by Bower, Tom
One of Barbie’s early victims in the Ecole was Maurice Boudet, a member of the Resistance, who was arrested on 9 July 1943. ‘He was a monster. He always had a cosh in his hand. He beat without hesitation and encouraged others to do the same. When I was unconscious, he pushed me into the freezing bath, then the cosh again, and acid injected into my bladder. He really enjoyed other people’s sufferings, and even hung people up in front of us with music playing in the background.’
Using these appalling methods, Barbie did achieve considerable success against the Resistance. It was not only the torture which produced the results, but also his impassioned determination to defeat his opponent. Once on the trail of a Resistance leader, with the scent in his nostrils, there was little that could restrain him. Unable to control that ambition, and impatient when faced with determined opposition or defiance, he resorted to torture. Professional interrogators and intelligence experts insist that torture is counterproductive because the victim will often confess to anything just to stop the pain. While that remains an unanswerable argument, it is a sad truth that every intelligence agency in the world has used and continues to use torture. Barbie’s case, however, is special. Some of his victims insist that he was a sadist and actually enjoyed using torture. Others make no mention of it. The majority of his victims did not survive to report on his demeanour. All that is certain is that in his terms he scored his ‘successes’ using both guile and torture.
For more than a year Barbie hunted for one Albert ‘Didier’ Chambonnet, the regional Resistance chief responsible for the Alsace, Haute-Savoie, the Ain and the Jura. There were three stages in the discovery: firstly the discovery of the Frenchman’s Resistance code name; then his real name; and then the man himself. On 30 March 1944 Lisa Lesevere was arrested and a Gestapo search produced photographs which were to be used for false papers of recent recruits to the Maquis. By coincidence, Lesevere was carrying a letter addressed to a certain ‘Didier’, a low-ranking officer responsible for dead-letterboxes. But she did know the Resistance chief.
Shortly after her arrival, Barbie asked her to give him the real name of ‘Didier’. Lesevere pretended not to understand. Dogged and impatient to extract his due, Barbie began hitting the young woman and then summoned four assistants, including ‘Gueule Tordue’. Lesevere was hung from the ceiling by her wrists and beaten. The following day she was undressed, beaten and pushed into the bath. She fainted, was revived by a doctor, to find Barbie and his agents laughing and offering her a drink as if nothing had happened. For nineteen days, the torture sessions continued. When her torture temporarily ceased, she was forced to watch others suffer, including her own fifteen-year-old son, whom Barbie had discovered. His parting words to his mother were, ‘Don’t forget that I am very soft’.
As the brutalities intensified, so did her resistance against divulging anything. But then, after a mock execution, Barbie revealed that another girl from her own network had betrayed her. Lesevere was tied, stomach-down, onto an upturned chair, and ‘Gueule Tordue’ began hitting her with a spiked ball hung from a cosh. Her vertebral column was broken and she fainted. Her first image when she awoke, lying on the floor, were the legs of a young girl and the sound of her playing Chopin’s L’Héroïque on the piano. Barbie leaned over her, stroking her hands: ‘What you have done is magnificent, my dear. Nobody has held out as long as you. It’s nearly over now. I’m very upset. But let’s finish. Go on, a little effort. Who is “Didier”?’ Lesevere said nothing. Hitting her on the face, Barbie shouted, ‘I don’t want to see this stupid young woman any more. Get rid of her!’
Just six days earlier, Mario Blandon, ‘Didier’s’ chosen hit-man and bodyguard, had also been arrested. Blandon had joined the Resistance in 1942, distributing pamphlets for ‘Combat’; after shirking the STO he was condemned to death in his absence. As the chef d’action immédiate of a Groupe Franc, an urban Resistance group, his prime task was to assassinate collaborators and traitors. ‘I killed many more Frenchmen than Germans,’ says Blandon with some pride, ‘and I never gave them any warning.’ Each murder was followed, he says, by a very good meal.
