The Cost of Courage

by Charles Kaiser

But back in Berlin, the conspiracy is in total disarray. It begins to fall apart altogether when Major Otto Remer is ordered to arrest Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister and the highest-ranking Nazi official in Berlin at this moment. When Remer confronts Goebbels in his office, the minister manages to get Hitler on the telephone and puts the major on the line with him. Realizing the Führer is still alive, the major reverses his loyalties on the spot.

  At six thirty in the evening, Goebbels manages to get the Deutschlandsender, a radio station powerful enough to be heard all over Europe, to broadcast a brief announcement that an attempt to kill Hitler has failed. (The conspirators’ failure to secure the radio station earlier in the afternoon is one of their many elementary blunders.) Goebbels initially blames the Allies for the bombing. Hearing the bulletin that Hitler is still alive, German Army generals in Prague and Vienna who have already started to arrest SS and Nazi party leaders begin to backtrack.

  Stauffenberg’s boss, General Friedrich Fromm, who has tolerated the conspiracy against Hitler for months without actively participating it, now turns decisively against the plotters, in the hope of saving his own skin. He pretends to carry out an instant courtmartial of Stauffenberg, as well as two generals and a lieutenant who were among his collaborators. Then he orders all of them shot immediately by a firing squad in the courtyard — to make sure they can’t implicate him in the conspiracy.

  By one A.M., Hitler is on the airwaves himself, describing a plot by “a very small clique of ambitious, irresponsible, and at the same time, senseless and stupid officers … It is a gang of criminal elements which will be destroyed without mercy.”

  By now the twelve hundred SS and SD officers and men who had been arrested in Paris have been released.

  “Seized by a titanic fury and an unquenchable thirst for revenge,” William Shirer wrote, Hitler “whipped Himmler and [Ernst] Kaltenbrunner to ever greater efforts to lay their hands on every last person who had dared to plot against him.” During the next nine months, at least two thousand and perhaps as many as five thousand Germans are executed for their alleged roles in the plot, some of them in concentration camps, just days before the war is over.

  One of the worst effects of the assassination’s failure is the rekindling of Hitler’s belief that he is protected by divine providence. Churchill believed that these were Hitler’s first words after the attack: “Who says I am not under the divine protection of god?”

  The other terrible effect was to convince Hitler that since so many of his enemies in the army had now been unmasked — men he decided must have been undermining him all along — Germany’s success in the war was now assured. Minutes after the bombing, this is what he tells his private secretary: “Believe me, this is the turning point for Germany. From now on things will look up again. I’m glad the Schweinehunde [bastards] have unmasked themselves.”

  * A nimble fellow who was also part of the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, Speidel became commander of NATO land forces in Central Europe from 1957 to 1963.

  † Three months after the failure of the plot to kill Hitler, the Führer sends two generals to Rommel’s home to offer him the choice of committing suicide or facing the People’s Court for his role in the conspiracy. Told that his family will be taken care of if he chooses the first option, Rommel goes upstairs to say goodbye to his wife. Then he gets in a car with the two generals and swallows a cyanide capsule. He is dead fifteen seconds later.

  ‡ In February 1944, the Swiss minister to Vichy met with Prime Minister Pierre Laval, who predicted the annihilation of Russia and said there was no question of a breach of the Atlantic Wall. When the Swiss diplomat repeated this assessment to one of Laval’s close collaborators, he was told, “What do you expect! Laval has gambled and he knows he has lost. But he wants neither to believe nor admit it.” (Jackson, France, p. 527)

  § Von Tresckow had been involved in several previous plots to kill Hitler. When the one on July 20 failed, he committed suicide the next day.

  Sixteen

  Although the smell of retreat wafted on the summer air, the business of Nazi horror continued as usual.

  — Matthew Cobb

  A great tide of popular enthusiasm and emotion seized me on my entry into Cherbourg, and bore me onward as far as Rennes, passing through Coutances, Avranches and Fougères. In the ruins of demolished cities and burned-out villages, the population gathered along the roads and burst out in jubilant demonstrations … The contrast was remarkable between the ardor of their spirit and the ravages endured by their persons and property. Certainly France would live, for she was equal to her suffering.

