Some ten months after Taillandier’s daring gambit, on November 11, 1942, the growl of German Panzer Divisions’ tanks and self-propelled cannons, followed by endless convoys of troop carriers, echoed above the border of Vichy France and the Occupied Zone. The Allies had invaded North Africa, exposing southern France to future strikes by the Americans, the British, the Free French, and their comrades from other nations. Suspicious of the Vichy regime’s loyalty to him in France and North Africa alike, Hitler had decided that all of France must now fall under occupation.
Colonel Paillole, tipped off that the Gestapo and Abwehr already suspected that his true allegiance lay with the Free French, fled to Spain and then to London, one step ahead of capture and execution by both the Germans and the Vichy government. In London and later from Algiers, he made certain that Marcel Taillandier would remain one of the most important leaders of the Resistance. Now, with the Gestapo and the German Army seizing Toulouse and southwest France, Taillandier embraced his opportunity to do what he had craved since the fall of France: to take the fight to the Nazis and collaborators in a ruthless, personal way.
Taillandier, now known to French, British, and American intelligence by his code name, “Ricardo,” began his campaign in earnest against the Nazis and collaborators in and around Toulouse. From de Gaulle and Paillole, orders came for Ricardo and his twelve most trusted operatives—including a woman named Lilli Camboville—to infiltrate the Toulouse Gestapo, Abwehr, and police. The effort would uncover and execute collaborators, gather intelligence, conduct sabotage missions, and kill German operatives. Taillandier was also ordered to help other Resistance groups to set up escape routes for downed Allied airmen across the Pyrénées, but de Gaulle personally emphasized that Taillandier’s primary duty was counterintelligence and guerrilla warfare. He was not to risk his life and mission to take part in an escape unless it was utterly necessary.
With Vichy now under Nazi rule, Otto Brandl summarily discharged Taillandier, but had no inkling that the former procurer was a member of the Resistance. German intercepts of transmissions from London sometimes turned up mentions of a “Ricardo.” No one knew who he was or what he looked like.
Taillandier, in need of a job that would aid his Resistance activities, found a near-perfect position as the manager of the Frascati Bar and Café, which was nestled in the center of Toulouse. He turned the café into a meeting place where he and his team met and planned their operations. In a real-life scenario reminiscent of “Rick’s Café” in the classic film Casablanca, the bistro was packed with local partisans, collaborators, Gestapo, and Vichy police. The Frascati also featured an upstairs brothel, with prostitutes who proved to be patriots by passing useful tidbits of information from Nazis and collaborators to Taillandier.
As part of an effort to blackmail Vichy officials into providing the names of collaborators and intelligence about upcoming Gestapo operations, members of Taillandier’s unit frequently wriggled into a crawl space above the brothel. They snapped photos of prostitutes and clients in bed through strategically bored holes just large enough for a small camera lens. Taillandier never took the photos or blackmailed the subject himself, as keeping his identity secret from the police and the Gestapo was crucial. He knew how to use the incriminating images, though.
The Frascati was a place where ideologies blurred and backroom intelligence was swapped. Everyone had an agenda. The café was one of the few spots in Nazi-occupied Toulouse where the Germans and police fraternized with locals and looked the other way—something Taillandier knew and used to deadly advantage. By May 1943, he and his team had executed at least thirteen collaborators, the traitors often unmasked through information gleaned in the Frascati or between the bedsheets of the upstairs brothel.
The Toulouse Gestapo, determined to find and kill the Resistance members who were taking out valuable informers, had eyes and ears everywhere. Through informers and the torture of several people of divided loyalties, the Germans came up with several last names—Gardiol, Pointurier, and Candau—as likely candidates for the spate of assassinations of collaborators in plain view on their doorsteps, in their cars, or on the city streets.
That same month, Taillandier ordered the execution of a reviled informer named Platt. Taillandier, wearing shades, a beret, and a mask, with one of his operatives at the wheel of a nondescript Citroën, knocked on Platt’s front door on the afternoon of May 21, 1943. When the traitor answered, Taillandier pulled a pistol from his overcoat pocket and wordlessly fired two shots between his eyes. The traitor was dead before he crumpled to the floor. The screech of the fleeing sedan’s tires and the screams of neighbors who had witnessed the lightning-fast and merciless shooting were the trademarks of Ricardo’s activities.
