by Bower, Tom
After three days’ leave, Barbie returned to duty and claims that he was ordered to finish the job. Cahn and his friends had been condemned to death. ‘I was put in charge of the firing squad. One of the condemned asked to hear an American hit record, and then we shot them. I really felt quite ill seeing their brains squirting out all over the place.’ For his services, on 20 April, Barbie was awarded the Iron Cross, second class.
Pressure on the Jews increased. On 14 May, a bomb was thrown into a German officers club in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. Although the evidence suggests that it was thrown not by Jews but by a resistance group, the Germans decided that the Jews should suffer the reprisals; this time they adopted a more subtle approach. On the morning of 11 June, Barbie arrived at the offices of the Jewish Council, the organisation set up by the Germans to represent Dutch Jews. To the astonishment of the two co-presidents, Abraham Asscher and David Cohen, Barbie politely introduced himself and shook both of them by the hand. Barbie confessed that the Germans had a problem, although he confided that it would be relatively easy to find a solution. Three hundred Jewish apprentices had been forced to leave their training camp, the lieutenant explained; but, after reconsideration, the Germans had decided that the boys should be allowed to return. Rather than collecting the boys by driving around the streets, the Germans wanted to write individually to the boys and advise them of the good news. Barbie therefore needed a list with the boys’ addresses. Faced with so polite and reasonable a man, Cohen handed over the list and Barbie, still the soul of courtesy, bade his leave.
That afternoon, Cohen and Asscher were called down to police headquarters. To both it seemed to be a routine summons, except that they were kept waiting endlessly. At 6.00 p.m., Asscher was allowed to phone his home: paralysed with horror, he listened to the news that the Germans had just completed a massive round-up of young Jews. An hour later, the two numbed leaders were taken to SD commander Lages’ room. The boys had been arrested, said Lages, as a reprisal for the bomb attack. Cohen and Asscher’s pleas for mercy were curtly ignored. To complete their misery, they were taken out of the building past the Jewish boys, who were standing in long rows. Both whispered despondent words of comfort, but soon found themselves alone and miserable on the street. All the boys were deported to Mathausen and were dead before the end of the year, some of them used for early gas experiments in summer 1941.
Just days after that coup, Barbie’s daughter, Ute Regine, was born in Trier. His notification of this fact to headquarters in Berlin on 4 July was from Amsterdam, but it is unlikely that he stayed for much longer in the city. Although it does not appear on his official service record, he travelled east via Königsberg and was attached to a special commando group whose mission was to support the German invasion of Russia. During the initial weeks of that ferocious advance, Barbie was employed fighting Russian partisans with a Gestapo unit. It was an introduction to cruder methods of interrogation and to the low value that Germans placed on their enemies’ lives. Homes were needlessly destroyed, women and children murdered and men brutally tortured to extract information. If Barbie is a sadist, it was during those months in Russia that he recognised the possibility of satisfying his pleasure.
In spring 1942, he was recalled to Berlin and assigned a delicate mission which needed a French speaker. He was sent as security chief to Gex, a French town on the Swiss border now under German occupation, to kidnap Alexander Foote, an agent working for Moscow with Leopold Trepper. Foote was living in Geneva. Barbie’s brief was to arrange his kidnap and bring him back to occupied France. Barbie’s base in Gex was a house which actually stood on the Franco-Swiss border. During the preparations for the kidnap, Barbie walked into the house in France, changed his clothes and walked out the other side into Switzerland. Fundamental to the success of the mission was a successful border-crossing by car. Barbie claims that he solved this problem by befriending the chief of the Swiss customs post in Gex. In return for helping him to meet his girlfriend in France, he was promised that he could drive through the border without a search. Headquarters in Berlin gave the green light, Barbie put the rehearsals into practice, but Foote suddenly disappeared. Barbie’s next posting, in June, was to Dijon.
France in summer 1942 was still a very pleasant command for German soldiers. The French were relatively benign, there was good food and the occupiers enjoyed a privileged existence; Dijon was quiet, with very few partisan attacks. But at German military command headquarters there was a firm sense that the days of sympathy were drawing to a close. The unoccupied southern part of France, ruled by the collaborationist French government, was hosting too many anti-German groups. Lyons, France’s second largest city, had become in name at least the capital of the nation’s resistance. Plans were drawn up to occupy Vichy France. It just needed an excuse to implement them and that was conveniently provided by the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa. On 11 November, the German army crossed the demarcation line. Klaus Barbie, recently transferred from section VI to section IV, arrived in Lyons as head of the Gestapo.
THE BETRAYAL
With hindsight, France in 1940 was in no state either to oppose the invading armies, or to organise an effective underground resistance to German occupation. Over the previous decade, deep political divisions, aggravated by a spate of public scandals, had resulted in the chronic series of weak governments that characterised the last days of the Third Republic. The mood of the country was one of despondency and exhaustion. The government’s reluctant declaration of war in September 1939 was, to the majority of the French, an ominous harbinger of chaos – instant bloodshed and devastation seemed inevitable.
