by Bower, Tom
Besides the mobsters were the political fanatics, men and women eager to denounce and remove their real or imagined enemies. According to August Moritz, the head of section VI responsible for collaboration, queues formed every day at the special kiosks for denunciations. ‘We had so many that we couldn’t even check most of them.’ Invariably the information was given to André’s group to investigate, with unfortunate results for the victim.
But even Barbie confesses to mistakes. One of his best French agents, Robert ‘Pierre’ Moog, he admitted, turned out to be a double agent:
We had a special way of checking a collaborator’s loyalty. We dressed them in German uniforms when we went on an anti-partisan raid and made them shoot at Frenchmen. ‘Pierre’ managed to do that – although while doing good work for us, he did good work for the other side as well. After the Gestapo headquarters was bombed in May 1944, we discovered that ‘Pierre’ had disappeared with two suitcases filled with documents.
Not all the double agents escaped. Barbie remembers with grim satisfaction how a Frenchwoman, acting as a collaborator, led his men into a trap which killed four of his agents. ‘When I established that she was a member of the Resistance, I had her executed and her body thrown into the Rhône.’
Besides André’s MNAT, the Gestapo also drew support from the specially formed French Gestapo, the milice. Pétain’s original plan had been to rally the anciens combattants, the veterans of the First World War, to his support by sentimentally recalling memories of their final and glorious victory in 1918. Recruitment to the Légion Française at the beginning was not a problem. Many wanted to participate in rebuilding the spirit of France. But within a year, the Légion’s undisguised collaborationist image decimated the ranks. Pétain, increasingly anxious to demonstrate his own government’s ability to police the country and defeat the resistance, turned to Joseph Darnand, who in 1941 had created the Service d’Ordre Légionnaire (SOL). Darnand possessed impressive credentials as a French nationalist. Severely wounded during the First World War, he had been decorated several times for outstanding bravery, even for the defence of France in 1940. But in common with many others, he had rapidly reconsidered his position and believed that France should fight with the Germans against the communists. Among SOL’s twenty-point programme were the slogans, ‘against Bolshevism, for nationalism; against Jewish leprosy, for French purity; against pagan freemasonry, for Christian civilisation.’ Known as the ‘Black Terror’, his paramilitary force – dressed in khaki uniforms, black ties and Basque berets – fought on the streets as the most aggressive defenders of French fascism. On 5 January 1943, Pétain announced that the SOL were in ‘the forefront of the maintenance of order in France, co-operating with the French police. To make their work easier, I believe they should be given autonomy.’ Darnand was appointed head of the newly formed milice. Welcomed, Barbie immediately entrusted Joseph Lecussan, the regional milice chief, with enforcing the policies which turned most Frenchmen against Vichy.
In summer 1942, after some negotiation, the Germans had convinced Vichy Prime Minister Laval that Frenchmen should be encouraged to volunteer to work in German factories. Appealing to national solidarity, Laval tried to disguise the reality by explaining that the Germans had agreed to release one POW for every three volunteers. But faced with insufficient volunteers, the Vichy government announced on 17 February 1943 the Service du Travail Obligatoire, compulsory labour in Germany. In practice, every Frenchman was automatically liable. After receiving their call-up papers, they were to report to STO offices for transport to Germany. When men failed to report, the milice or Gestapo hunted them down or took reprisals against the local population.
One of the first dragnets in Lyons for the draft-dodgers was on 1 March 1943. Six hundred men had failed to report for an STO train. At 5.30 that Monday morning, Wehrmacht soldiers, directed by the Gestapo, sealed off Villeurbanne, one of the town’s largest working-class suburbs. An hour later the Gestapo, with the soldiers, conducted a house-to-house search. Whenever the front door was not immediately opened, bursts of Schmeisser sub-machine-gun fire smashed the lock. Every man aged between seventeen and fifty-five was arrested and hustled to local cafés which had been temporarily requisitioned. Those without exemption from the STO were herded to the Place de la Mairie, and stood waiting, covered by anti-tank cannons and machine-guns. At the end of the morning, 300 men were taken to the local railway station where their families gave them food and clothing and said a brief farewell. Their destination was Mathausen concentration camp.