On June 24, 1943, Gardiol, Pointurier, and Candau all received calls from a trusted friend to meet Ricardo at the Frascati. It was a trap set by Gestapo Obersturmführer Müller. Awaiting the trio at the café were Gestapo operatives who had been ordered not to seize the Frenchmen until a fourth man—the mysterious Ricardo—joined them.
Gardiol, Pointurier, and Candau walked into the characteristically crowded bar around noon, spotted Lilli Camboville alone at a table, and joined her. A few minutes later, Taillandier entered, suddenly realized that there were even more Gestapo inside than usual, and walked past his friends without looking at them. Because Taillandier was familiar to the Nazis as the bar’s manager, they had no reason to suspect that he was in fact Ricardo. Müller and his men paid no attention as he walked to the back, climbed the staircase leading to the brothel and the rooftop, and kept going. He climbed from the attic annex onto the roof and made his way across several rooftops until he came to a fire escape. There, he lowered himself to an alley and vanished.
Müller and his men waited for several more minutes. When the three men and the woman at the table rose to leave, he and the Gestapo pounced. They arrested them and hustled them off to the city center, where a giant red-and-black swastika flag was draped above the Gestapo headquarters. Agents in black uniforms and skull-and-crossbones-adorned caps and others in dark suits and low-brimmed black fedoras bustled in and out of the entrance to the thirteenth-century bastion with its narrow-slit windows, parapets, and two steel front doors.
Müller and his agents had missed any connection between the Frascati’s manager and the four people who had just been arrested. Frantic to extract Ricardo’s identity from the prisoners, the Gestapo went to work immediately on the Frenchmen and Lilli, who was three months pregnant. According to Morhange member Pierre Saint-Laurens, who knew them all, Lilli was Taillandier’s mistress, and the child was his.
Taillandier hid in a friend’s attic annex, unable to flee the city because the Gestapo and the police were stopping, searching, and questioning anyone who even attempted to leave Toulouse by bus, train, or car. He could only agonize over the plight of his captured friends and hope that somehow they would not crack under torture.
For several days, the Gestapo beat the three men with fists and chains. They did not break, not even when the Nazis used pliers to tear off their fingernails and rip out their teeth. They were shocked with electrodes taped to their testicles, but still did not give up Ricardo.
Lilli’s pregnancy ended with several thunderous punches and kicks to her abdomen. When she miscarried, the Gestapo simply tossed the lifeless fetus into a wastebasket. Then they stripped her naked, bound her hands, and hauled her to a bathtub filled with ice water. They blindfolded her and shoved her head beneath the water. After a few seconds, they yanked her head out. She gasped for breath. Again and again, the men shoved her head back into the frigid water and removed her only when she was an instant away from drowning. She revealed nothing about Taillandier and their unit.
Three days after the Frascati raid, Taillandier received word from one of the operatives who were staking out Gestapo headquarters for him. Just before dawn, the Gestapo dragged the four Resistance prisoners out
of the fortress, threw two of them into the backseat of a waiting sedan and the other two into another, and drove them to the train station. As sunrise seeped across Toulouse and the city’s ancient bricks emitted their famed roseate hue, Gardiol, Pointurier, Candau, and Lilli were thrown into a cattle car already crammed with men, women, and children. The train slowly pulled from the terminal, the engine’s clamor not loud enough to muffle the sobs and screams from the windowless cattle car. Taillandier’s friends were on their way to concentration camps, but his identity remained hidden from the Gestapo. Only Gardiol would ever see France again.
Taillandier returned to the Frascati after “falling ill” for a few weeks. He “resigned” as the café’s manager, but the Gestapo did not yet know that he was the Resistance leader Ricardo. Musee departemental de la Resistance (Toulouse) director Guillaume Agullo says, “As far as I could find, Marcel never used again the Frascati the same way; it stopped becoming his everyday place, he had to be more prudent. . . . But he therefore continued to go there, more or less, depending on the periods. But from now on, the operational PC [headquarters] became the Chateau de Brax.”