  — Charles de Gaulle, describing his triumphant journey through the countryside toward Paris, days before its liberation

  IN PARIS, the Nazi establishment reacts with horror to the slow but steady progress of the Allied invasion. The surge of hope Parisians feel after Normandy is miserably balanced by a huge upswing of anxiety. After the failure to assassinate Hitler, the Germans in the occupied French capital become completely unhinged: Their vindictive sadism knows no bounds.

  “We had our hands at their throats,” Christiane remembered, “and they were scared that our specialty — sabotage — might hinder their retreat. It wasn’t funny before, but now it was horrible. Everything that they had done before was multiplied many times over.” Sensing their imminent exile from the French capital, the Nazis lash out at the local population more viciously than ever, arresting, shooting, and deporting scores of Parisians who had never felt threatened before.

  At the same time, the broader population of Paris is displaying growing public disdain for their Nazi oppressors. On July 14, a huge illegal demonstration of one hundred thousand people marches through the city to celebrate Bastille Day. German troops fire shots in the air to try to contain the crowds, but French policemen stand by and do nothing. The Occupation apparatus is plainly breaking down.

  In the second half of July, Christiane lives through another catastrophe; at the same moment, she dodges another extremely close call. Then, unexpectedly, her parents get their first hopeful news about the fate of their younger son, André.

  Jacqueline has stayed behind with Alex Katlama and the Maquis in the countryside, while Christiane is leading a clandestine life in Paris. She lives with the Rondenays and three other confederates in a secret apartment on avenue Mozart.

  Nevertheless, Christiane continues to visit her parents, without ever giving any details about her secret life. The summer of 1944 is extremely difficult for Jacques and Hélène Boulloche: “They had a deported son,” Christiane remembered, “and two daughters working in the Resistance at a time when the Gestapo seemed especially dangerous. It was hard for them to bear, even though they were in complete agreement with what we were doing. We never talked about it … but in a sense, our involvement was a direct result of everything they had taught us.”

  On July 27, Rondenay tells Christiane she will accompany him to a meeting with Alain de Beaufort, who has just arrived in Paris from the Morvan. But as the temperature inches toward eighty-four degrees on another sweltering Paris day, something makes Rondenay change his mind. At the last minute, he decides to send Christiane to a different rendezvous.

  During June and July alone, de Beaufort has distributed more than 150 tons of arms and supplies for the Maquis in the departments of Aube, Yonne, and Nièvre. He and Rondenay have escaped numerous assassination attempts, including one just ten days earlier, organized by Henri Dupré, a double agent for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service.

  Rondenay has escaped from half a dozen German and Spanish prisons since the beginning of the war. He has carried out dozens of successful sabotage missions, crafted countless fake identity cards, and fought bravely with the Maquis in the French countryside. But on this steamy Thursday, just four weeks before the Liberation of Paris, the luck of these two remarkable Résistants finally runs out.

  Disaster strikes as soon as Rondenay greets de Beaufort at th
e Passy Métro station in the 16th arrondissement — and Gestapo agents with guns drawn swarm around them. De Beaufort tries to escape, and he is shot in the foot. For the next two weeks, both men are brutally tortured, but neither of them ever talks.

  The news about her hero reaches Christiane very quickly. Immediately she goes into her standard routine after every arrest: “There was no question of giving in to panic; we had to act as quickly as possible. We spent the night burning all the incriminating documents in our possession. It was that night when I realized how slowly things could burn!”

  She still has a clandestine apartment on rue de Lille, but she is afraid it won’t be safe there. So she goes to her parents’ apartment for a couple of days instead.

  “Despite everything,” Christiane recalled, “there was no time to be discouraged. I didn’t have time to be miserable because of Jarry’s arrest. There was so much I had to do, as there always was after every arrest: change the contact places, change the mailboxes. At times like this, you feel incredibly useful, because you believe in what you’re doing.

