Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Vernier understood the dangers that Priscilla faced as a British-passport holder whose French documents were not in order. He was in touch with a ‘specialist’ who might sort out some new identity papers. But first, he needed to find Priscilla a less exposed address than a hotel. The best place was a nursing home. He knew a doctor who would provide her with a medical certificate.

  Priscilla presented this to the French police, who forwarded it to the German authorities. On 13 October 1942, SS Untersturmführer Heise signed a dispensation order: ‘In view of the medical certificate that has been presented to me, she is free from having to sign in until 30 November 1942.’ For the remainder of her time in Paris, Priscilla’s address was Dr Devaux’s clinic, 23 Rue Paradier, Ville d’Avray, in Paris’s western suburbs.

  She used the nursing home as a screen. ‘I had to go there once a week and always leave them my telephone number in case the Germans became curious and wanted to see me. This made Emile furious, as he hated me being away from him and he hated the thought that I owed so much to Daniel.’

  Cornet punched Priscilla when he found out what Daniel Vernier had done for her. ‘That was how I learnt one side of his character, which had been kept hidden till then. This insane jealousy.’ Cornet could no longer camouflage his feelings; Priscilla had believed they were about love, but they were about possession. Whenever Vernier’s name was mentioned, there was a violent scene. Priscilla hoped that a meeting would solve matters, but the two men met ‘and hated each other’.

  Her ongoing affair with Cornet had a desolating impact on Vernier. He refused to eat. He looked ill. ‘There was no doubt that I made him suffer cruelly.’

  Priscilla had never felt prettier or more carefree than in her first months with Cornet. She had got into bed with a man who appeared to love her and whose sensuality was appreciated. She felt like a woman for the first time. But her best days with Cornet were over. ‘Being in love suited me. But not Emile. He became more difficult and demanding, and tormented me with questions about my movements, thoughts, actions, secret desires.’

  What had she done this afternoon? She had taken tea with Zoë. How was he to know it was with a woman and not a man?

  He told her: ‘You attract too many people and you show them you are not unmoved by their attentions.’

  He asked: ‘How much do you love me?’

  ‘I haven’t got a tape-measure kind of mind. I love you as much as I am capable of loving.’

  Whoever she spoke to made him jealous: Robert, Zoë, Daniel, Simone, even her divorce lawyer. He said: ‘I want to push them away and say: she is mine, leave her alone.’

  His possessiveness infuriated her almost more than Robert’s passivity. ‘Sometimes I lost my temper with him and stormed out of the café, but he used brute strength to stop me when he caught up; sometimes I wept and then he would be full of remorse and gentle for a while.’

  Vernier begged her to leave Cornet. She refused. ‘However unhappy I was, I felt more alive than I had done before his appearance.’

  But the scenes wore Priscilla out. She could not bear what she called his ‘Gestapo act’. And something else troubled her: Cornet’s means of earning a living.

  ‘One day he would have plenty of money and splash it around. The next day there would be nothing to eat at all. Where did all the money come from when it was there?’ Priscilla in love had been ‘un peu dans la lune’ – head in the clouds. Only when they came back from the countryside to live in the centre of Paris did she realise that her Belgian lover was involved in the black market. ‘I was slightly startled as I had never known any shady characters before and there now appeared in my life quite a number of them.’

  23.

  L’AFFAIRE STOCKLIN

  Who were these shady characters who popped up in Priscilla’s life to protect her from the French and German authorities?

  So much of research involves combing for wayward threads. Most of the time you pluck and what comes away is fluff. Just occasionally, as in fishing, the line goes taut and you feel a tug like a submerged handshake.

  Embedded in one of Cornet’s letters was a reference to a figure whom I failed to invest with significance when I first read it. But Max Stocklin was the one loose strand poking up, from which unravelled the protected and sulphurous underworld of the French Gestapo. From what I discovered about him in his file in the Préfecture de Police, he became my initial suspect for the influential figure who could have persuaded the French police to let Priscilla go.