Instead, the first eight months of the war were comparatively uneventful, and when the invasion finally came in May 1940, a dispirited, disorganised, even mutinous French army was no match for the outstanding military tactics of the Wehrmacht. There was scant enthusiasm to defend the ‘rotten’ Third Republic, and with considerable relief, France capitulated on 17 June at the end of a campaign that had lasted only six weeks. Her proud military reputation in ruins, her government divided, her people so paralysed by confusion that some even welcomed the swift victory of the invaders, it seemed impossible to believe that France would ever be able to produce a resistance force capable of troubling Barbie’s Gestapo in Lyons.
The German army had reached the outskirts of Lyons on 1 June. Terrified by the ferocious bombardment of Bron airport, about half the city’s population of 500,000 immediately fled south. Only a few disparate army units, including a company of Senegalese troops, patriotically stood their ground waiting to defend the town. Contemptuously, the Germans held back until 19 June, two days after the government’s formal surrender, and entered the city virtually unopposed. Barely any townspeople were on the streets to see the conquerors march in, watch the Swastika replace the Tricolour, and witness the handful of brave but futile acts of resistance. ‘What silence,’ commented an awed but melancholy observer. ‘One could sense the flow of the Rhône.’
The occupation of Lyons lasted less than three weeks. Suspicious of the French, Hitler was as uncertain then as he remained throughout the war about the role France should play in the Thousand Year Reich. Total occupation seemed an unnecessary liability and since France had, unprompted, delivered a government which seemed more than willing to collaborate, dividing the country was an ideal solution. Paris and the north would be ruled by the German army while below the demarcation line Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval, based in the spa town of Vichy, would head an ostensibly independent government of fourteen million people. Hitler’s solution produced a very uneasy peace but it momentarily silenced most anti-German feelings.
The German army pulled out of Lyons on 7 July. In the cellars of the Prefecture lay twenty-six rotting corpses of black Senegalese soldiers who had been captured outside the city, the first victims in Lyons of German racialism. News of the massacre provoked no demonstrations of anger or resentment. The German withdrawal was simply greete
d with relief and the city, like the rest of the country, resumed life as if little had changed. Only those who were determined to oppose both the Germans and the armistice faced an unenviable dilemma. To stay meant acceptance of the defeat, to answer de Gaulle’s ambitious call to join him in London would be akin to betrayal, even treason. Most decided to stay. If they were soldiers, their only act of resistance was to hide their weapons in the hope of using them in the impenetrable future.
For those very few Frenchmen who, in summer 1940, instinctively felt that they could neither live nor collaborate with the Germans, Lyons was a natural destination. South of the demarcation line, it was the nearest ‘free’ city to the capital. Politically conservative and without the pretensions of Paris, it stood at the crossroads of the nation’s transport system, divided by the rivers Rhône and Saône with rail and road connections to every city. Its sheer size and its warren-like network of passages and streets made it, in the early years of the war, an ideal refuge for those seeking anonymity. The former capital of Roman-occupied Gaul became the ‘natural birthplace’ of the French Resistance.
Resistance in the early months meant little more than a discreet and seditious discussion of opposition to the government. Among those who had emigrated to the south were many of the nation’s leading journalists, who felt unable to write for Paris’s censored press. Some managed to print a handful of primitive pamphlets appealing for support and opposing the collaborationist government. Others scrawled slogans on walls. But the popularity of the First World War hero, Pétain, seemed indestructible. When he visited the city on 18 November, he was greeted by no fewer than 150,000 people. De Gaulle’s answer to this was an appeal from London for the streets to be deserted for one hour on New Year’s Day. The response appeared to be overwhelming but in fact meant very little.
A lack of political leadership frustrated the immediate growth of the Resistance. The dismay and disillusionment with pre-war politicians persisted into the occupation. None of them became leaders of the underground movement and none of the violent pre-war animosities ever disappeared. France’s defeat provoked a bloody civil war between pro-Armistice and Resistance factions which the Germans skilfully and ruthlessly exploited. It took more than a year for some of the antagonists even to consider temporarily setting aside their differences to face the common enemy. Lyons was the setting for the sensitive negotiations and vital compromises which led to the creation of the national Resistance movement. But it was a difficult and hazardous birth, repeatedly thwarted after Barbie’s arrival.
During the first year, three distinct, non-communist resistance movements developed, all based in Lyons but each determinedly independent of the others because of the political views and personalities of their leaders. Henri Frenay led the largest group, ‘Combat’, Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie headed ‘Libération’, and Jean-Pierre Lévy founded ‘Francs-Tireurs’. They were an incompatible trio. Frenay was a diligent, methodical ex-officer, an organiser who was simultaneously careful and brave, yet aggressively ambitious to become leader of the whole secret army. Equally brave, Astier had the opposite temperament: a swashbuckling, hot-headed charmer, he found Frenay lacklustre and unattractive. Levy was at neither extreme and tried to act as conciliator.
