The Charlemagne Murders

by Douglass, Carl;

Corporal Daniel Olsen Mountie with the RCMP at the Atlin, BC station

  Nasnana Athabaskan girl, Alaskan Bear Lodge worker

  Asaaluk Tlingit girl from Hoonah, Alaskan Bear Lodge worker

  Major Darrin Higgins Chief officer MCU, Alaska State Police, in Juneau

  Lt. Oscar Perez MCU (Juneau) first responding officer

  Tucker Nicholsen SAC, 83rd MP Det CID, Fort Richardson, Alaska, new head of the investigation of Gen. Gabler’s murder

  Henry and Anotklosh Peratrovich Hoonah Tlingit headmen

  Sergeant Major Owen Briggs, USA Senior NCO in charge of Bad Kreuznach Allied slave camp

  Superintendent Axel Baird INTERPOL agent in charge in New York City, investigating the death of Gen. Glen Gabler

  AAG Spencer Reynolds Assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the DOJ of the US

  DFBI Warren Brent Gaines Director of the FBI

  Special Agent Xavier Gonzales-Soto FBI agent in charge of interrogating Michaele

  Lydia Heppleweight Fort Worth court stenographer

  Tom Packer and Eldred Drake Texas Rangers from Presidio, Texas

  Texas Ranger captain, Reggie Cutler Chief Texas Ranger headquarters, Austin, Texas

  Dayne Brown Tarrant County Deputy Sheriff

  Sgt. Billie Wayne McAfee Fort Worth PD Sergeant

  Ruth Digby Tarrant County (Fort Worth) Elmwood Sanatorium evening nurse

  Evert Williams American investment banker with the Negro Industrial Bank of Washington

  Creighton Wilberforce American investment banker, vicepresident of Bank of America

  Giuseppe “The Boss” D’Aquila American Mafioso involved in financial crimes

  Gaetano “Numbers” Terranova American Mafioso involved in financial crimes

  Kenneth Lawson Donald Martin Allenton CIA agent involved in Operation Paper Clip

  Donald Martin Allenton CIA agent involved in Operation Paper Clip

  Evert Williams Investment banker from the Negro Industrial Bank of Washington—the oldest and largest Negro-owned commercial bank in the metropolitan Washington, DC, region. The bank partially funded the Pueblo Parque National Nahuel Huapi Project

  ARGENTINES

  Carlos Aguillara-Dominguez, aka Hörst Dietsel Argentine murder victim

  Anna Maria Lobos Carlos’s mistress

  Manuel de Jesus Sargentopolicíaprovbsas Policía de la Provincia de Córdoba, PPC [Corporal, Police of the Province of Córdoba]

  José Emanuel de Corsos Teniente Policía de la Provincia de Policía de Córdoba, PPC [Detective, Police of the Province of Córdoba]

  Gerhardt Möller Oficial de Policía [Police Officer] Policía de la Provincia de Córdoba, PPC

  Adolf Henckel Inspector de Policia [Inspector of Police—third ranking field officer in the department] de la Provincia de Policía de Córdoba, PPC

  Dr. Konrad Schmidt von Dresden Córdoba Provincial Police Medical Examiner

  Erich Walther Boehme Former SS Hauptsturmführer, and current ODESSA officer in Bariloche, Argentina.

  Xavier Manriquez-Huelsmann Head of the law firm of Xavier Manriquez-Huelsmann and Mitarbeiter Abogados la Ley representing the Pueblo Parque National Nahuel Huapi Project

  Daniel Urquiza Project manager of the Pueblo Parque National Nahuel Huapi Project

  Heinrich Stracher Artist/architect/civil engineer. Designer of the Pueblo Parque National Nahuel Huapi Project

  Gunther Horn Banker who partially funded the Pueblo Parque National Nahuel Huapi Project

  Christof Weishuhn Chilean—Puerto Montt—Club Aleman Nazi sympathizer

  FRENCH

  Général de division (Ret.) Étienne Malboeuf French murder victim

  Monica Roussin-Malboeuf General Malboeuf’s wife

  Damien Malboeuf Estranged son of Gen. Malboeuf

  René Malboeuf Estranged son of Gen. Malboeuf

  Antoinette de Baudry Malboeuf’s mistress

  Grégoire Laurent De Vincent Enquêteur [plain clothes detective of the Paris police]

