Avenue of Spies

by Alex Kershaw

  He would get much better revenge by helping the British track down the perpetrators of the crimes he had seen in Neuengamme. “The British knew they were going to find horrible things in Germany and they had prepared for it,” he remembered. “They had organized war crimes commissions—a high-ranking officer, usually a colonel who had legal training, often a former barrister, went out with the troops when they arrived in a camp.” Phillip provided detailed written testimony for a British colonel who was leading an inquiry into thirteen members of the SS who had been responsible for the atrocities in Neuengamme.

  The summer stretched on. Phillip was in no hurry to return to the past—or to Paris and his widowed mother, no matter how much he missed and loved her. He needed more time to “readjust from the camp to normal life.” Facing his mother would mean confronting the past and the reality of his father’s loss. He was not ready for either just yet. The older men among the 14th Light Field Ambulance Unit, to which he was attached, looked after him as if he were their own son. He felt protected. It was almost as if he were part of a joyful family again. “I think they liked me,” he recalled. “I certainly liked them. I was able to decompress. Going home too soon would have been like going from zero to infinity.”

  Phillip traded his cigarette ration for a Leica IIIb camera and photographed the Bay of Lübeck and the surrounding area. He visited the nearby city of Kiel with a group of British soldiers to celebrate King George VI’s birthday. He had left Paris as a sheltered child. For the first time he was expected to behave like an adult and was treated as one. He bought a motorcycle in Neustadt and posed proudly beside it in his British uniform for a photograph, one of several images from that long summer that he would prize for the rest of his life.

  As the fall approached, Toquette became ever more anxious to see her son again. It had been over a year since she had last set eyes on him in Moulins before he and Sumner were taken to Compiègne. She wrote to Phillip, asking what was keeping him in Germany for so long. He was to stop playing the soldier and come home to her. School would start again soon.

  Phillip duly arrived back in Paris in late September at Le Bourget airfield in a French military plane, a Junkers Ju 52 with corrugated metal on its sides, the same kind that had brought Hitler to Paris in June 1940. When he stepped onto French soil, he was still proudly wearing a dark green British uniform, not yet ready to be a schoolboy again. He had brought a suitcase with him. It was full of guns he had acquired in Lübeck.

  Phillip took a bus into Paris and then the metro to the Place de l’Étoile. He walked along the platform, up the stairs, past the advertisements on the tiled walls, into the light, the Arc de Triomphe before him, just as he remembered it. The thickets of road signs in German were gone. He walked along the Avenue Foch. There were no more black Citroëns parked outside the grandest homes. Tricolors had replaced swastikas. His mother, looking far older than he remembered, was waiting for him at number 11. Never had she been happier to see her son. Her only child was no longer a boy. He was as tall as his father had been. At long last he was home.

  Phillip put his suitcase, full of guns, in his bedroom. It was just as he had left it in the spring of 1944. Nothing, it appeared, had been touched. Nothing had changed.

  TWENTY-TWO

  JUSTICE

  WHEN THE WAR ended, like all senior SS officials, those who had controlled the apparatus of terror in France quickly went to ground. SS general Karl Oberg disappeared on May 8, 1945, in the Austrian Tyrol. He then assumed the name Albrecht Heintze but in July 1945 was captured by American investigators and handed over to the French. His deputy, Helmut Knochen, was typically more cunning. He hid in Göttingen, south of Hanover, and managed to stay a step ahead of Nazi hunters for several months. At one point he was seen in Madrid, a popular refuge for collaborators and the SS. In a British intelligence report he was described as “having a large head and brutal German face. Cleanshaven. Blue eyes. Always carries a briefcase. Wears camel hair coat with leather pockets.”

