Avenue of Spies

by Alex Kershaw

  The sun rose high above the city. It was another gloriously warm day. There would be thousands of young Parisians swimming once more in the Seine, the quays along the Île Saint-Louis and by the Pont Neuf filled with skinny, chattering sunbathers.

  The sun began to beat down on the metal roofs of the cattle car, sending temperatures inside soaring. One window crossed with barbed wire served as the sole ventilation. Toquette and her friends were soon gasping for breath. There were 2,104 men and 400 women in the transport, also waiting for the train to move, for the waiting to end.

  Women near Toquette began to take off their clothes. As the minutes passed, more garments were discarded. Many were soon down to their underwear, their bodies covered in a fine film of perspiration. When they moved, some women slid and slipped against each other’s slick bodies. Others fainted. In some cars, they collapsed and died. In a wagon full of men, one prisoner could feel a dry tongue licking him. A fellow prisoner was sucking up the sweat dripping down the small of his back.

  The Germans were walking up and down outside, their boots heavy in the heat. At one car where the door was still open, the women saw a large Ukrainian SS man, red-faced and sweaty. He was familiar to some of the women. He had supervised their torture, making sure they were roughed up good and proper. It was as if, remembered one of the women, he had arrived at Pantin to wish them bon voyage—to see off a “herd of cattle on which he [had] stamped his brand, now being shipped to the slaughterhouse.”

  On a platform a few yards away, another man, his shoulders slumped, walked away and then out of the station and to a nearby café. It was silver-haired Bobby Bender, the Abwehr agent who had in recent days worked frantically with Raoul Nordling and Erich Posch-Pastor von Camperfeld to stop the deportation and have the prisoners handed over to the Red Cross. Bender had just tried to fool the SS commander at Pantin into delaying the train. But the SS officer was having none of it. Bender knew that the only hope now was Raoul Nordling, due that evening to meet with Otto Abetz and Pierre Laval at Laval’s official residence, the Hôtel Matignon, at 57, Rue de Varenne. It was still possible to stop the train if both would agree to it.

  There was another cause for hope, even at this eleventh hour: a teenage boy cycling frantically in the outskirts of Paris toward a village called Nanteuil-Saâcy. He had an important message for the head of the resistance in the village, which lay on the train line from Paris to Nazi Germany.

  At any cost, by any means, cut the rail line.

  It was around midday on August 15. From somewhere in Paris a resistance worker, huddled over a radio transmitter, tapped out an urgent message. He could not know that Knochen's radio experts were no longer at large, driving around in vans camouflaged as delivery trucks, loaded with tracking devices, and no longer walking the streets even on warm days wearing large overcoats that concealed their detectors.

  The resistance worker tapped away on his radio set, sending a coded message. Thankfully, it arrived in London and was soon read by some of de Gaulle’s intelligence staff.

  Germans organized evacuation detainees Paris prisons…by rail via Metz Nancy. Fear general massacre during trip. Take all measures possible sabotage transport.

  The afternoon stretched on endlessly, it must have seemed, to the men and women caged in the cattle cars at Pantin. Finally the light began to fade. At 9:30 p.m., while Toquette and the others still waited in the rail yard, Raoul Nordling walked into the Hôtel Matignon for his appointment with Pierre Laval and Otto Abetz.

  The situation in Paris had completely changed in a matter of hours. The police had been on strike since the morning. There was no electricity or gas. Nordling could sense a fast-growing anxiety. After four years of increasing repression at the hands of the SS and Gestapo, uncontrollable forces were about to step boldly from the shadows to the barricades, to fight at last in the city’s streets.

  Laval’s official residence, the Hôtel Matignon, just a few hundred yards from Josée and René de Chambrun’s home, was in darkness. A few ushers groped around in the corridors holding candles. Nordling found his way to the building’s antechamber with the aid of a flashlight. A dark-suited, chain-smoking Laval greeted Nordling and led him to his office where a paraffin lamp cast long, flickering shadows.