It was the prelude to a massive three-day Gestapo dragnet through the city, starting on 7 March. Frenziedly trying to fill their quotas, German soldiers and milice, directed by the Gestapo, drove through the town’s streets corralling any group of men unfortunate enough to be on the pavements, especially as they left the cinemas and factories. Fathers of ten children were as vulnerable as eighteen-year-olds. Subdued by bursts of sporadic shooting, all of them were herded into waiting railway carriages for the journey across the Rhine.
As the dragnets increased, thousands of young Frenchmen went into hiding. As the safest places were the countryside, forests and mountains, Vichy and the Germans were suddenly confronted by small bands of desolate, hungry and bitterly hostile Frenchmen roaming the country. They were natural recruits for the still disorganised and divided Resistance, one of whose members in a casual moment, discussing their possible use, had described them as the maquis (from the Corsican, ‘scrubland’), hence the name.
The other victims of the Gestapo manhunt in Lyons were the Jews: the country’s second largest Jewish community lived in the city. Virulent anti-semitism has a long and tragic history in France and long before the country’s defeat French conservatives were blaming their country’s predicament equally on the communists and the Jews. Nevertheless, in the years before the war thousands of German, Austrian and Czech Jews had sought and been given temporary refuge in France. Some sought extra insurance and became French citizens. It proved to be of little avail after France’s defeat. On 20 July, Laval’s government announced a commission to review recent naturalisations. Within a short time, six thousand Jews became stateless. A month later, Vichy announced the abolition of laws against anti-semitic propaganda. Once they had got into their stride, by the end of September, thirty-one camps for stateless Jews had been set up in Vichy where hundreds of Jews were to die of hunger and exposure during the winter. All these policies were taken at the initiative of the Vichy government.
Senior officers at Gestapo headquarters and the German Embassy in Paris were somewhat surprised by this rapid burst of Vichy anti-semitism. Hoping to develop collaboration, they had been reluctant to initiate any persecutions. But among the more junior officers, Theodore Dannecker, an obsessive anti-semite, portrayed Vichy’s measures to Berlin as the reason why complete implementation of Nazi policies against the Jews, including their deportation, would not damage collaboration. Dannecker’s persistence was rewarded.
At the Gestapo’s request, on 14 May 1941, French police rounded up 3,700 Jews in Paris. Three months later, on 20 August 1941, just three weeks after Goering had spoken to Heydrich for the first time about the ‘Final Solution’, a four-day round-up by French police began in the capital. To Dannecker’s disappointment, only 4,320 Jews (all men) were finally delivered to the Drancy internment camp; he was even less satisfied in December, when a subsequent raid produced only 743 Jews. Prudently, some Jews had moved south to the unoccupied zone, and especially to Lyons. In the town and surrounding area, the Jewish population had swollen from 3,000 to approximately 70,000. As more Jews fled, Dannecker insisted that stronger anti-Jewish measures were needed. Support for him in Paris was mixed but in April 1942 he found very willing allies in Laval and René Bousquet, the secretary-general of the police. Over the following weeks, a series of discussions between Bousquet and the Gestapo produced an agreement for further round-ups and accelerated deportation of Jews from Drancy to Auschwitz. French agreemen
t was fundamental to the German plan because only the French police had sufficient manpower and organisation to comb the country for the Jews. Officially, only stateless Jews were to be deported, but Bousquet not only privately agreed that French Jews could be included but also inquired whether the Germans could also deport Jews interned in Vichy camps. Anxious to fulfil the target he had personally given Adolf Eichmann of delivering 100,000 deportees (soon reduced to 40,000), Dannecker willingly agreed to that proposal and also to Laval’s request that children also be deported, ‘to avoid the separation of families’. The result of those agreements was a series of raids by the French police in the occupied zone, starting on 16 July, in which 13,115 people were arrested.
