw someone he knew coming toward him.
At the same time, however, the people to whom he was closest—his family, Marie-Madeleine, and his other Alliance friends—enveloped him in warmth and tenderness, doing everything they could to pull him out of his shell and back to life. Particularly important was his deepening relationship with Monique Bontinck, Marie-Madeleine’s young assistant, with whom he had closely worked in the first six months of 1943.
As the weeks passed, Rodriguez, while never forgetting the past, slowly began returning to the present—and the hope and opportunity it offered. His life as Edward Rodney was over; he was done with the secrets and pain that the code name conveyed.
“I look at myself now,” he wrote, “and I see only Ferdinand Rodriguez.”
It took Fourcade a long time to coax from Rodriguez the full story of what had happened to him and the others in Germany. Bit by bit, he began telling her about it, starting with his and Faye’s arrests, his transfers to various prisons, and the trials and death sentences handed down at Freiburg. With great emotional difficulty, he described the night of August 20, 1944, when, paralyzed by fear, he heard the footsteps of his comrades descend the iron stairs at Schwabisch Hall. He also told her how Faye had left his last will and testament, along with other papers, for her behind the radiator in his cell at Bruchsal.
Of Fourcade’s three thousand agents, about six hundred had been imprisoned by the Germans during the war. So far, she knew of only about 150 who had survived that ghastly experience. Of the remaining 450, dozens were already known to be dead, among them some of her top lieutenants and agents: Henri Schaerrer, Maurice Coustenoble, Lucien Vallet, Robert Douin, Antoine Hugon, Georges Lamarque, Gabriel Rivière, Pierre Dallas, Ernest Siegrist, and Lucien Poulard. But she had no idea of the fates of the vast majority who were still missing, including Léon Faye.
When the war in Europe finally ended in May 1945, she and Rodriguez set off on a pilgrimage to eastern France and Germany in search of the hundreds who had not returned. It was a heartbreaking journey. Almost immediately, she learned that her anxiety in the late summer and fall of 1944 about the slowness of the Allied advance and the fate of her imprisoned agents had been justified: The eight months of war that followed would claim the lives of many if not most of them.
For Fourcade and Rodriguez, the first horrifying discovery would come even before they crossed the Rhine into Germany.
* * *
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IN THE SPRING AND SUMMER of 1944, 108 captured Alliance members, sixteen of them women, arrived in three separate convoys at the Schirmeck prison camp in the eastern French province of Alsace. Most of the operatives, ranging in age from twenty to eighty, had been arrested in the massive Gestapo roundup after the arrests of Rodriguez and Faye in September 1943.
Their new place of confinement, located in the Vosges Mountains, had originally been a small training camp established by the French army early in the war. When the Nazis occupied Alsace, they turned it into a prison for resistance members living in the province, who, after being sent there, were forced to help build a new SS concentration camp, Natzweiler-Struthof, a few miles away.
More than half the Alliance operatives at Schirmeck had been involved in collecting intelligence from German submarine bases and shipyards in Brittany, Bordeaux, and Normandy. Several were among the network’s most valued agents: Jacques Stosskopf from Lorient; Philippe Koenigswerther, head of the Bordeaux sector; Pierre Le Tullier, one of the French policemen who had helped Marie-Madeleine escape from Marseille and who then had joined Alliance as head of the Rennes subnetwork; and Maurice Gillet (Unicorn), who had been so successful at Brest and who was joined at Schirmeck by six members of his family. (His wife was imprisoned at Pforzheim.)
There were also agents from other regions, including the Paris area and eastern France. One of the Paris-based operatives was Marguerite Brouillet, Marie-Madeleine’s dear friend, whose home at Le Lavandou on the Mediterranean coast had sheltered the Alliance chief in the summer of 1942 and had served as the base for General Giraud’s escape later that year.
None of the Alliance operatives at Schirmeck had officially been charged or put on trial. Their presence at the camp was top secret, and they were kept strictly segregated from other prisoners. Housed in men’s and women’s barracks, they occupied their time by staging plays and organizing impromptu classes in English, literature, physics, and mathematics. In August, they learned of the Allied liberation of Paris and talked longingly about their own liberation, which they expected any day. They speculated what France and their lives would be like after the war.