  Six months after the war, on 21 January 1946, Emile Cornet wrote to Priscilla: ‘I’ve been two days in a row at the Court of Assizes where they are trying Max Stocklin. I was summoned as a witness and did my best for him. He has been condemned to hard labour in perpetuity. The important thing was to save his head.’ Cornet implied that Stocklin was a friend of Priscilla’s, but did not mention what he might have done to deserve the guillotine.

  I had already begun hunting Stocklin down; in German and French history books, in archives in London, Washington and Koblenz. But he was a fugitive footnote, appearing fleetingly, each time spelled differently and in a different guise – Swiss businessman, art dealer, Abwehr spy – and vanishing after the war. In the National Archives in Kew, I read in a report marked ‘Secret’: ‘Max Stoecklin deceased Swiss national, recently executed by the French Government as a German agent.’ And yet Stocklin had been killed off before his time. Not until I opened file No. 305315 in the Préfecture did he stir.

  The person who looked up at me from his mug-shot was clean-shaven, darkly handsome, aged about forty-five. Underneath was printed: STOCKELYNCK. But it was Stocklin all right.

  The name which had led to my aunt’s dossier trailed behind it threads which, once tugged, unspooled from an address in central Paris to Hermann Göring’s estate outside Berlin. From his headquarters at 1 Rue Lord Byron, Max Stocklin ran a hugely profitable Europe-wide operation into which he enticed Cornet, and by extension Priscilla. It was Stocklin who enabled the couple to live well and who provided them with a requisitioned apartment only a few yards from his office. The relationship was intimate enough for Stocklin to summon Cornet to provide the character reference at his prosecution.

  The important document in Stocklin’s police folder was headed ‘l’affaire Stockling’. This was the handwritten transcription of Stocklin’s trial in January 1946. It contained details which had eluded the published record and brought Priscilla out of the clouds.

  Twice married, twice divorced, Max Stocklin was born in 1901, in Basel, to a family who owned a porcelain business. After a childhood on the Rhine, he lived in Marseilles, then moved to Brussels where he shed his first wife and sold, without success, portable microphones and gasogene boilers. But through gasogenes Stocklin met, in 1934, a bon-vivant who rescued him from bankruptcy and upturned his life.

  Hermann Brandl was a mysterious thirty-five-year old Bavarian engineer who worked for a Belgian boiler manufacturer, specialising in a heating-system known as ‘système Otto’. It was a cover. Brandl was an officer of the Cologne section of the Abwehr. He was reasonably close to Admiral Canaris, the Abwehr’s head, and also to Göring, the ultimate controller. Like many unlikely people in Priscilla’s story, Brandl will appear again.

  In 1936, Brandl recruited Stocklin as an agent, ostensibly to sell his ‘Otto’ heaters, but paying him 2,000 francs a month to gather information on Belgian military bases.

  Two years later, purporting to work for a wine company, Max Stocklin was sent to Paris. He rented a house in Saint-Cloud where he installed a clandestine radio transmitter. From the atelier of 11 Avenue de Nancy, Stocklin signalled to Brandl on the outbreak of hostilities, giving information about French aircraft numbers and the location of the military headquarters at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre.

  French security police discovered Stocklin’s transmissions and arrested him on 15 May 1940, two days after the German army crossed the Meuse. His crime carried the death penalty. He was incarcerated in a
camp in Cépoy 70 miles south of Paris while awaiting execution.

  The German invasion saved him. The camp was evacuated and the guards were marching the prisoners south when Stukas attacked. Stocklin seized the chance to escape across the fields with his French cell mate: a falsetto-voiced petty criminal, tall and strong with tiny, dark, cunning eyes, who offered to guide Stocklin back to Paris. Three days later, they stood and watched a German military band marching down the Champs-Elysées.