  Gendarmerie Lieutenant Sylvain Piétri Research Unit Officer-Assistant to Inspector De Vincent

  Benedettu Paganucci Corsican syndicate criminal and former lover of Antoinette de Baudry

  Dominic Rizzuto Associate of Paganucci

  Tony Lagomarsino Associate of Paganucci

  Eugène Léon Dentremont Senior Detective Chief Superintendent of INTERPOL

  Superintendent Guy Mutz Chief of the INTERPOL office in the western suburb of St. Cloud in Paris

  Marianne de la Reynie Senior INTERPOL technician, Forensic Specialist

  Ronald Swing INTERPOL Secretary General

  Jean-Yves Sarrazin Current French planter in Vietnam, former foreign Legion colonel Danvier

  Col. Col. Didier Amirault French foreign Legionnaire in Algeria

  Lt. Col. Édouard Melerine French foreign Legionnaire in Algeria

  Captaine Émile Duris Commandant of the EMT [État-major tactique, Tactical Command Post], La Légion Étrangère [French Foreign Legion], Sidi-bel-Abbès, Algeria

  BRITISH

  Lieutenant-General Sir Cyril Goeffrey Robert Hill-Brownwell, RA, Ret British murder victim

  Major Algernon Donelly, RA Witness of British murder

  Clifford Brewster Major Domo at the Army and Navy Club where the British murder took place

  Detective Chief Inspector Lincoln Crandall-White. New Scotland Yard senior homicide detective

  DI [Detective Inspector] Angela Snowden New Scotland Yard homicide detective

  DI [Detective Inspector] Anthony Bourden-Clift New Scotland Yard homicide detective

  Doctor Evan Goodefellow Physician at Royal Brompton Sanatorium

  ISRAELIS

  Levi Appleman ben Cohen [“C”] Director of Mossad, involved in Project Save the Generals

  Moises Silverman Senior covert Mossad agent involved in Project Save the Generals

  Davido Parades Mossad agent-in-place in Bariloche, Argentina, involved in Project Save the Generals

  Lev Mizrahi Leader of the Mossad kidon [assassination] squad involved in Project Save the Generals

  Abraham Levy Senior katsa [Mossad field officer] tasked with the leadership of Project Save the Generals

  III. A BRIEF NONFICTION HISTORY OF THE CHARLEMAGNE DIVISION

  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

  -Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities, opening paragraph, London: Chapman & Hall, April-

  November, 1859

  “Someone praising a man for his foolhardy bravery, Cato the elder said, ‘There is a wide difference between true courage and a mere contempt for life.’”

  -Plutarch

  The book—The Charlemagne Murders—is a novel, a fiction, a story, and most certainly is not a factual history of the 33rd Waffen-Grenadier Division [Der SS (Französische NR 1 Division Charlemagne)]. The division, however, certainly existed—as incredible as it may seem—because literally thousands of Frenchmen fought—with full knowledge of what they were doing—for Germany’s Nazis, and in the most feared and hated division in the armed forces—Der Schutzstaffel or SS—or as the Germans euphemistically called them: the protection squadron or defense corps. The SS was an elite, jingoistic, military, paramilitary, and police unit sworn to fanatical personal fealty to Adolf Hitler and all he advocated and practiced. That is in the face of the fact—for the Frenchmen involved—that Nazi armies invaded and occupied France and subjected the French to terrible treatment and humiliation such as the atroc
ities of Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane. Why would any patriotic Frenchman do such a thing, for apparently the volunteers regarded themselves as patriots?

  To understand the underlying motivation, it is necessary to see the historical perspective of the subset of Frenchmen who saw socialism and communism as the greatest threat against civilization and French values that was ever conceived. From 1934 onward, French communism—the PCF or Popular Front—openly supported Stalin and the Russian Communist Party socially, politically, and financially and regarded the worst threat to France to be Hitler’s Nazism. The early communist party began to resist all overtures towards Hitler and to demonstrate against war. The demonstrations became progressively violent, and the party became increasingly active in illegal and clandestine activities.

