by Bower, Tom
The brothers had been worried since early February that, despite their efforts, their security had been breached by careless French helpers. By March, according to the account written by Jack Thomas, they were convinced that the Germans had obtained their full description from a Frenchman dressed as a cleric, whom they called ‘the Bishop’. They had rejected his offer of secret film of the German construction of the ‘Atlantic wall’, fearing that the deal had been set up by the Germans to confirm that they were British spies.
Awaiting denunciation at any moment, the brothers had spent the last weeks of March hidden in a factory, waiting for finalisation of their escape to Spain and then back to England. As fast as their escape routes were established, the Gestapo efficiently arrested their contacts. Dragnets masterminded by Barbie pulled in the owners of safe houses, radio operators and couriers with money belts intact. At last, by 4 April, it seemed that a safe route had been established.
That evening, the brothers sat down to a farewell meal. With them were their most trusted friends: Alphonse Besson (‘Thermogène’), his wife Germaine (‘Bohémienne’) and Monique Herady (‘Fernande’), their courier. Just before 9.00p.m., as they were finishing, there was a knock at the door. Hearing German voices, the brothers ran up the stairs. From down below, one of the German officers shouted out, ‘“Auguste”, “Artus”’, their code names. After a brief but vicious fight, they were arrested by Barbie and taken to the Hotel Terminus for interrogation. They had few doubts about what awaited them.
Under the laws of war, Barbie was fully entitled to order the execution of all five: the British because they were spies and the French because, as members of the Resistance, they had broken the armistice agreement signed by the Vichy government. Before leaving England, the Newtons, like all other SOE agents, were told that on arrest they should try their best to stick to their cover stories. Should that prove impossible, either because of the circumstances surrounding their arrest or because of torture, each agent was asked to hold out for at least twenty-four hours so that the remainder of the network had time to disappear. Once in France, it was not always easy to follow the instruction handed out in Britain. M. R. D. Foot, the SOE’s historian, describes the agent’s plight as follows: ‘If arrested, he did his best to tell his cover story; but seldom with success. Arrest usually meant discovery, discovery usually meant torture, followed by deportation, deportation usually meant death. There were exceptions.’
The Newtons’ own account of their treatment in Hotel Terminus is dramatic. In separate interrogations, both denied from the outset that they were British agents. They claimed that they were crashed RAF pilots trying to get back home. Alfred, at the end of the first interrogation by one of Barbie’s subordinates, feared that he would not be able to withstand the appalling torture promised for the next day. It was while he was escorted to that second session on the third floor that he passed an open window and, in a flash, threw himself out into the void. Ever vigilant, the Germans had strung wire netting across the courtyard: miraculously, he survived the fall with a broken leg, broken fingers, a fractured shoulder and concussion. Medical facilities in the Montluc were spartan and his cries of pain were heard throughout the prison.
Henry, the dominant brother, was meanwhile interrogated by Barbie. He makes the bizarre claim that Barbie accused him of being the Czech responsible for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in June 1942. The questioning, according to Henry, was continuously punctuated by a series of wild and vicious blows. Once he lashed out at one of Barbie’s assistants. His reward was to be beaten half unconscious. Then, on successive days, he was subjected to electric shocks, nearly drowned in an ice-cold bath (one of Barbie’s specialised tortures), strapped to a table and hit with a stick, and burnt with a red-hot poker.
Even Alfred, despite his injuries, was not spared. Barbie deliberately hit him on his sensitive wounds. Like his brother, he too refused to break his cover story, even when he was about to be shot against the prison wall.
Back in the cells of Montluc, after the ‘days of punishment and interrogations [which] succeeded each other monotonously’, Alfred’s courage was bolstered when he heard the two women, ‘Bohémienne’ and ‘Fernande’, singing messages to him as they passed beneath his cell window – only to be deflated again when he saw his brother Henry brought back to the prison lifeless on a stretcher.