  It was January 16, 1946, when “Dr. Bones” was finally run to ground near Kronach in the American zone of occupied Germany. First he was incarcerated at Dachau, site of Hitler’s first concentration camp, and then he served as a key witness in the Nuremberg trials of senior Nazis such as Ribbentrop and Kaltenbrunner. “It was a harsh year—at Nuremberg,” Knochen recalled. “My cell was below that of Göring.” Unlike his former Gestapo colleague at 31, Avenue Foch, Theodor Dannecker, Knochen chose not to commit suicide, even though he knew it was highly likely he would, when it was his turn to go on trial, be found guilty and executed. He would not take the coward’s way out like Dannecker, who had hanged himself in his cell under American custody. He was proud of his war record. He had served his country with honor. He would defend his actions to his last breath.

  —

  HAMBURG WAS still a city of ruins. Remarkably, however, one building in the old center had survived with very little damage: the Curiohaus on the Rothenbaumchaussee. One day in March 1946, eighteen-year-old Phillip Jackson entered the building and made his way to a courtroom. As soon as he stepped inside, he saw SS men lined up in the dock, numbers hanging from their necks. His heart began to race. “The terror came back to me,” he later recalled. “I was back in Neuengamme, at night, standing on a parade ground, and the SS in the dock were there, holding whips, with dogs and guns.”

  Phillip had been called to testify at the trial of fourteen SS officials who had been primarily in charge of Neuengamme. They were now seated in the dock, dressed in shabby suits, looking thin and gaunt, much older than when Phillip had last seen them just two years before. Each of them knew they were going to die if found guilty of crimes against humanity. The camp’s commandant, thirty-nine-year-old Max Pauly, was tagged as number one.

  After several months back in Paris, Phillip had started to recover from the immense trauma of Neuengamme and the tragedy of the Bay of Lübeck. He was one of the prosecution’s key witnesses. He had agreed to testify in English. As he took his place on the witness stand, he managed to control his fear so he could face the men whom he had last seen in immaculate black uniforms, barking orders as 15,000 people stood at attention at Neuengamme. Blessed with a superb memory, able to describe in great detail the crimes he had witnessed, Phillip quickly proved to be a highly effective witness.

  During his first day of testimony, Phillip was asked if he had witnessed any cruelty in Neuengamme.

  “Did you see people beaten by the SS?” asked a prosecutor.

  “Yes, I did,” Phillip replied calmly.

  “Can you point to any particular SS man or officer who you saw beat a prisoner?”

  Phillip turned to look at the SS who had murdered and terrorized thousands. “I saw number three, number five, number nine, and number ten.”

  On Thursday, March 21, 1946, the fourth day of the trial, a lawyer for Max Pauly named Dr. Curt Wessig began to cross-examine Phillip.

  “I want to ask a question in the interests of my client, Pauly,” he asked.

  Pauly sat nearby in the dock. Phillip did not look at him.

  “You said that Pauly said ‘bash him in the face’ or something like that. My client, Pauly, denies this phrase and he would like to ask you whether you have really seen [him] when he uttered this phrase?”

  Phillip remained focused. “I am very sorry that he does not remember,” he replied. “It was a daily happening. I remember distinctly. I saw Pauly when he said it.”

  “You said that your father was drowned,” Wessig continued. “Did that happen in the camp, or do you attribute any sort of responsibility to the accused Pauly?”

  “This was not actually in the camp,” replied Phillip, “but still in captivity because we were guarded by the SS on the ship, Thielbek. I do not know in what measure the accused Pauly may have been responsible for the placing of the prisoners on the ship.”

  The trial continued. The catalogue of crimes was long and numbing. Finally, Wessig called upon the court
to recognize that “Pauly had simply been a tool of a system that stormed through most of the countries of Europe in hate and fury, and that this system was bound to flounder because it refused to acknowledge and live out an ethics that called for the love of all that is human.”

  None were convinced that Pauly had been a mere “tool”—far from it. On May 3, 1946, a year after Phillip’s father had perished in the cold waters of the Bay of Lübeck, Pauly was sentenced to death. He wrote to his son from his cell while waiting to be executed: “Always be proud of being a German, and detest with all your might those who acquiesced in this absolutely false verdict….Please remember my favorite dish—pancakes and chocolate pudding. If I could only eat my fill once more!”