Keen to show their total sympathy with those raids, Laval and Bousquet ordered a series of similar round-ups in Vichy. Lyons was their first and natural target. On 26 August, in the ‘grey Lyons round-up’, 1,000 were arrested and interned in the Vénissieux work camp. Disappointed by the small number of arrests, Laval ordered repeated raids during the following weeks, directed exclusively at foreign Jews. The number of arrests was again small, but the protests provoked by the police rampage were massive. Stunned by their ferocity, the Vichy government was forced to call a pause.
By the time Barbie arrived in Lyons on 11 November, 41,951 Jews had been deported from France to Auschwitz, less than half the number which Dannecker had promised Eichmann. The orders from Paris were to complete the task. Under Barbie, Jewish affairs were the responsibility of sub-section IVC, under Hans Welti and Erich Bartelmus. Within weeks of arriving, in early January 1943, Bartelmus led a series of raids, rounding up 150 Jews in the town.
The most important raid that year, however, was on 9 February in the Rue St Catherine – the headquarters of the Fédération de Sociétés Juives, the national co-ordinating headquarters of all France’s Jewish organisations. Barbie arrived very early in the morning, arrested those who were already inside and waited to arrest anyone who arrived during the day. From the outside, the unsuspecting visitor had no idea that the Gestapo were behind the door. Most of those who came wanted advice on escaping from the Germans, and false papers or financial aid. Amongst those who arrived was Michel Kroskof, a Polish artist who was looking for recruits to his Resistance group. Like the others, Kroskof was seized and interrogated immediately by Barbie; but, unlike the others, he resolutely stuck to his story that he was only trying to sell his paintings and was not Jewish. Barbie tried to trick him by telling a subordinate in German that the prisoner would have to be executed. Kroskof, who carried false papers describing himself as a Frenchman, pretended not to understand and was released. More than one hundred others were not so lucky. Eighty-six of them were deported to Auschwitz, to their deaths. The telex from Gestapo headquarters in Lyons to Paris announcing their arrest and deportation was sent on 14 February and signed by Barbie – conclusive proof that he was directly involved in persecuting the Jews.
No one knows how many Jews the Lyons Gestapo had arrested and deported by the end of the war. The local magistrate claimed that a total of 7,591 people were deported from Lyons; Bartelmus went on many raids, but the deported Jews were not segregated and his records were destroyed. However, many more Jews than were arrested escaped across the borders into Switzerland and Italy, or hid in the countryside, some joining the Resistance.
Barbie, unbelievably, claims that he only became anti-semitic after the war – but, as thirteen-year-old Simone Legrange discovered, whatever the motivation, the brutality was the same. Denounced by a neighbour, Legrange and her family were taken to Montluc prison and put in a cell together. The first German they saw after their arrival on 6 June 1943 was, according to Legrange:
… a smiling man. At first I found him very, very charming. He was dressed in light grey, carrying a cat which was a darker shade of grey. He came towards us very nicely, stroking the cat. First he looked at my father, then my mother, and then came to me and said I was very pretty. Still stroking the cat, he put it gently on the table and asked my mother where her other children had gone. We really didn’t know. They’d gone into hiding in the country two days before and we didn’t have their address. Slowly, he came up to me and took hold of my long hair, rolling it gently along his hand. When he reached my skull, he yanked it as hard as he could and repeated his questions over and over again. He slapped me and knocked me onto the floor and picked me up with the end of his foot … [Simone was then separated from her parents.] He knocked me about all day. My face was completely torn to pieces. My lip was split. I was covered in blood, and I hadn’t eaten. He took me to my mother’s cell. He had the door opened and called to my mother, ‘Well, there you are, you can be proud of yourself.’ The beatings continued for five days.