It was likewise without warning that Blandon himself was trapped, betrayed by a collaborator whose identity he has, despite considerable effort, never discovered. With three others, Blandon was en route to carry out another murder when he drove into a roadblock – waiting, he believes, especially for them. Three days later he was driven alone by the Gestapo to the Ecole de Santé. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Barbie, ‘your friends are dead and you are going to join them.’ Blandon admits that he was terrified, especially when Barbie pushed an album of photos in front of him to identify fellow members of the Resistance. ‘Fortunately, Barbie didn’t recognise me, even when I was looking at my own photo.’
The torture began on the second day. It continued daily for eighteen days. Stripping him almost naked, Barbie beat Blandon repeatedly, burnt him with cigarettes and pushed him under the bath water:
The worst he did to me was pushing three-inch needles through my rib cage into my lungs. I often collapsed and he threw me into the corridor to recover. I feigned unconsciousness and saw him inflict even worse tortures on others. Women were undressed and beaten, one even holding her three-year-old child; and one woman was forced to submit to Barbie’s huge sheepdog. At the end of each day, we were all dragged, bleeding heavily, to the cells below, and the killings continued. One night there was a lot of noise and Barbie came down the stairs pushing someone ahead of him. He kept three steps behind him … [here Blandon paused] … you see, I was watching this with the eye of a professional killer and I knew exactly what was going to happen. Barbie shot the man in the back of the head. The head split apart while the man somersaulted to the bottom of the stairs like a rabbit. To get that effect, you need to be exactly three steps behind. Barbie just laughed, the same laugh that I recognised twelve years ago in his first television interview.
Blandon was also tortured on occasion by Barbie’s assistants while Barbie looked on, eating a sandwich and drinking a beer. Once he gave Blandon a cigarette saying, ‘this could be your last’; a few minutes later the beatings started again. The climax was the sudden confrontation with ‘Didier’ himself. Blandon then realised that the whole group had been betrayed. He swears that neither he, nor his chief, were in any condition to give even a grimace of recognition. The following day Blandon was sent to Paris to join the long journey of the infamous ‘train of death’ to Dachau, during which 932 people died. ‘Barbie’s tortures were bad, but Germany was even worse.’
Few who survived to describe the experience suffered more than Father Bonaventure Boudet, a member of a French mission who was arrested on 9 July 1943 and interrogated by the Gestapo at the Ecole. At the end of the war, Boudet could not even remember how many interrogation sessions he had endured; some had lasted twenty-four hours; the last session had continued for three days. Besides violent beatings, he was savaged by police dogs, hung to a hook by his wrists and given electric shocks, then hung by his legs until blood trickled out of his nose, ears and mouth. While he was hanging upside down, his head was immersed inside a bucket filled with soapy water. His final agony was acid, injected into his body, which caused insufferable agony in his urethra and kidneys.
Boudet also watched as others were tortured. Fingers and toes crudely cut off with kitchen knives, women’s breasts severed and nipples torn off, limbs being burnt and severed from the body. One victim was actually scalped and his eyes torn out.
Hedwig Ondra, born in 1923 in Austria, also witnessed the results of these tortures. Young and desperate to see something of the world, she had applied in 1941 for a job as a secretary in Paris. It promised glamour and foreign travel. To her surprise she discovered that her new employers were the Gestapo in the Avenue Foch. In November 1942, impressed by her fast typing, the personnel department appointed her as Knab’s secretary. The work, she says, was too varied. Frequently, while typing Knab’s regular situation reports to Berlin o
r Paris, she was summoned to the fourth floor to type a ‘confession’. The Frenchman in question, who had invariably been tortured before she arrived, would dictate an agreed statement which was translated to her by a German priest: ‘They were experiences I would rather forget.’ In early 1944, she pleaded that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and was transferred. In 1963, she went voluntarily to the state prosecutor in Munich to testify that Barbie was ‘a very brutal man’.
Curiously, it was not Barbie’s brutality which was to win him his greatest coup.
THE COUP
On 7 June 1943, René Hardy, code-named ‘Didot’, boarded a train bound for Paris at the Perrache station in Lyons. His journey ended when he was arrested by the Germans, eighty miles further on at Chalon-sur-Saône. What followed that arrest plunged the Resistance movement into a severe crisis which remains shrouded in mystery to this day. Every aspect of the saga is disputed by at least one of the participants and, usually, not only for personal but also for political reasons. The only certainty is what finally happened two weeks after Hardy was arrested: Moulin was captured, arrested and tortured by Barbie and died soon after. Had he lived, post-war French history might have been very different. For forty years France has demanded an answer to the question: did René Hardy betray Jean Moulin?