Just a few days after Paris was freed, Julius Gehrum, the Gestapo head in Strasbourg, received an urgent order from his headquarters in Berlin. With Patton’s army approaching the Moselle River, it was time, his superiors declared, to take drastic action against the Alliance agents at Schirmeck. No members of other French resistance networks held at the camp were included in the order.
On the evening of September 1, the agents, in groups of twelve, were ordered from their barracks and forced to board trucks that headed off toward an unknown destination. Their exodus was observed by another network operative, a doctor from Le Lavandou who had been recruited by Fourcade and who had been made camp doctor by the Germans; thanks to his job, he was not quartered with his Alliance comrades. That night, he noted with concern that his fellow agents had left without luggage and that empty trucks returned every two hours to pick up more.
He did not learn until later that they had been taken to the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, where they were hustled into a cement block building and told to strip. One by one, they were led down a staircase to an underground vault, where they were shot in the back of the head by SS executioners. Their bodies then were placed on a hoist and hauled up to the camp’s crematorium, one floor above, where they were burned.
Inmates at Natzweiler-Struthof reported they had heard repeated gunshots, along with screams and muffled singing. When Fourcade arrived at Struthof, she was told that the crematorium’s chimney did not stop smoking for two days after the massacre. Escorted to the vault where the executions took place, she saw dried blood and a flattened bullet in a drainage grid in the ground.
The SS clearly had burned the bodies to cover traces of their crime. There were no records of the agents at the camp; their names were listed on none of its registers. Yet the identities of those killed did not remain a secret for long, thanks to the doctor’s testimony, as well as the discovery of bottles filled with sheets of paper that had been buried beneath the floor of one of the barracks. Inscribed on them were the names of the agents kept there—Stosskopf, Koenigswerther, and Brouillet among them—and an account of how they all had spent their last months.*1
Although Julius Gehrum had overseen the carnage at Schirmeck, he was not present when it occurred. Of the next spasm of killing ordered by Berlin, he took personal charge. On November 23, 1944, the day the Allies liberated Strasbourg, Gehrum and two henchmen launched a murderous, weeklong tour of a string of prisons in western Germany—several in the Black Forest and all of them close to the French border.
Their first stop was the prison at Kehl, directly across the Rhine from Strasbourg, where Rodriguez had been briefly jailed. A few hours after Strasbourg’s liberation, Gehrum and his SS assistants took nine Alliance agents from their cells and herded them to the shore of the Rhine. There they were shot in the back of the head and their bodies thrown in the river. Most of the victims were members of the Nantes sector, including André Coindeau (Urus), the sector’s chief.
The following day, the exe
cutioners traveled to the prison at Rastatt, thirty miles north of Kehl, where they escorted twelve Alliance agents, all belonging to sectors in central France, to a clearing in the woods near the Rhine. Again, they were shot and their bodies dumped into the river.
On November 27, four young female agents from the network were taken from the prison at Offenburg and shot in a nearby forest, where they were buried. On November 28, Gehrum and his assistants returned to the Rhine. After collecting eight network operatives from the prison at Buhl, they loaded them onto a boat and took them to the middle of the river, where they were shot and their bodies dropped over the side.
For the three SS assassins, November 30 was the most murderous day of all. At the prison in Pforzheim, twenty-six agents, including eight women, were transported by trucks from their cells to a clearing in the middle of a forest. There they were killed and their bodies pitched into a water-filled gravel pit. Among the victims were Maurice Gillet’s wife, Marie, and Pierre Dayné, the Paris policeman who early in the conflict had acted as Fourcade’s personal bodyguard.*2
Once they were done at Pforzheim, Gehrum and his men drove thirty miles to the prison at Gaggenau, where they transported nine members of the Toulouse and Bordeaux sectors to a forest clearing and dispatched their victims with a bullet to the head. The bodies were buried in a mass grave near the place of execution. Among the dead were Mouchou Damm, head of the Toulouse sector, and his son.
In what would later be called “the blood week in the Black Forest,” Gehrum, aided by his underlings, had murdered sixty-eight Alliance agents for the sole purpose of preventing their rescue by Allied troops. The killings were one more sign of the Reich’s remorseless vendetta against a spy network that had played such a major role in its looming defeat and, perhaps just as important, had not stopped actively working until the war’s end to achieve that goal.