All five of those arrested were transferred in May by train to Fresnes prison in Paris. According to Thomas:
To Alfred’s incredulous joy, he found himself in the same compartment as Henry, ‘Thermogène’, ‘Bohémienne’ and ‘Fernande’. It was a wonderful reunion, particularly as the guards stationed in the corridor made no attempt to stop them talking to each other. They spent their journey to Paris checking their cover stories and figuring just how much the enemy had been able to find out.
After some weeks in Fresnes, the brothers were transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp where, despite appalling conditions, they survived the war. Their return to England was an anti-climax. Sad, lonely, and feeling the terrible futility of their sacrifice, they both suffered chronic sickness before they died.
The Newtons’ story, as related by Thomas is, however, an inaccurate one – however colourful. There are three living eyewitnesses to contradict their account.
André Courvoisier, who saw Henry nearly every day for six weeks in Montluc, is quite emphatic that the agent was neither tortured nor even injured. ‘There was never a mark on Henry. But I do remember the day when he gave me a ring which he asked me to pass on to “Fernande”. He seemed to think that he would not survive the next few days.’ Four days later, Henry asked Courvoisier to retrieve his ring, ‘because the danger had passed’. Courvoisier remained friends with the Newtons after the war and is still convinced that they were brave men.
Madame Besson, ‘Bohémienne’, still lives in Lyons on a small pension. Her account completely discredits the Newtons’ story. She insists that she neither saw the brothers in prison after their arrest nor sang messages to Alfred from the Montluc prison yard. She has also denied that she was either interrogated or tortured and she is sure that when she saw the brothers on the train, neither of them had any marks suggesting torture. Moreover, during that journey the German guards prevented any conversation. Mrs Besson did not even speak to her husband, whom she never saw again.
The third account contradicting the brothers’ is Barbie’s own. Reminiscing to General Wolff in 1979 about his successes against the SOE, his recollection was undoubtedly confused, if only because forty years had elapsed. He may well have grouped many events into one story and almost certainly he exaggerated his achievements. But it is an account which contains two remarkable coincidences with earlier parts of the Newtons’ story.
At the beginning of 1943, recalled Barbie, he heard that two British agents were landing between Toulouse and Lyons on a sabotage mission. Hidden from view, the Gestapo watched the agents parachute down and then followed them to a small factory. Shortly afterwards, the Germans were spotted and the SOE agents began shooting, only to be forced to surrender when they ran out of ammunition.
Both protested that they were British soldiers, producing military ID tags which had been hidden in their shoes. Barbie insisted that they were dressed as civilians and were therefore spies, who could be shot. Both became very depressed. Barbie remembered that one of them even threw himself out of the window but was saved by a net stretched across the courtyard. The other agent, Barbie remembers, was quite different: ‘He was surprisingly easy to break. He confessed immediately and revealed a Resistance camp near Grenoble.’ With just the threat of torture, Barbie had extracted the information he wanted.
It is indisputable that at 5.30p.m. on 5 April, the day following the Newtons’ arrest, Barbie and a squad of Gestapo officers arrived in Le Puy and arrested four people: Charles ‘Charlot’ Causse, Pierre Pestre, and M. and Madame Jean Joulian. All four had worked with the Newtons but, because of persona
l differences with other Resistance workers in the Newtons’ Le Puy network, had formed their own group. All of them were taken the same day to Montluc and interrogated by Barbie. Three days after the arrest, the squad of Gestapo officers returned to Le Puy and dug up the Joulians’ garden where they discovered eleven hermetically sealed cylinders containing guns and ammunition; these had been parachuted to the Newtons’ network. At the same time, ‘Charlot’ and Pestre were released. Madame Joulian was released only three months later. Her husband returned from the Mathausen concentration camp at the end of the war.
Only one member of the Newtons’ GREENHEART network is still alive, Madame Labourier. She and her husband joined the Resistance in early 1941 and were early members of Virginia Hall’s NEWSAGENT network, transferring to GREENHEART soon after the Newtons’ arrival. She first heard about the brothers’ arrest from a fellow Resistance member who reached the Newtons’ factory hideout at daybreak, twelve hours later. He immediately returned to Le Puy with the news.