Henri Aubry, a founder member of Combat, had written to Hardy summoning him to meet his chief, General Delestraint, appointed by de Gaulle as head of the Armée Secrete. The rendezvous was to be the metro station at La Muette. The purpose was to promote Hardy to head of the Armée Secrete’s Third Bureau. From extraordinary carelessness, Aubry’s message to Hardy, which mentioned Delestraint’s code name ‘Vidal’, was not written in code. Even worse, it was left in the ‘Dumoulin’ letterbox which was already known to the Germans. Hardy, however, knew the box was no longer safe, and never collected the message – but by pure coincidence he was due to leave for Paris at the same time anyway for an entirely different meeting. Soon after Aubry’s message was left at the box, it was picked up and brought to the Gestapo headquarters. The Germans knew that ‘Vidal’ was an important Resistance leader. It was clearly an unique opportunity.
Barbie ordered two French informants, Jean ‘Lunel’ Multon and Robert ‘Pierre’ Moog, to travel immediately to Paris to help the capital’s Gestapo with ‘Vidal’s’ arrest. Both had just arrived from Marseilles where, because of their betrayals, the Resistance had suffered a crippling wave of arrests. Ignorant of the web that was fast being spun around him, Hardy travelled under his own name and arrived at Perrache. To his horror, he saw and recognised Multon, whom he knew to be a traitor. Nevertheless, confident of his cover, he boarded the train. Barbie’s agents sat in the very next compartment.
It was at 1.00 a.m. when, acting on Moog’s initiative, the French police boarded the train at Chalon-sur-Saône and arrested Hardy. He was taken off the train while the two denunciators continued towards Paris. There are two very different versions of what then followed.
According to the most definitive account, written after long investigations by Henri Noguères, a noted historian of the French Resistance, Hardy was taken to the local police station and held for three days. For the first two days the questioning was quite cursory. It was only on 10 June, the third day, that Barbie arrived, and after a short time took Hardy back to Lyons in his car. Once inside the Ecole de Santé, Noguères believes, Hardy lost his nerve – perhaps because Barbie threatened to kill Hardy’s beautiful fiancée. Whatever the reason, Hardy left the dreaded Gestapo interrogation headquarters just eight hours after his arrival, and he emerged completely unharmed. It was only several days later that he contacted other members of his group. Contrary to the most fundamental Resistance rule, he deliberately failed to mention that he had been arrested and that he had spent eight hours in Barbie’s office. His explanation for his absence was that, having seen Multon, he had jumped off the train; only after he was sure that he had not been followed had he returned. In the meantime, Multon and Moog had successfully organised Delestraint’s arrest and, as a bonus, two other Resistance agents had fallen into their net.
It was only after the war, in March 1947, that the story told by Hardy of his arrest and interrogation by Barbie was exposed as untruthful. His explanation for the cover-up was that, at the time, he was afraid that he would have been blamed for Delestraint’s arrest. His account of the hours with the ‘Butcher of Lyons’ was less credible.
Hardy claimed that he had told Barbie that he was a businessman and a sympathiser of Nazi Germany. Having won Barbie’s confidence, he then offered to collaborate in any way he could, although he insisted it would inevitably be limited. Barbie, he claims, accepted that offer with the threat that, should Hardy double cross him, his fiancée and her family would suffer. He insisted that Barbie never realised the importance of his prisoner.
Over the years Barbie has given several accounts, all of which differ significantly on the sequence of events following his arrest of Hardy at Chalon-sur-Saône. But all his accounts are identical on the two crucial issues: firstly, that by the end of their ‘discussion’, Barbie knew that Hardy was ‘Didot’; secondly that the Frenchman had agreed to collaborate and betray the whole Resistance network.