  On October 8, Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s last official hangman, placed a rope around Pauly’s neck. The iron grate on which Pauly stood was pulled away and he dropped to his death. Others followed Pauly, including the doctor Alfred Trzebinski, responsible for murdering more than two dozen children upon whom he had experimented at Neuengamme, and whose last words showed not a hint of regret as he waited to drop: “Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

  —

  HELMUT KNOCHEN was sentenced to death in March 1947, along with his close colleague Hans Kieffer, his head of counterintelligence, but not for crimes against humanity, nor his role in sending almost 80,000 Jews to their deaths. Instead, both he and Kieffer, his chief spy hunter, were condemned to hang because of their involvement in the murder of several British soldiers in early August 1944, just before they quit Paris. In the dying days of Nazi occupation, Knochen had received orders from Berlin, which he had then passed on to Kieffer, to execute five members of the Special Air Service, the SAS.

  During his trial, Knochen had skillfully argued: “Neither I, nor one of my subordinates, could have acted otherwise, without being condemned to death immediately.” In the aftermath of the failed July 1944 plot against Hitler, Knochen added, it would have been suicide to disobey any order coming directly from Berlin. He had even managed to persuade no less than senior general Günther Blumentritt to plead for his life. “I am not able to mention all examples but I remember that Dr. Knochen and his office in many instances acted in the interest of the French population,” stated Blumentritt, who would play a key role in forming Germany’s postwar military. “Dr. Helmut Knochen,” he concluded, was a “decent man without a brutal disposition.”

  Hans Kieffer, too, argued that he had simply been carrying out orders when he passed on Knochen’s specific instructions to Gestapo executioners, three of whom worked at 84, Avenue Foch. Like Knochen, he was also condemned to die. While awaiting execution, forty-seven-year-old Kieffer was interrogated at great length by Vera Atkins, head of SOE’s French Section, which he had brilliantly destroyed under Knochen’s watch. When told that SOE agents including Violette Szabo had been viciously treated just before being executed, Kieffer looked surprised and began to cry.

  “Kieffer, if one of us is going to cry,” replied Atkins with contempt, “it is going to be me. You will stop this comedy.”

  Just before being escorted to the gallows from his cell, Hans Kieffer pulled down a photograph of his daughter, Hildegard, and asked if it could be sent to her. He had placed a note on the back: “Moggele, I bless you in my last hour.” Albert Pierrepoint then placed a rope around Kieffer’s neck and made sure he was quickly dispatched to Valhalla, one of around two hundred Nazis he personally accounted for after the war.

  Kieffer had been neither as calculating nor as well connected as Helmut Knochen, who was spared the noose when in 1950 his sentence for the SAS killings was commuted to twenty-one years in prison. But he was then extradited to France, where he finally appeared in court along with Höherer-SS und Polizeiführer Karl Oberg, head of the SS in France, in February 1954. While awaiting trial, Oberg was questioned 386 times by the French, who collected ninety kilos of documentary evidence. On October 9, 1954, a grayhaired Knochen and haggard Karl Oberg were sentenced to death for crimes committed in France. “The French government was severe,” Knochen recalled. “My case was linked to that of Oberg….[René] Bousquet [former head of the French police during the mass deportations of Jews from France] testified at my trial: he arrived by plane, tanned from a trip made to the Bank of Indochina—he was my counterpart in the war!”

  To Knochen it seemed incredible that Bousquet, an old rugby chum of René de Chambrun, had escaped justice after the war for his role in the deportation of French Jews. As the head of the French police, he had, after all, helped organize the mass roundups of 1942. Bousquet still clearly had many powerful friends in high places and in fact would in the 1980s be photographed dining with one of them, no less than President François Mitterrand. But unlike Mitterrand and so many other former Vichy officials, he did not live to a ripe old age. He was sensationally killed in 1993, just weeks before he was finally to be tried for war crimes, by a fifty-one-year-old man who then pled not guilty to murder, arguing that Bousquet had so obviously deserved to die.