Despite the arrests in Lyons and Le Puy, the Labouriers decided not to rush into hiding, but to continue life as normal. Madame Labourier was at her local hairdresser’s when she heard about the release of ‘Charlot’. Barbie, he reported, had forced both himself and Madame Joulian to confront Henry Newton in Montluc. What ‘Charlot’ did not reveal was that, without physical torture, Henry had confessed to Barbie, and that ‘Charlot’ secured his own release in return for helping the Germans. Barbie had skilfully exploited Henry’s confession.
After their return to Le Puy, the three who were released had very little contact with the Labouriers, who began working with the Maquis in the hills outside the town. On 11 February 1944, ten months after Newtons’ arrest, Barbie arrived at the Labouriers’ home. Her husband, warned of the Gestapo’s imminent arrival, had fled, but Madame Labourier and her son Marcel were arrested. While the son was taken away for interrogation, she was kept for two days under house arrest and then released. Barbie, she says, warned her that her son would be killed if she left the town. Exploiting a technique he was to use throughout his reign in Lyons, he calculated that she would nonetheless be tempted to alert other members of her group and that his agents could follow her to the Maquis in the hills. This time the trick did not work. Aware that she was being shadowed, she gave the necessary warnings, but without alerting the Germans.
It was at the beginning of March that she saw Barbie again. He was standing near her husband’s garage wearing a light-brown raincoat and black trilby hat. Courageously she went up to him (‘he had serpent eyes’) and asked about her son. ‘Your son,’ he replied, ‘is very stubborn.’ Marcel did not survive the war.
On 18 March, Madame Labourier was rearrested. She was just one of many picked up in a massive swoop. Taken with the others to Clermont-Ferrand, she says that was interrogated by Barbie. He was wearing her father’s ring, which she had last seen on her son’s finger:
I screamed at him, ‘What have you done to my son?’ He hit me in the face a few times. He asked me about my Resistance group. I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t torture me. A few days later I was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. It was terrible. When I got back at the end of the war, ‘Charlot’ acted funny. He had not been rearrested. The Newtons later thought that he had betrayed us.
Emotions in Le Puy, as in the rest of France, were very high in the immediate aftermath of the war. Old scores were settled with little ceremony. Known collaborators were lucky to be given even the semblance of a trial. Some committed suicide after a visit from the survivors of a betrayed local Resistance group. Others were just shot in the street. Even more, however, escaped any punishment. Their victims had disappeared into the concentration camps and never survived. Those who did return were often too exhausted, sick and bewildered to seek out their denouncers. After the initial blood-letting and feuds, collaborators and resistants alike just wanted to resume a normal life. Madame Labourier remembers only that ‘Charlot’ turned away when she saw him again for the first time in the street. ‘After sixteen months in concentration camps, I just didn’t care any more about what had happened.’
The Newtons were advised by the War Office after the war that they would be unwise to return to Le Puy. They would, they were told, reawaken some old antagonisms.
THE BUTCHER
Manipulating people was not always a delicate skill, artfully practised by Barbie, but often a crude tool used for his own survival. His successes against the Resistance were the consequence of his uninhibited resort to ruthless attrition, and the recognition by his victims that he would suffer no misgivings, not even momentary human self-doubt, before resorting to violence. His first and overwhelming loyalty was to himself. The party, the ideology and the nationalism were just vital props for his own self-esteem. He is one of that rare breed of men without conscience who could as happily have served as a commissar for Stalin as he did as a Gestapo officer for Hitler. His seeming air of authority which, over the next forty years, was to put so many in awe and respect of him, was not the product of special qualities of leadership or intelligence, rather it sprang from his unhesitant and unrestrained dedication to his own success. Limited though he may have been by lack of education, he survived and flourished precisely because the Nazi state encouraged its Gestapo officers to be ruthless to prevent any challenge to its authority. That inhuman audacity became part of his very character. Reminiscing with pride in 1979 about his time in Lyons, he disclosed, ‘The reason why the French are so interested in me is because I wounded their Gallic pride. I proved to them that they’re stupid.’ He could never forget that his father had been severely wounded by the French in the First World War.