  “At the same time I felt a trap was being set around us. After you’ve survived so many disasters, you say to yourself, ‘I can’t always be so lucky!’ It was exhausting, especially because the atmosphere in Paris was so electric. The Allies were advancing, the Germans were standing their ground. We were truly in a waiting game. On top of everything else, it was incredibly hot!”

  Now Christiane always thinks she is being followed. One day, she is waiting outdoors at a bistro in Saint-Germain-des-Prés to meet a contact, when a strange-looking man begins to stare at her. Gripped with terror, she gets on her bicycle — and the man follows her. Finally he runs straight into her. But it turns out he isn’t trying to arrest her; he only wants to flirt!

  “At times like this, we felt really odd,” Christiane remembered. “We were living on another planet, but we had to act as naturally as we could. It was a completely different world of extraordinary intensity.” Christiane won’t really understand how she feels right now until after the Liberation. Then she will experience “a terrible void: one that was almost impossible to fill.”

  WHILE SHE IS BACK in Paris, her parents receive the first hopeful news they’ve had all year: a two-page letter from André. It is sent from Flossenbürg, a German concentration camp in Bavaria. This is the third camp he has been sent to in three months, after Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

  Official German policy allows prisoners of the camps to write one letter a month,* as long as it is written in German, but for some reason, André has been forced to wait three months before he is permitted to send his first message:

  Dear Father: Finally I am allowed to write you a letter. My health is good, my wound is better and my morale is excellent. I hope to get letters from you soon. I will write you once a month.

  André explains that he is allowed to receive packages, as long as they weigh “less than 5 or 6 kilos.” Among other necessities, he asks for a pullover sweater.

  His sister Jacqueline writes back immediately, describing the family’s joy at receiving his letter and promising that Christiane will send him the requested package. “The conditions of our daily lives are more and more difficult, but they are bearable,” Jacqueline writes. “Of course, there is no possibility of leaving Paris this summer … We embrace you from the bottom of our hearts.”

  A few days later, on August 2, 1944, Hélène writes to her imprisoned son: “We are happy to know you are healthy. We hope to see you again soon. The whole family kisses you very tenderly.”

  TWO DAYS AFER mailing her letter to André, Hélène gets another pleasant surprise: a forty-eight-hour visit from her older son, Robert. Now thirty-one, Robert has never joined the Resistance, although he has provided important information to the Free French from time to time. Like his father, he has kept his government job throughout the war, after being demobilized following the armistice in 1940. Now he is an inspector with the Finance Ministry, posted to Toulouse. A bachelor and a dutiful son, he has traveled to Paris this weekend to visit his beleaguered parents.

  It is now Saturday, August 5, 1944. In the south, the Allies have begun a massive aerial bombardment to prepare for Operation Dragoon, the second Allied invasion of France, which will start in just ten days on the Mediterranean coast between Cannes and Toulon.†

  And in exactly twenty days, the tanks of the 2nd French Armored Division, commanded by General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc, will finally roll into the exhausted capital, to the most rapturous welcome of any reconquering army of modern times.

  But today, the Germans are still in control, food supplies are dwindling, and Parisians are increasingly nervous about the sluggish progress of the Allies toward their capital, two long and stifling months after their spectacular assault on Normandy.

  On Saturday night, Christiane’s aunt and uncle host a small dinner for all the Boulloches who are in Paris this weekend — Christiane and Robert, and fifty-six-year-old Jacques and Hélène. For Christiane, the dinner feels like a parenthesis in the middle of a life of permanent stress. Nothing important is discussed, and among the guests, only Christiane’s parents know about her secret life as a Résistante. Christiane excuses herself around ten thirty and bicycles back to her clandestine apartment on avenue Mozart.

  Her parents and her brother return to the family’s large apartment on avenue d’Eylau. The Boulloches’ servants, Marie and Simone, are asleep in the maids’ rooms nearby when the family retires for the night. The apartment is a short walk from the Palais de Chaillot, the concert hall where Jacqueline had miraculously snatched Christiane from the Nazis’ clutches eight months earlier.