  Stocklin bid farewell to his cell mate and made a beeline for the Hôtel Lutétia, taken over by the Abwehr. In the black marbled hall, surrounded by boxes and papers, he was reunited with the men he had spied for in Brussels. Among the most important was the intelligence officer who had first employed him, Hermann Brandl.

  Stocklin’s meeting with Brandl could not have been more opportune for either party. Acting under the code name ‘Otto’ – derived from Brandl’s middle name or from his domestic boilers – Brandl was charged by Admiral Canaris with an order that Göring announced at Maxim’s a fortnight after the Occupation: to strip France of everything that Germany’s war effort required. Göring couched his instructions in terms of La Chasse. ‘You must turn yourself into hunting dogs, be on the trail of anything which might be useful to the German people . . .’ The French were expected to meet not only the food and maintenance needs of the occupying army but to satisfy the requirements of Germany’s population at home. Göring’s plan, admitted one German general, was to make France part kitchen garden and part brothel.

  Alongside the official procurement services of the German military, there now sprang up a clandestine system organised by Brandl. He urgently needed trusted agents with a knowledge of France. On the spot he promoted Stocklin to help him.

  Hermann ‘Otto’ Brandl and the massive looting organisation he created with Stocklin’s assistance, known as ‘Bureau Otto’, became an obsession of Gillian Sutro during her research into Priscilla’s activities. ‘He was never in uniform. He spoke very good French. He was very close to Göring for whom he worked with great zeal buying up for a pittance works of art for Göring’s and Hitler’s art collections (Hitler had first choice) or seizing paintings from requisitioned apartments deserted by Jews who had fled. Otto operated in Paris where he had installed the Bureau Otto to which people could bring things for sale. He had agents scavenging for him in the provinces . . . buying up brewers in huge quantities: 50,000 bottles at a time, leather goods, cement, copper, nickel, lead, foie gras by the ton, meat, crates of caviar, turkeys, cattle. Money was no problem, as the vanquished French had to cough up 400 million francs per day for the upkeep of the German Army in occupation; the Germans also had the right to requisition food “à discrétion du vainqueur”. One can imagine what abuses went on.’

  A leading architect of this abusive system was the man who sat across the Paris courtoom from Priscilla’s lover: Cornet’s employer and the funder of Priscilla’s lifestyle.

  ‘Brown hair, very elegant,’ the police clerk wrote. Under a grey overcoat and multi-coloured scarf, Max Stocklin wore an ‘impeccable’ white shirt and red tie. His voice did not rise once in two days of cross-examination.

  Cornet must have known a lot of what he heard in court. It was why he was there: to defend his friend’s character. Stocklin needed Cornet to save his life.

  The charges read out by the liberated French prosecutor against Max Stocklin for his wartime activities in France were serious:

  He was head of counter-espionage in the Haute-Savoie region.

  He had been sentenced to death in absentia for attempting to set up a clandestine radio post near Algiers.

  He had tried to bribe a policeman for information about General Weygand and the French fleet in Toulon.

  All false, Stocklin insisted. ‘I spied before the war, it’s true, but I decided to give it up and concentrate on business. After the armistice, I was just a black market collaborator.’

  But his black market dealings constituted Stocklin’s gravest crime. This ‘dangerous enemy agent’ was none other than ‘the principal agent of “Otto” Brandl’.

  Rules prevented the Germans from dealing directly with their French suppliers. Brandl appointed intermediaries like Stocklin to open secret purchasing offices, all answerable to Bureau Otto. Stocklin camouflaged his as a French industrial research body.

  Why did the Germans set up such offices? Why not grab what they wanted? German policy was based on cynicism and deception. While Germany was still trying to win the rest of the war, it needed a docile France on side. To give the impression that Vichy was in charge of France’s affairs, everything had to appear above board, and prices were kept fixed to maintain the propaganda of Pétain’s programme of ‘German–French economic collaboration’. But this collaboration was a fantasy. The reason that so much food was rationed, eventually making the French among the worst fed in Europe, was because most of France’s wheat, fruit, vegetables, butter and meat was syphoned back to Germany. Not only that, the French were financing the operation from the Vichy treasury.