Like all other Gestapo chiefs in France, Barbie had to rely on French sympathisers, collaborators and informants to operate effectively: ‘At the beginning it was very hard for us. We had very few contacts. Everything was new. I had to build an effective team, carefully hand picking each recruit. We were showered with denunciations of the Resistance by the French and I usually tried to find long-term collaborators from amongst the denunciators.’ The rush to help the occupying army was sufficient to convince him of German superiority. His prejudice was confirmed when more than 50,000 Frenchmen fought in German uniforms later in the war. It was a paradoxical hatred. During his interrogation in 1944 of twenty-year-old teacher Roseline Blonde, he put forward in near-flawless French his own theory about his French-sounding name: his family was probably amongst those Protestants expelled from France by Louis XIV. At that moment, Blonde thought that he was a Francophile; he even praised the Palace of Versailles. Then suddenly he was interrupted by a French collaborator who wanted to put some questions. Barbie turned angrily and screamed, ‘You are the servant here and I am the master.’
For the Gestapo officers, life in Lyons in the early days of occupation was indeed a pleasure. At lunchtime, Knab had arranged that the whole staff should eat together, with himself presiding at the centre of the high table. Barbie sat on one side, Hollert on the other, the others in descending order of rank. They were impeccably served by French waiters. But quite frequently Barbie, dressed in civilian clothes, walked alone from the Ecole de Santé to a nearby bar, sometimes the Moulin à Vent, to eat a meal while chatting with the regular customers. One of these, Jean Laborde, says that the Moulin’s patron knew who Barbie was and even listened to him denouncing ‘the terrorists’ – who, he claimed, did not even have the courage to attempt to kill Barbie when he regularly walked alone from the Ecole to the restaurant.
In the evenings Barbie, like other officers, made a regular tour of the best restaurants, choosing from the Grillon, Les Glaces, Balbo or the Lapin Blanc. His regular French girlfriend and companion at such times (according to Hedwig Ondra, one of the SS secretaries in Lyons) was known among the Germans as Odette, but to the Lyonnaise as Antoinette ‘Mimiche’ Murot. Barbie returned on leave to his wife only once during his whole period of service in France.
Feeling about Barbie amongst
the other Gestapo officers was divided between loathing and respect, the latter tinged with fear. No one was allowed to forget that he dispensed summary justice not only to the French, but within the Gestapo itself. With pride Barbie told General Wolff how he dealt with one officer whom the French police chief revealed had raped a local girl. Barbie claims to have said to the officer, ‘“This evening at six o’clock you’re to be in the cellar with the rest of the officers. There’ll be a rope and you’re going to hang yourself.” And he did it. I kicked the chair away…. One becomes tough when one’s young. I don’t think I could do the same any more today.’
There was, however, little fear of Barbie amongst those fifty-odd Frenchmen who worked closely with him. They were part of Barbie’s 120-strong ‘personal army’, all members of the most aggressive pro-Nazi groups in the town which Barbie gradually drew towards him. One of the most infamous of these, from the French Nazi Party (the PPF), was François André, an ex-communist. Known as the ‘Gueule Tordue’, his face had been atrociously deformed in a road accident. With a mouth twisted into the shape of a gaping wound, he had no need to convince anyone of his natural brutality. His deputy, Antoine ‘Tony’ Saunier, was the group’s treasurer. In late summer 1943, with Barbie’s agreement, André established the Mouvement National Anti-Terrorist (MNAT), announcing that its task was to meet terror with terror and warning, ‘Millionaire Jews, bourgeois freemasons, you who subsidise and arm the assassins, you will pay with your life.’ Motivated more by a desire for criminal self-enrichment than by political calculations, these men exploited the absolute power that Barbie and the Gestapo gave them to steal at random; murder invariably followed the theft. The money or jewels were handed to Saunier who, after taking a percentage for his own purposes, divided the remainder between the ‘staff’ and the Germans. They became an imitation Al Capone gang, except that they did not have to disguise their activities or fear retribution from the State. Their underworld was the State and they were allowed to enjoy the best that Lyons could provide. Within months, the MNAT had become so identified with the Gestapo that in early 1944 it was given offices in the Ecole de Santé.