  Hardcore nationalist anticommunist families fought back politically, financially, and as an insurgency. Their sons became imbued and seduced by the anticommunist rhetoric. Hitler’s burning of the Reichstag signaled to the French that invasion was imminent, and the communists launched a fight to protect the nation against the Nazi threat. In 1934, the far right wing staged riots to protest the actions of the communists. The growing strength of the PCF/communist party in France alarmed thousands of right wing-leaning French patriots by their rhetoric and actions. It was widely presumed that atheistic communism was set to take over the world and destroy civilization as the conservative French knew it. They sent their sons to Germany in the thousands to join in the only effective organization acting against the apparently overwhelming influence and power of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Those sons stayed in their French units, and a considerable number of them proved their loyalty to Hitler by becoming worthy to be in the SS.

  The history of the Charlemagne Division began decades earlier in the trench carnage of World War I. Postwar France was a place of chaos, political and social unrest, and economic distress; and the Frenchmen who returned home found a much changed and inhospitable homeland. The French had won the war technically; but it was a hollow victory: one and a half million men were killed and four million were wounded, which overwhelmed France’s depleted resources in the aftermath of the most horrific war in the world’s history. Much of that devastating war took place in France itself, and a significant portion of northern France was in ruins.

  Between the end of the war and 1940 when the next war began in earnest, France had forty-two governments—averaging about six months each in duration. This chaotic and ruined France was the seedbed of French communism among the young people in the desperate working class. They—much like the poor Muslims of the current era—were easily radicalized. They stormed the Bastille and started the Paris Commune.

  The old guard right wing families were aghast at the growing power, radicalism, and threat posed by the ever-increasing menace of the far Left. That majority segment of the French populace balanced the extremes of the Left by joining the politics of the far Right. Traditional monarchists, working-class nationalists, big business, and the firmly entrenched French bourgeoisie came together in an unlikely union whose core purpose was to defeat communism and to restore law and order, whatever the cost. L’Action Française became the focus group to stand up to the evils of communism, as the Right deemed them.

  The extremists of the Right matched rhetoric for rhetoric, riot for riot, and armed conflict for armed conflict with the Left. On the Right, Great War veterans flocked to such groups as the Croix de Feu with its penchant for armed response and secret paramilitary activity. The youth of Right wing families joined organizations such as the Jeunesses Patriotes which became the forerunner of the Hitler Youth in neighboring Germany. In 1934, the Right staged bloody riots with protracted fighting between French police and the Right-wingers. The more moderate French reacted by electing left-leaning governments, especially that led by Prime Minister Léon Blum. It was not inconsequential for the anti-Semite Right that Blum was Jewish. That inflamed the Right’s core bigotry and led to an approval of the Nazi policies being unleashed in Germany. The Right seethed under what it felt to be unfair treatment by the socialist/communist regimes of the country and longed for revenge.

  Many on the Right so despised the Jewish, communist, rabble-led governments that they espoused a united states of Europe with a bent towards approval of Germany’s policies; and, after the invasion, collaboration with the Nazis. Although today’s perspective is much different, at the time, the prism through which the Right saw the world of France, such ideology, political stances, and intellectual writing favored a world of cooperation between Nazi Germany and Right wing France. A generation of thousands of Frenchmen was reared in that milieu.

  Imperial Germany was created by unifiying disparate German states by the staunch nationalist Otto von Bismarck in the late nineteenth century after German victories in European conflicts. World War I was a challenge by the power and economic strength of Germany against the governments and economies of Europe and later the United States. The humiliating defeat of Germany cost them precious land: Schleswig-Holstein was ceded to Denmark, Eupen-Malmédy to Belgium, and Danzig to Poland, and Alsase-Lorraine was returned to France. War reparations required by the Treaty of Versailles were crippling. The Spanish flu ravaged the European world, including Germany, all still reeling from the Great War. A British blockade resulted in food shortages and near-starvation. Then, the coup de grâce came to any thought of a return to democracy by the Germans in the shape of the Great Depression.