  It is impossible to overestimate the spread of Bureau Otto’s tentacles. Brandl did not limit his purchases to the needs of the German troops, but was interested in buying ‘absolutely anything the French offered’, according to Fabienne Jamet – owner of the lavish brothel One-Two-Two, the windowless seven-storey building in Rue de Provence where many of Brandl’s transactions took place. Here, and in the Traveller’s Club on the Champs-Elysées, Brandl bought soap, leather, metal, carpets, playing cards: all by the ton. ‘The list of things he required was endless and he paid cash on the nail.’

  Near the top of the list were works of art. Brandl’s principal agent Stocklin was charged with stealing Matisse’s The Open Window from the Paul Rosenberg collection, and for selling to Hitler, for 350,000 francs, Matisse’s Female Nude in a Yellow Chair. And yet looted paintings were not the cornerstone of Stocklin’s trafficking. His main concern was to snap up French textiles, alcohol and telegraph wire, and ship these on to Germany, for which he required reliable, fast drivers. This was Cornet’s attraction: in his last major race before the war, driving an Alfa Romeo 1.8, Cornet had finished seventh in the 1938 Antwerp Grand Prix.

  In October 1940, Stocklin opened a purchasing office at 1 Rue Lord Byron. The Bureau d’Etudes Minières Industrielles et Commerciales (BEMIC) took over suites 425–427 on the fourth floor and purported to be a company investigating the feasibility of manufacturing electric cars.

  Stocklin’s car passed Priscilla’s entrance, on his way to Brandl’s office in Rue Adolphe-Yvon. Between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. every afternoon, representatives of the purchasing offices turned up with samples to be rejected or accepted. Reports speak of about fifty representatives, the majority of them women. They took care not to give their full identities; a pronoun sufficed. There were penalties for revealing names or addresses. Stocklin, calling himself ‘Guy Max’, visited often.

  His sample accepted, Stocklin received an order form for delivery to a warehouse in the Saint-Ouen docks north of Paris. There was no other paper trail involved, no tax. Payment was made in new-minted French francs.

  Bureau Otto’s principal cashier has left a picture of how the purchase worked. A trusted agent like Stocklin – or one of his nominees like Cornet – pulled up in a car carrying four men armed with machine guns who guarded the vehicle while Stocklin loaded sacks containing the bank notes. One afternoon in October 1941, the cashier issued 322 million francs, remitted from the daily amount of 400 million francs that Article 18 of the Armstice required the Vichy government to hand over to the occupying forces. This money was used to buy and ferry goods. To any French policeman who stopped his car or lorry, Cornet flashed a special yellow and red striped Ausweis which authorised him to circulate at any time, to carry a gun and to count on the assistance of German police, who could do what they liked. An instruction printed in French and German stated: ‘The French authorities have no jurisdiction over the bearer’, and declare
d that the lorry’s contents could not be stopped or inspected by French police. These were the goods, the cars and the lorries, but most of all the money, delivered in one million franc bricks, which passed through Cornet’s hands. Priscilla’s Belgian lover and former motor-ace was merely pursuing his wartime trade when he wrote to her after Paris was liberated: ‘I’ve got a job that suits me perfectly. I drive a lot for the Interallied Mission, I drive at least a thousand miles a week, and I’m quite satisfied.’

  Brandl’s system was failsafe. The French provided the funds for the Germans to pillage their country. That is why the Germans were not worried, initially, when the situation created both a French and a German black market competing for the same items. The price was driven up, but the French were paying anyway. The daily turnover of the offices under Brandl’s control made ‘Doctor Otto’ the uncontested Godfather of this combined black market. Few benefited more from Brandl’s patronage than Cornet and Priscilla’s friend Max Stocklin.