  At three A.M., the deep Sunday morning silence of the pitchblack 16th arrondissement explodes into terror, when the Gestapo storm the third-floor apartment. The Nazis rouse the horrified sleepers from their beds, then bellow the reason for their nocturnal invasion: “We are here to arrest Christiane Boulloche.”

  But Christiane is not here. She is sound asleep in her secret apartment on avenue Mozart.

  So the Nazis seize her father, her mother, and her brother in her place.

  JUST AS THEY HAD after André Boulloche’s arrest, the Gestapo leave the apartment unguarded for an hour or two, with the servants all alone. Marie seizes the moment to telephone Christiane’s aunt Ginette to tell her the terrible news — and to implore her to prevent Christiane’s next visit to her parents, which she is planning to make that very morning.

  But Ginette doesn’t know where Christiane is or how to reach her on the telephone. There is only one thing she can do: At the crack of dawn she dispatches her maid, Odette, to the rond-point de Longchamps, and Christiane’s cousin, Louis, to place du Trocadéro, to try to intercept her niece before she reaches 28 avenue d’Eylau. There the second wave of the Gestapo has camped out in the concierge’s apartment and tacked Christiane’s photograph to the wall.

  Now there is one more miracle. Christiane sets out on her bicycle for her parents’ house around eight thirty on Sunday morning. After a few minutes, to her great annoyance, she gets a flat tire. When she can’t pedal anymore, she changes her route. Normally she would cycle up from Trocadéro to her parents’ apartment. But today, because she is forced to walk her bicycle, she takes the route through the rond-point de Longchamps. Because Christiane is pushing her bicycle down the street, Odette easily intercepts her — seventy yards from her parents’ front door. Christiane knows what Odette has done: “She saved my life.”

  FOR THE NEXT WEEK, the Germans, and then the Milice, the Vichy paramilitary force, terrorize her parents’ apartment building. An elderly woman who tries to visit Hélène Boulloche is detained for three hours; a young girl who comes to visit someone else in the building is stripped and searched.

  As soon as Odette tells Christiane about the arrests, her only concern is to alert the rest of her unit, and then to disappear as quickly as she can. Alone in Paris, without Jacqueline, or any other member of her immediate family,
this twenty-one-year-old secret agent must summon all of her inner strength to escape confusion and despair.

  Later that morning, Christiane runs into a close family friend, Dr. René Cler. When she tells him she is on the run from the Gestapo, the thirty-four-year-old doctor immediately invites her back to his apartment on avenue Sully-Prud’homme. What strikes him most about this brave young woman is her “sense of immediate spontaneity.”‡

  Eight months earlier, Cler had already collaborated with the movement, after Jacqueline Boulloche had arrived “very agitated” at his house for lunch.

  “Our unit has just been arrested,” she declared. “Can we hide our radio transmitter with you?”

  “I had no choice,” the doctor remembered. “So then I passed several unpleasant nights.” He recognized “a remarkable simplicity” in the Boulloche sisters: “For us, it is our duty.”

  A year earlier, the doctor had had his own close call, when he answered a summons from the Gestapo, after they became suspicious of the activities at his apartment. “It was not pleasant. An attractive French girl interrogated me for two or three hours. And there was a sexual current between us. When she went next door to make her report in German, she said, ‘This man came voluntarily to see us, and we should let him go.’ ” And they did.

  Cler decides that it’s too dangerous to lodge Christiane in his fourth-floor apartment. But there is an empty apartment on the sixth floor that belongs to an absent Swedish diplomat, and the concierge allows him to put Christiane in there. Now, not even the members of her own unit know where she is living.

  The apartment building next door is filled with Germans. During the final days before the Liberation, there are German snipers on the roof — and a Senegalese sniper fighting with the Free French in an apartment across the way. Christiane spends most of her days in the doctor’s apartment and her nights in the apartment of the Swedish diplomat. One night when she goes back upstairs, she discovers bullet holes from stray shots lodged in the wall exactly where she had been sleeping.