The groups had different specialities and strengths among various professions in different areas of the country. In theory they had penetrated the government, the telephone and postal services, the railways and the police. All had tenuous links with small but committed groups of refugees stranded in France: expelled Alsatians, Belgians, Poles, rootless survivors from the Spanish civil war and Jews escaping persecution were determined to fight the Germans, even if the French were reluctant. But the three groups were handicapped by political and personality struggles. During that first year their leaders met to discuss common aims but then withdrew to protect their separate identities, political views, methods and membership. Active support for the Resistance had probably diminished by the end of the year. Deprived of money, weapons, and experience, it was a victim of the harmony created by Vichy and Berlin.
France’s cosy fiction ended on 21 June 1941 with the German invasion of Russia. Overnight, the French communists, who had until then been compromised and politically disarmed by the non-aggression agreement in 1939 between Nazi Germany and communist Russia, submerged themselves into the underground and declared war on the occupation army. Resistance groups began negotiating, more pamphlets appeared and sabotage increased. For the first time, unarmed German soldiers were assassinated on the streets, provoking, as intended, vicious reprisals. Dozens of innocent Frenchmen were summarily shot, straining French tolerance of the occupation and undermining the comforting myth that the Germans were, if not welcome, at least decent friends. The honeymoon relationship was shaken but it was not destroyed; most of those executed were imprisoned communists.
Building an underground army posed enormous risks. The tradecraft of a guerrilla war still had to be learnt: isolation cells, dead-letterboxes, cover names, safe houses, chains of command and above all rigorous discretion. Ignorant and inexperienced, all the groups were riddled at best with novices, at worst with informers. Lyons, as a Resistance mecca for all of France, was inevitably heavily policed. Diligently and obediently the Vichy police around Lyons carried out continuous swoops, successfully arresting not only fledgling members of the Resistance, but also agents sent from Britain by the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
The relationship between the Resistance movement and the SOE was a delicate one. There are innumerable historic landmarks establishing the almost unshakeable antagonism between Britain and France and old prejudices born with the Battle of Hastings and the burning of Joan of Arc at the stake were inevitably reconfirmed when the British abandoned the French in June 1940 and fled back across the Channel from Dunkirk. Propagandists in Berlin and Paris found little difficulty convincing many Frenchmen that the British were not their natural allies. Their message seemed to receive irrefutable confirmation when, on 4 July 1940, the British (after issuing an ultimatum that it should either join the Allies or scuttle itself) destroyed the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, with the loss of 1267 French sailors. This severely complicated Britain’s relationship with the Resistance not only in France, but also in London. The French nation heard only about the carnage and not about the warning and ultimatum.
Throughout the war neither the British nor the American government were prepared to treat de Gaulle as the official representative of a French government in exile. Both allies were unsure to the point of actual distrust about exactly how much support he could command in France and what policies he would pursue once the country was liberated. The same distrust spilled over into SOE and other Resistance operations.
In summer 1941, without consulting de Gaulle’s Free French forces, SOE headquarters in Baker Street parachuted the first of a dozen British agents into the area near unoccupied Lyons to contact sympathetic Frenchmen and train them into the nucleus of a fighting force. During the first fifteen months, five networks were established around the city: NEWSAGENT, PIMENTO, HECKLER, GREENHEART and SPRUCE. Most of the agents arrived suffering from a combination of bad training, inappropriate equipment, appalling breaches of the fundamental rules of self-protection, and vicious personality differences with their intended colleagues.
All the agents sent to Lyons had to co-operate either with Phillipe de Vomécourt or Georges Dubourdin. Vomécourt was domineering, intemperate and reckless, but also brave and imaginative. Dubourdin was the opposite. An impossible mix for any newcomer who, parachuting into a dark, hostile country, expected at least friendly support. Only Virginia Hall, a sober thirty-five-year-old American, proved a sure guide and friend. Despite her artificial leg, she built a credible relationship with the local gendarmerie, passing herself off as an American journalist.
Among the early arrivals were Ben Cowburn, a Lancashire oil technician, and radio operators Denis Rake and American-born Edward Wilkinson, neither of
whom had sets. Cowburn immediately began organising small but successful acts of sabotage, but the other two wandered desperately around the zone looking for a base, a radio set and the organisation which could channel their courage and training into some recognisable achievement. On 13 August they met a newly-arrived SOE agent, Richard Heslop, who had just landed by boat, and all three headed towards Limoges. Two days later they were arrested by French police. All three denied anything but a passing acquaintance – a futile excuse since both Wilkinson and Rake had brand new banknotes which ran in perfect consecutive order, and identity cards which, although allegedly issued in different towns, were written in the same handwriting. To Heslop’s fury, Rake immediately admitted his identity. All three were imprisoned for three months, simultaneously punished by the French yet begrudgingly protected from the Germans.
On 28 June 1942, three other British agents arrived by parachute near Tours: Brian Stonehouse, a fashion artist turned radio operator, and two brothers, Alfred and Henry Newton. They were met but not greeted by Vomécourt. Brusquely Vomécourt ordered Stonehouse to separate from the Newtons and travel to Lyons. After a long delay because of illness and mishaps, he finally began transmitting for several SOE groups operating out of Lyons, but not for the Newtons.