Taillandier’s network had been dismantled, but Ricardo was far from finished. He began putting together a new network he would call Morhange, embarking on a personal reign of terror that would strike fear into the Gestapo, the police, and anyone who dared to cooperate with them. Pierre Saint-Laurens, in his history of Morhange and Taillandier, writes: “This fierce repression [the Frascati raid], far from damaging the morale of Taillandier, led him to decide to move to the attack. He gathered around him those who had escaped like him. He created Morhange.” 4
The Gestapo soon learned to its fear and fury that Ricardo was not only alive and well, but had reconstituted his hit squad. From August to September 1943, under direct orders from Paillole alternately in London and Algiers, Taillandier and his men kidnapped at least six Vichy intelligence agents who worked for the Gestapo, and brought them to the Château de Brax, where Taillandier still operated a powerful radio transmitter.
Taillandier and Morhange, unlike the Gestapo or the police, did not torture prisoners. Instead, they were subjected to rigorous verbal interrogations by former civil and military justices who had joined the Resistance. The interrogations were actually cross-examinations in which the prisoners were allowed to defend themselves, but Taillandier and his associates had compiled irrefutable proof that the accused had collaborated or worse with the enemy.
Pierre Saint-Laurens, one of Taillandier’s operatives, writes that in the cavernous great hall of the château, the collaborators were “considered traitors to the nation, [and] were judged on the military tribunal code.” 5
As Taillandier watched all of the proceedings, the death penalty was handed down, but if the prisoners had provided confessions and information, they were assured that no retribution would be taken against their families. Taillandier gathered the information in folders and later transmitted the intelligence to a Free French transmitter in Barcelona, from where it would be sent to London or to Algiers.
The executioner was a strange young man known only as Pierre. Saint-Laurens writes: “Then came the gruesome part of the case, the ‘funeral’ of the castle. A gravedigger always prepared three graves in advance in case of need; they rarely remained long unoccupied. There is even an executioner, Pierre, aged less than 20 years, a disturbing character who takes pleasure in his duties and complains when there is no hurry to execute collaborators.” 6
Pierre’s method of execution was to force the condemned man to kneel in front of his grave. He then pressed the tip of a revolver against the man’s forehead and ordered him to keep his eyes open or he would make him die slowly. Sometimes, Pierre would hold the gun in place for several agonizing minutes, reveling in the sobs and quivers of the doomed prisoner. Always it ended the same way. A shot pealed above the grave, and the collaborator toppled backward into the hole.
On October 15, 1943, Taillandier struck again. He had received an order from London to eliminate Colonel Jean Sénac, a German plant in the former Vichy Intelligence Service. Stationed with the police now in Toulouse and working with local Gestapo chief Wilhelm Redzeck, Sénac infiltrated numerous Resistance units in southwest France, and his agents had set up many French men and women for ambush, arrest, torture, and execution by the Nazis.
Sénac, in a topcoat, scarf, and white fedora, emerged from Gestapo headquarters, adjacent to Toulouse’s elegant and palatial Capitole, on the brisk fall morning of October 15 and walked down the steps. The Place du Capitole teemed with people headed to work and with Gestapo and police. Suddenly a black Citroën pulled up alongside Sénac. Two men sprang from the car, grabbed him, and flung him into the backseat. Then the car sped away.
That night, Sénac was tried at the Château de Brax and summarily executed by Pierre as Gestapo and police mounted a futile door-to-door search in Toulouse. Redzeck, enraged by the kidnapping of Sénac in broad daylight under the nose of the authorities, had no doubt that Ricardo was behind the operation and ordered the Gestapo to use all means necessary to identify and track down the elusive, enigmatic Frenchman. Taillandier had no intention of lying low in the wake of Sénac’s “removal.” From Paillole came another order, one that Taillandier knew would inflame the region, but one that he had long wanted to undertake. In September 1943, a British submarine had secretly picked up Free French intelligence agent and assassin Alphonse Alsfasser in Algiers. The sub had broken the surface several nights later in a remote inlet near Marseilles. Alsfasser rowed to shore in a rubber safety raft and was met by two men in dark berets and long black overcoats. One of the pair was Taillandier. Their mission was to bring the assassin to Toulouse and kill Toulouse police superintendant Barthelet, a notorious collaborator and Nazi sympathizer who handed over hundreds of French patriots to the Gestapo.