  Enter the National Socialist Party—the Nazis—and its charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler. Very soon, the new chancellor—the putative Fúhrer—abandoned any pretense of paying reparations, of having an emasculated German military, or allowing the hated Jewish race any longer to be the ruling class, as Hitler saw them. He rearmed Germany, rounded up the Jews and other undesirables, and created an intensely well-ordered and efficient government with only Nazis allowed to govern.

  In part to balance his own power against that of the German military—the Wehrmacht—Hitler established his own military organization, the SS, which was dedicated to his principles of anti-Semitism,

  Aryan supremacy, and the establishment of a United States of Europe with Hitler’s Germany at the helm. This fit the aspirations and ideologies of the French Right wing to a T, and French youth flocked to join the dynamic movement in Europe—which was deemed to be the answer to France’s quagmire problems as well as those in Germany. The SS started as a protection unit for the Fúhrer, evolved into a national police force, and morphed into his personal political army.

  It was deemed to be a singular honor that a unit of Frenchmen should be accepted as a fully recognized Waffen SS division. Other units were formed by Danes, Belgians, Norwegians, Dutch, Estonia, Latvia, the Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, and even Poles. Altogether, there were 200,000 volunteers in the SS from other countries including Great Britain: there were 40,000 Spanish volunteers, 40,000 volunteers from Belgium, 50,000 Dutch volunteers, and three divisions from Finland. Late in the war, Soviet opponents of Stalin, personnel from the Soviet Union, including the Caucasian Muslims, Turkestanis, Crimean Tatars, ethnic Ukrainians and Russians, and Cossacks were absorbed into the Wehrmacht, but the Charlemagne Division’s all-French makeup was unusual, if not unique.

  Although the story of the division has largely been lost to any but inquisitive historians, it should be remembered that the transition of Frenchmen into sociopathic German SS paramilitarists was not just a social and political movement. It is in fact a story of French individuals who made a conscious choice to turn their back on their country and to fight for a murderous enemy. The 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne (1st French) and Charlemagne Regiment are collective names used for units of French volunteers in the Wehrmacht and later Waffen-SS during World War II. From estimates of 7,400 to 11,000 at its peak in 1944, the strength of the Division fell to just sixty men in May 1945. Even late in the war, after it was clear that Germany’s cause was lost—and the Waffen SS was known worldwide as a
hiss and a byword—Frenchmen still joined up and participated in the barbarities being committed on the Eastern Front. They recognized and later admitted that they understood the horrors of the actions of the SS, but they pitied the German elitists because they faced the world alone as a crumbling bulwark against the inevitable encroachment of godless communism.

  The Frenchmen were volunteers, not men unwillingly pressed into service. They came from common bourgoise families and had no prior strong political involvement, from militarists produced by the long tradition of French men of war, and many had served France in the Great War and in Indochina and North Africa. The ranks of the Charlemagne Division included such diversity as former teachers and school boys, farmers, and clerks, along with the warriors. At intervals, there were as many as 20,000 Frenchmen in the Charlemagne Division from France, and there was a Flemish Division from Flanders. At first, the volunteers for the LVF [Légion des Voluntaires Français] had to be Aryan and in good health. At that point, there was an unspoken policy that the volunteers come from good Catholic families and have the appropriate political convictions.

  The majority of these men and their families were fearful anticommunists who were galvanized into action by the Russian invasion of Finland in 1939. By the following year, Germany itself had ten million young men of its own of which six and a half million were part of the German military machine. They hardly lacked for manpower at the time. Some 50,000 were in the SS, quite a sufficient number to commit the atrocities they were already perpetrating. Nevertheless, young Frenchmen flocked to Germany to join up. In large part, this enthusiasm for Germany was a result of a sort of ennui of defeatism and political despair that gripped France.

  In actual fact, France was a vastly superior military force than Germany, and Germany was occupied with its invasion of Poland and would have been very hard-pressed to have protected its western border and to have withstood a second war front with France. France missed its opportunity—as did the rest of the civilized world—to stop the onslaught of Nazism that was beginning to sweep Europe.