  Abetz was not there yet and so Nordling and Laval talked politics for a while. Laval said he had wanted to reconvene the French parliament so that a new government could direct France once Marshal Pétain had given up power. But it had not been possible to obtain agreement from the leader of the Senate.

  Thirty-eight-year-old Otto Abetz finally arrived. He was also carrying a flashlight.

  A few days before, Nordling had implored Abetz to show leniency toward the political prisoners, citing the case of the director of one of Paris’s finest universities, arrested by the Gestapo for refusing to hand over names of students thought to have joined the resistance. At that meeting Abetz had revealed his true nature, dropping all pretense to diplomacy, and had ranted at Nordling, telling him the best thing to do with political prisoners was simply to shoot them.

  “That college is a nest of assassins!” Abetz had shouted. “It should be torched. The Gestapo is much too soft on these types. I looked into the case of this director and you can rest assured he won’t be released.”

  Nordling had persisted. He begged Abetz to release the college’s director as well the thousands of other political prisoners held in Paris jails. But Abetz coldly turned Nordling away. “There is nothing left to do but kill them all,” Abetz said.

  Now, in the flickering gaslight of Laval’s half-abandoned office, Nordling beseeched both men once more to show mercy. It was not enough to improve the conditions of deportation—to place fewer people in the cattle cars so prisoners could at least lie down. The transports should be stopped altogether. Nordling then gave his word that the SS guards at Compiègne, Pantin, and Romainville would be given safe passage and would not be prosecuted for war crimes.

  Abetz was evasive, unwilling to give Nordling a straight answer. Nordling continued his entreaties, but both Abetz and Laval soon lost patience and told Nordling they had much more urgent things to discuss. The fate of the political prisoners, the women squeezed into a cattle car at Pantin, dying from dehydration, had nothing to do with them. It was entirely a Gestapo matter, not the concern of Laval or the German embassy.

  Nordling pointed out that Abetz and Laval might want to consider their long-term futures. It might be a good idea to curry favor with the advancing Allies. They might want to gain a little goodwill or they could be punished severely.

  “So you think Germany has lost the war?” asked Abetz.

  “Whatever happens,” replied Nordling, “I don’t think it’s going to turn out too well for your forces, Ambassador.”

  At Pantin the train still stood on the tracks. There was the sound of couplings clanking against each other. The cattle cars began to creak and shudder as the slack in the couplings was taken up.

  The transport was leaving. Half a dozen women’s bodies had been dumped beside the tracks. They had died of the heat.

  Toquette heard singing. It was faint at first.

  Arise children of the fatherland.

  The day of glory has arrived.

  Against us tyranny’s bloody standard is raised.

  It was France’s national anthem, “La Marseillaise.”

  The singing grew louder as it spread from one cattle car to another. Soon defiant voices could be heard from all the cattle cars as they clanked and jerked slowly into the darkness beyond the Pantin freight station, filled with heroes of France’s resistance.

  Listen to the sound in the fields.

  The howling of these fearsome soldiers.

  They are coming into our midst.

  To cut the throats of your sons and consorts…

  A railroad worker was watching. He was seen to be crying as the singing grew faint and the train finally disappeared into the humid night.

  SIXTEENr />
  DAYS OF GLORY

  THE PYRES WERE burning again. On the Avenue Foch, the men in gray SS uniforms and those in plainclothes, having received surprise orders from Heinrich Himmler to abandon Paris, were busy emptying filing cabinets, piling files onto the fires that sent smoke drifting across the sun-bleached lawns and riding paths. At number 72, where Knochen had been based for more than 1,500 days, vital documents were being destroyed lest they fall into the hands of Allied intelligence. Uncharacteristically, so rushed and stressed was Knochen, knowing the Allies were only a few days from Paris, he forgot about a cache of incriminating documents held at another Gestapo address.