For Taillandier, the directive was personal. Barthelet had been instrumental in setting up the Frascati raid that nearly nabbed Taillandier himself and sent four of his most trusted and valuable operatives to concentration camps. As any good officer would do, he was preparing the operation’s groundwork over several months after a communication from Paillole, who warned “my Toulouse comrade [Taillandier] against that police official and alerted the Morhange group to be very careful.” Paillole described “the head of the Toulouse police [as] a man whose brutally repressive policies against Resistance fighters . . . led us to put him on the list of dangerous individuals deserving D measures.” 7
The D stood for death, and Taillandier was eager to carry out the order. Throughout the war, Resistance units all across France often received coded messages with simply a name and a D.
Taillandier immediately understood why Paillole had trusted Alsfasser to do the job: “Alphonse Alsfasser was a strong young man, a loner with intense patriotic feelings . . . and was a repentant gangster.” 8 Like Taillandier, he would not hesitate to kill a man face-to-face.
For weeks, Taillandier and his Morhange operatives staked out Barthelet’s every movement. He would leave his office in the city’s Place Saint-Étienne near eight o’clock every night and drive to his house “at the crossroads of two streets far from the center of town.” A police car always traveled ahead of him, and to his rear was a sedan with several Gestapo agents. They would remain at his house until he parked in the adjoining garage and entered his home from an entryway inside the garage. The three vehicles took the same route each evening “down deserted avenues, the Allées Verdier and the Place du Grand-Rond.” 9
The planned execution was brutally simple. When Barthelet and his escort reached the empty Place du Grand-Rond, Taillandier, Alsfasser, a third shooter, and a skilled Morhange driver would race up alongside the superintendent’s car. Then Taillandier and Alsfasser would rake the official with submachine guns and speed off before the escorts could react.
At 7 p.m. on October 16, 1943, just one day after the kidnapping and executi
on of Sénac, Taillandier, Alsfasser, and two Morhange men parked a Peugeot 402 behind the soaring rose-hued, Romanesque expanse of Saint-Étienne Cathedral. Barthelet always turned down the narrow street behind the church on his way to the Place du Grand-Rond. Taillandier and the others waited.
To the gunmen’s shock, Barthelet’s car appeared on the road at 8:30 p.m.—alone. They let him pass and trailed him, all but the driver cradling Thompson .45 submachine guns delivered by Allied bombers to secluded drop zones in the countryside. The weapon’s speed and killing power made it Taillandier’s favorite.
Barthelet appeared oblivious to the car to his rear as he approached the Place du Grand-Rond. Still no escort, Marcel noticed. The police official slowed down, and as the Peugeot drew within a few feet of his rear bumper, Barthelet suddenly hit the gas and veered in the wrong direction down a tight one-way street.
The Morhange driver shot past the street and slammed on the brakes. As he threw the transmission into reverse, Taillandier, suspecting a trap, shouted at the driver not to follow Barthelet and drive away as fast as possible. In the backseat with Alsfasser, Taillandier turned and looked out the rear windshield for any Gestapo or police cars bearing down on them. To his relief, the street was empty. He “cancelled the operation until another date could be set when it would be carried out differently.” 10
Taillandier already had a backup plan prepared. Before Alsfasser’s arrival, he noticed a small, vacant lot in front of the police chief’s house. Several thick bushes along the lot could easily hide two men. Taillandier also discerned an ideal parking spot some 360 yards from Barthelet’s home and completely out of sight from both the home and from the route the official took every evening. He chose Saturday, October 23, for the hit.
The Lost Airman Page 9