Barbie’s version in 1979 was that Multon had told him several days before 7 June not only that ‘Didot’ was travelling to Paris to meet Delestraint, but even the exact train and seat number. With Multon on the train, Barbie himself went to Chalon-sur-Saône and watched with satisfaction as Hardy was arrested:
As he passed me he seemed very confident. Once he was in the prison cell, I walked in and took his glasses, held them up to the light and said, ‘plain glass’. He realised immediately that he had been betrayed and asked me who I was. ‘That,’ I said, ‘you’ll soon find out. But let me tell you what I know. These identification papers were made in England and your real name is René Hardy, in charge of railway sabotage.’ He was terribly shaken. When he’d recovered he said, ‘I give up. What’s going to happen to me?’ [By then the two were in Barbie’s car heading for Lyons.] ‘I’ll give you five guesses. We’ll arrive at 8.00 a.m. in Lyons and at 9.00 a.m. you’ll be standing against the wall.’ He went quite pale. ‘Well, can’t we talk about it?’ I realised that he wasn’t made of hard stuff. ‘But I’ll only talk,’ he said, ‘as long as you don’t take me to Montluc.’
Barbie claims that Hardy spent about a day at the Ecole de Santé, giving him a detailed description of the ‘Plan Vert’, the railway sabotage plan. In the meantime he was waiting for a telex from Berlin which would contain Himmler’s personal approval for Hardy to be used as a Gestapo agent. Soon after it arrived Hardy was released, ‘although of course I had two men follow him’.
Barbie’s first official account, given thirty-one years earlier in 1948 – in a sensational disclosure to Comissaire Louis Bibes, a French government official investigating Hardy’s alleged betrayal of Moulin – was somewhat different. In this version Hardy’s breakdown only occurred when they arrived in Lyons, after Barbie had found a letter from his fiancée in his pocket. ‘Moreover,’ Barbie told Louis Bibes, the investigator, ‘he wanted to give the impression of being an important leader. So I said to him, “The best way to become a leader is to help us get rid of the others.” Twenty-four hours later he agreed.’
A year earlier, in 1947, Barbie had written his first, unofficial, account of his arrest of and subsequent relationship with Hardy for Robert Taylor, the American CIC agent who recruited him to work for American Intelligence. In that account, Barbie claimed that he was actually on the train with Multon and that he left it two hours before it arrived at Chalon to alert the police to arrest Hardy. He claimed that, after his comments about the glasses, Hardy ‘suddenly stretched out his hand and assured me that he had the fullest faith in his future fate … In that moment, I decided to trust Hardy.’ During the following two days, Barbie claims, the two spoke for hours about life, their work and the war. Hardy was, according to this accoun
t, well cared for and comfortable – and sufficiently relaxed by alcohol to reveal a few secrets. Barbie did not press him then: ‘… to his great astonishment I released Hardy from confinement. In return he gave me his word of honour that he would seize the right moment and would help me under any circumstances … He came to me every evening after his release, gave me reports and slept in my office.’
At this point Barbie’s 1979 account turns into pure fantasy. On the one hand, he claimed that Hardy had in 1943 given him details of events which had not yet occurred; on the other, although he had told Bibes in 1948 that he had lost contact with Hardy after August 1943, he now claimed that Hardy had given him details of the Normandy invasion plan.
Noguères, not surprisingly, distrusts Barbie’s account. In a conflict of evidence between a Gestapo torturer on the one hand and an alleged French traitor on the other, the choice is virtually impossible. Nonetheless, the events which followed Hardy’s release tend to support Barbie’s version.
The news about Delestraint’s arrest sent a shudder throughout the movement. To Moulin in particular, it seemed an awful premonition. Realising that the Resistance was heavily penetrated by the Gestapo, he was morosely fatalistic about his own future. ‘I am sought now by both Vichy and the Gestapo, who, partly owing to the behaviour of some members of the Resistance, know everything about my identity and activities.’
Events now moved rather quickly. Moulin’s first priority was to appoint a temporary successor for the hapless Delestraint. He also wanted to reorganise completely the military groupings throughout France. He expected considerable opposition, especially from Frenay on some matters and from Aubry on others. Nothing less than a meeting of the top Resistance leaders could settle the various disputes. On Saturday 19 June, it was decided that the military leaders of the Resistance should meet two days later. Everyone expected a long and hard session. During the preceding forty-eight hours, they held a series of preliminary discussions in the streets, bistros and parks of Lyons.