  That morning of August 17, although frantically busy, the Paris Gestapo still had time to ensure that the last remaining Jews at Drancy, fifty-one unfortunate souls, were sent to Auschwitz, joining 59,000 others sent to death camps from Drancy during Knochen’s time in Paris. Fewer than 2,500 of that total would return. It was a deadly day for both Jews and patriots. In the Bois de Boulogne, a few hundred yards from the Avenue Foch, thirty-five resistance members who had planned to raid a German armory but instead walked into a trap, having been betrayed, were gunned down by Knochen’s colleague Friedrich Berger, and some of the Rue de la Pompe gang of mercenary killers and thieves. Just to make sure they were dead, Berger’s men had tossed grenades at the bullet-riddled bodies, which were later found near a beautiful waterfall.

  That same day, after learning that explosives had been placed at monuments, buildings, and bridges, Pierre Taittinger, the mayor of Paris, met with von Dietrich von Choltitz, the city’s military governor. Just two weeks before, the stolid, gray-haired fifty-year-old Prussian general had been ordered by Hitler to crush all attempts at an uprising. When it came to destroying all opposition, Hitler had added, Choltitz would be able to count on all the military force that could possibly be provided. With around 20,000 men at his disposal, he was to hold the City of Light to the bitter end. There could be no retreat. All the great monuments and bridges were to be blown up, and Paris would be left as a vast ruin. Taittinger begged Choltitz to spare Paris. Was Choltitz to go down in history as a monster—the barbarian who had destroyed the most beautiful city in the world? Or would the world remember him as the good German who saved it?

  The following morning, August 18, Knochen left Avenue Foch with suitcases hastily packed. The grand rooms he had occupied for so long—from the very outset of the German occupation—with their high ceilings and glittering crystal chandeliers and wonderful views were empty, the odd innocuous document strewn across the scuffed parquet floors. The only reminder of so much suffering was the desperate graffiti on the walls of the cells on the top floors at number 84, where SOE agents like Violette Szabo had been abused but not broken.

  Knochen quit Paris after four years as he had arrived, surrounded by his most loyal cronies in a convoy of fast cars. His immediate superior, SS general Karl Oberg, had left his private residence at 57, Boulevard Lannes, a hundred yards from Avenue Foch, exactly as he had found it and had even insisted on handing over the keys to the concierge in person.

  Knochen and his fellow Gestapo officers arrived later on August 18 at Vittel, a spa town some 250 miles to the east. It was an ignominious retreat for Knochen, along roads clogged with German trucks and other staff cars also fleeing far from the onrushing Allies, among whom General George Patton’s Third Army was making astonishing progress, covering sometimes fifty miles a day, hampered only by ever-growing supply problems and shortages of gasoline. Vittel was so very far from the action, and Knochen found it impossible to turn his back completely on Paris. It had gotten under his skin, marked him, utterly seduced him, and was impossible to fully abandon. On August 20, already wistful, he sent an elite group of agents back the way he had come, ordering them to stay in the city as long as possible. They were to send him regular radio reports, updating him on the progress of the Allies. One of Knochen’s most trusted men led the group, which comprised four cars of agents and a car with a radio, eleven men in all, including five Frenchmen.

  They found a city fast descending into bloody chaos. Fighting had broken out between members of the French resistance and pockets of Germans all across Paris. The resistance had strength in numbers but was woefully short of weapons—a deliberate ploy of the Allies, who had feared that the communists, if heavily armed, would ignite a nationwide revolution. In fact, the resistance did not have the firepower to take a single one of the Germans’ many heavily fortified positions. The key question for all was how hard the Germans would fight to keep the city. Would they battle to the last man, as Hitler had ordered, or would they give up before all Paris was destroyed? It was still anyone’s guess.

  —

  THE SUN was blazing yet again. It was August 20, 1944, when the cattle train pulled into a yard in Weimar in Nazi Germany. An exhausted and thirsty Toquette and the other women were let off the trains and allowed to breathe some fresh air and stretch their limbs for a while. Some women took the opportunity to question some of the guards.

  “Will we be able to keep our own clothes, or will we have to wear uniforms?”

  “You’ll keep your own clothes.”

  “Do they shave women’s heads in that camp?”

  “Of course not. That’s only for severe punishment.”

  “Will we have to work?”

  “No, only minor chores.”

  The women were ordered back into the boxcars. The train moved slowly beneath a pitiless sun. Two days later it finally came to a halt.