Having failed to break their spirit, Barbie ordered the family’s deportation. In Auschwitz, Monsieur Legrange was shot in front of his daughter, and his wife was sent to the gas chamber after being caught stealing some discarded cabbage leaves.
Barbie naturally disputes that he ever interrogated the Legrange family. As proof he insists that he hates cats. He also denies that he knew the final fate of the Jews he deported from Lyons: the proving of that knowledge is crucial to his present prosecution. Dr Kurt Schendel, who worked in 1943 and 1944 in the Paris liaison office of the Gestapo’s Bureau for Jewish Affairs, was one of those responsible for negotiating with Heinz Roetke, the head of the Gestapo’s Bureau for Jewish Affairs, and Alois Brunner, a special assistant to Adolf Eichmann with the brief to organise the acceleration of the Final Solution. Schendel had many discussions with both SS men about the deportations (except that they were called ‘evacuations’ or ‘family reunification’) and in 1972 he swore an affidavit to the Klarsfelds that it was common knowledge in Paris that Barbie was not only leading the arrests of the Jews, but also organising summary executions at Montluc of those arrested. According to Schendel, one of the committee members of the UGIF (Union Générale des Israëlites de France) in Lyons, Raymond Geissmann, had tried at the end of 1943 to persuade Barbie several times not to shoot the arrested Jews, but Barbie had replied, ‘Shot or deported, there’s no difference’. This suggests that Barbie knew from the SS officers working in the Jewish Bureau in Paris, and definitely from Knab, what the real fate of the deported Jews was likely to be.
The main prison used by the Gestapo in Lyons was the fortress of Montluc. Constructed in the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is sited near the Perrache railway station, just a mile from the centre of town. Within weeks of its requisition by the Gestapo it became, even by Gestapo standards, appallingly overcrowded. With unrestrained vengeance, the PPF and the milice had embarked on a massive wave of arrests and were depositing their prey with the Germans. The first solution was to build wooden barracks in the courtyard for the Jews. But when that proved to be only a temporary relief, the Gestapo organised regular ‘clean-outs’. Any inmate who had been imprisoned more than a few weeks, was automatically sent to a concentration camp in Germany.
Jean Nocher was one of the first to be arrested and imprisoned in Montluc. His day began at 7.30 a.m. with physical and verbal abuse hurled at him and the other prisoners by the armed German guards. His only relief from solitude was to catch a glimpse of the other prisoners, although some of them looked terribly bruised and swollen after a night’s interrogation. Joining the long procession of prisoners, he was allowed just three minutes at the wash basins. Back in his cell, plagued by vermin, Nocher received little water and hardly any food. Others did not go back to their cells but were taken away, often without their clothes, for interrogation:
Their return in the evening was something awful to see, their bodies just a mass of open wounds, burns and blood. Once, in the next cell to mine, was a poor devil moaning quietly. The Gestapo had made him lie down naked, with his back against the sharp edge of a shovel embedded in the ground. Then they whipped his stomach with a lash. His backbone was fractured and his legs paralysed.
The Gestapo institutionali
sed torture when it requisitioned the massive Ecole de Santé Militaire on the Avenue Berthelot in June 1943. Under Knab’s direction, three enormous cellars in the west wing were converted into cells where prisoners were kept for some days before being transferred to Montluc. After the initial interrogations in Room Six on the ground floor, the prisoners were taken to specially-equipped rooms on the fourth floor. Each room had one or two baths, a table with leather straps, a gas oven, pokers which were heated inside the oven, and crude electrical prongs. The baths were filled alternately with freezing and boiling water. According to André Frossard, he was undressed and his wrists were tied to his heels. Then a stick was pushed underneath his trussed arms. Barbie and the other interrogators pushed their victims under the water, resting the stick across the bath: ‘… it was like an axle around which they turned me, dragging me by the hair’. When the victim nearly drowned, the interrogators attempted to revive him with kicks and blows.