  By the time Knochen was sentenced to death for a second time, the Cold War was raging and, to cement close relations between Germany and other Western democracies, many convicted Nazis had their sentences dramatically reduced. This was the case with both Knochen and Oberg, whose death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. Knochen was finally pardoned and released along with Oberg on November 28, 1962, by none other than the French Fifth Republic’s first president, Charles de Gaulle. Knochen then returned to Germany, settling in Baden-Baden, where he worked as an insurance agent before dying in April 2003 at the ripe old age of ninety-three, apparently weary of life and very much embittered by his treatment at the hands of the French. “Let me say that the greatest crime in history was the extermination of the Jews by Hitler,” he told one interviewer, a skilled fabulist to the very end. “And the greatest tragedy of my life was the fact that in an indirect way, and quite without being aware of it, I was mixed up in it. At no point did I know, or even suspect, that the Jews of France, deported to the East, were murdered.”

  EPILOGUE

  LES INVALIDES

  AS WITH COUNTLESS Europeans, Toquette Jackson tried her best to put the war behind her. She would rarely talk about the past and only ever discussed her time in Ravensbruck with the women who had actually shared the trauma with her.

  One day not long after the war, the remarkable Maisie Renault arrived at Toquette’s home in Enghien. Renault remembered that it was a beautiful day. Phillip greeted her at the front door. Maisie had been eager to ask him questions about the Lübeck tragedy, in which her brother Philippe had been killed, but when she had seen how young Phillip still was, just seventeen, she decided not to ask him.

  Renault looked through a window and saw a lush lawn leading down to a lake dotted with sailboats. Toquette spoke little about her own suffering but became very emotional when she described what had happened to Sumner. Renault was reminded of what Toquette had so often told her in Ravensbruck: how much her husband was admired and loved, and what a good father and doctor he had been, committed to helping others to the very last minutes of his life. Toquette said she was working again as a nurse. She showed a picture of herself, taken just after liberation, that had been used in a magazine. From her upper neck to her chest, she still bore the scars of countless lice bites.

  Toquette and Phillip both struggled to overcome their loss. “Everyone we knew had lost something or someone in the war,” Phillip recalled. “We were lucky to still have each other.” The bond between them grew stronger than ever. They had survived the greatest of tests but both had been deeply scarred. “I skipped adolescence,” explained Phillip seventy years later. “I was a kid until I was arrested and then spent time in a concentration camp, which made me into an adult, but I had no adolescence. I had skipped from child to adult.”

  A bleak future appeared to lie ahead. “My father had been killed,” Phillip recalled. “There was no source of money. We were living
in a very expensive apartment in one of the most expensive places in Paris or in the world.” There was no life insurance. For a while Toquette took in lodgers but still could not afford the home on Avenue Foch, and decided reluctantly to live full-time in Enghien instead. She also, sadly, had to part ways with Louise, her ever faithful maid for over a decade.

  To make ends meet, Toquette then found a job in a small business making jellies. It was still a struggle to get by. Phillip felt he had to do his share as soon as he could, but he was determined first to finally pass his baccalaureate, so he returned to his old school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly. One day a teacher ejected him from a classroom because he was talking. Phillip couldn’t help but laugh. The punishment seemed so insignificant compared to what had happened daily in Neuengamme.

  Phillip eventually passed his baccalaureate and then looked for work. College was out of the question. He had to support his mother. Then Toquette’s brother, Tuvette, who had survived two world wars fighting in tank units, found him a job as a junior draftsman in an engineering company. His first month’s paycheck was all of sixty francs, and he gave every centime to his mother. Phillip had always had a good head for numbers, was bilingual, and became quickly irreplaceable. He worked hard, just as his father had at his age. He would eventually spend thirty-five years with the firm, retiring as a vice president, having enjoyed “Les Trentes Glorieuses,” France’s thirty great years of postwar boom.