  A sign read: FURSTENBERG. They were around sixty miles north of Berlin. It was almost noon. Again the sun glared down on the women.

  “This is our destination,” someone said, “the camp at Ravensbruck.”

  It was the biggest of its kind in Nazi Europe, spread across swampy marshland, surrounded by high walls topped by electrified barbed wire, and had the dubious distinction of being the largest prison in history solely for women. When opened in 1939, it had been designed to hold around 7,000 women, and that late August of 1944, as with most concentration camps in Germany, it was vastly overcrowded. More than 40,000 women had been crammed into wooden huts, sleeping six to a bunk in lice-infested straw. Fewer than 12,000 of them would be alive at war’s end.

  The doors to the wagons were opened. Light streamed into them, blinding some of the women. Outside stood the SS with hard, angry faces, wearing the dreaded SS runes on their collars. Ordered from the cars, the women were made to get into groups of five as female SS guards, wearing jackboots and black uniforms, got to work, whipping, kicking, punching, welcoming Toquette and her fellow prisoners to the Ravensbruck regime.

  Toquette was ordered to line up and then formed part of a long column that marched down a dusty road, past pine trees, over cobblestones, past neat homes, where German children and their mothers watched them from the gardens. It was very hot, an effort to walk, and then they were climbing a hill. Toquette could see large houses, long lawns, and yet more children playing. Some mothers alongside Toquette were reminded of their own children.

  To Toquette’s right was a large lake. She marched down a hill, past flower beds, neatly tended, to a green gate with high portals and beyond that to a long, low barrack, linked to others by a coal-dust pathway. Then she saw some of the inmates, their heads shaved, barely human, wearing blue-and-gray-striped skirts, few of them even half her age, so haggard, emaciated, open sores on their bare legs.

  She was exhausted after a week of sleepless nights and travel, and weak from thirst and hunger, and now she was made to stand in a row and wait. Women cried out for water and an SS soldier walked back and forth, inspecting them, all that afternoon, forcing them to stand in the bright sunlight. She could smell death: there was a morgue close by beyond some barbed wire.

  Finally, the women were taken into a brightly lit room. Everything of value was taken from them. Then Toquette was ordered to lie down on a table and examined between her legs to make sure she had not hidden anything in
her vagina or anus. Next she had her head shaved and was taken to a shower block and made to stand in the nude, humiliated before leering SS men. Other older women looked acutely embarrassed by their nakedness.

  The SS had taken everything from them. Toquette had nothing from her previous life: no hair, no clothes, no letters or photographs, not a single thing to remind her of Sumner or Phillip, whose lives she had risked for France.

  —

  PARIS WAS on the brink. On August 22, two days after Toquette arrived in Ravensbruck, General von Choltitz received an order from Hitler: “Paris is to be transformed into a pile of rubble. The commanding general [Choltitz] must defend the city to the last man, and should die, if necessary, under ruins.”

  Later that day Choltitz talked with General Hans Speidel, whose office had passed on Hitler’s order to turn Paris into a vast charnel house.

  “I thank you for your excellent order,” Choltitz told Speidel.

  “Which order, General?”

  “The demolition order, of course. Here’s what I have done. I’ve had three tons of explosives brought into Notre-Dame, two tons into the Invalides, a ton into the Chambre des Députés. I’m just about to order that the Arc de Triomphe be blown up to provide a clear field of fire.”

  Speidel sighed deeply.

  “I’m acting under your orders, correct, my dear Speidel?”

  Speidel hesitated.

  “Yes, General.”

  “It was you who gave the order, right?”

  “It wasn’t me,” Speidel replied angrily, “but the Führer who ordered it!”

  Choltitz shot back: “Listen, it was you who transmitted this order and who will have to answer to history.” Choltitz calmed down. “I’ll tell you what else I’ve ordered,” added Choltitz. “The Madeleine and the Opéra will be destroyed. As for the Eiffel Tower, I’ll knock it down in such a manner that it can serve as an antitank barrier in front of the destroyed bridges.”