by Bower, Tom
None of the meetings was more important than the encounters around Sunday lunchtime near the Pont Morand by the Rhône. Between 11.30 and 3.00 p.m. Aubry met Gaston Defferre, then a senior Resistance official. Nearby, sitting on a park bench was René Hardy and another man. The stranger’s face was always partially or wholly hidden by a newspaper. None of the Resistance leaders alive today has any doubt that the stranger next to Hardy was Klaus Barbie. Calling Hardy over to him, Aubry told his chef de section that an important meeting had been fixed for the next day and that he wanted Hardy to be there. Because of security, the exact location had not been decided. Hardy was just told to be at the Caluire funicular at 1.30 p.m., where a guide would meet and escort them to the safe house. The two then went their separate ways.
Just before midday on the following day, a pretty blonde woman, Mme Delétraz, arrived at a Resistance safe house in Lyons. A former member of the destroyed ‘Gilbert’ network, Delétraz had been arrested some months previously by the Gestapo. She had volunteered to help the Germans, but in fact was a double agent. Visibly distressed, she explained that she had just come from the Gestapo headquarters. Two hours earlier she had heard someone called ‘Didot’ tell the Germans that the leaders of the Secret Army would be meeting later that day, and that de Gaulle’s delegate would also be there; he could not tell Barbie where the meeting was to be held. According to Delétraz, Barbie ordered her to follow ‘Didot’ to the house and then return to the Gestapo, who would be waiting in vans near the top of the funicular. She claims that she left the Ecole de Santé as fast as possible but her warning was never passed on to the Resistance leader.
Barbie agrees with most of Delétraz’s account but insists that in the event he found the location by following yellow chalk marks left by Hardy. French investigators dismiss the chalk story but accept Barbie’s claim that he gave Hardy a 6.35mm-calibre pistol. Barbie also claims that his assistant, Heinrich ‘Harry’ Stengritt, paid ‘whole suitcases of money’ for information, but this has not yet been established.
Security for the meeting was unusually lax. The location was a doctor’s surgery in a big villa in Caluire, a suburb of Lyons, overlooking the town. It was a good cover because a stream of visitors would not normally attract attention. Dr Dugoujon, the owner, was a sympathiser but not an active member of the Resistance. According to the plan, Dugoujon would continue seeing patients while the committee met in an upstairs room. In theory, only a small handful of people would know the exact location. The other participants were to meet at selected places in Lyons and be guided to the house. But in fact more people than usual knew about the meeting and even its location. Moreover, contrary to the procedure on previous occasions, no lookouts or armed sentries were posted around the house.
Moulin arrived late at 2.45 p.m. with Raymond Aubrac and two other Resistance leaders. Aubry, Hardy and three others had already arrived. Because Moulin was late, the receptionist assumed that they were ordinary patients, and led them into the downstairs waiting room. Just a few minutes later, Aubry heard the creak of the gate leading in to the small courtyard. Casually, he looked out of the window; he saw a large group of leather-jacketed men, armed with British-made Sten guns, dash over the grass and burst into the house. Turning to the others he gasped, ‘We’ve had it. How weird. It’s the Gestapo.’
Barbie was the first to burst in. He claims that he fired a burst of machine-gun fire into the ceiling and ordered everyone to put up their hands. The French deny that there was any shooting, just a ‘small man, shouting in excellent French, “Hands up. German police”.’
Barbie went first to Aubry, hit him around the head, pulled his arms behind his back and handcuffed him. Then to Aubry’s surprise, Barbie called him ‘Thomas’, a code name he had only very recently begun to use: ‘“Thomas”, it doesn’t look as if things are going well. You looked a lot happier yesterday at the Pont Morand. I was reading my paper. But it was such a beautiful day that I thought that I would let you enjoy it because I was going to see you again today.’
According to Barbie in 1947, ‘The interrogations were only for show. I suddenly realised that the Resistance leaders were missing. I was afraid that they had been warned shortly before the raid. Then I thought of the waiting room.’ In fact, downstairs in the waiting room, Aubrac and Moulin hoped that they would be mistaken for genuine patients. When Barbie first came into the room, he hardly noticed Moulin sitting under a picture of horses. But any hopes of escape were soon dispelled. Within a few minutes everyone, including the innocent, had been punched, roughly frisked and lined up facing the wall. Moulin just had time to pass to Aubrac some documents which had been hidden in the lining of his jacket before both were handcuffed. As they chewed and swallowed the paper, Moulin whispered to Dugoujon, ‘My name is Jean Martel’.
After the initial shock, a tense and awful silence settled on the house. Hardy’s presence was a surprise. Aubry had invited him without telling anyone, because he wanted some support for his own arguments against the others. It was also Aubry who claimed that he immediately noticed Hardy standing slightly apart from the others, without handcuffs. His hands were instead bound with a loose chain.
According to Barbie, but disputed by some of the French, the prisoners were immediately brought to him individually for questioning in the dining room. Once again there are two very different versions of how Barbie ran that first interrogation, and more important, what he actually achieved. He claims that Hardy had given him a complete list of the participants and that he immediately confronted each of them with their real identity. Moulin, he asserts, was identified by Hardy, who was hiding in a cupboard in the dining room. According to a prearranged agreement, Hardy knocked on the side when he heard Moulin’s voice.
Barbie’s claim that he had identified everyone, including Moulin before leaving the house, is refuted by the French who insist that Moulin’s cover was only blown two days later. Dugoujon is quite sure that there has never been a cupboard large enough to conceal a man in his dining room. But he and the others remember Barbie hitting them with a wooden chair-leg. Laughingly Barbie denies hitting anyone. ‘They say that I used a piece of Henry II furniture. I don’t know how old the furniture was. In any case I didn’t hit them. I just destroyed them psychologically.’
It was during the interrogations that there was a series of shouts and then a burst of shooting. Hardy had escaped. According to Hardy, he had hit his guard as he was getting into a waiting car. As the German lost his balance, Hardy dashed for some shrubs and rolled down a hill. To a French eyewitness outside, the complete lack of alarm shown by the heavily armed SS men was quite striking. The Germans mounted only a cursory search and inside the house Barbie seemed quite unconcerned. It was enough to convince many in the Resistance that Hardy had betrayed the meeting, a view which is supported by Barbie:
As planned, Hardy gave Stengritt a shove, dropped the chains and ran. We shot at him, but of course didn’t intend to hit him. But then everything went wrong. The next day there was a message that the French police had arrested the man who had got away. The chief of police was very proud of his force and I had to congratulate him. When he brought Hardy to our headquarters I had to give him and some-other policemen the normal-reward – 20,000 francs. The money didn’t matter because we had a whole room-full – dropped by the British. When Hardy came he was wounded. He had shot himself in the arm to make everything look genuine. It was very annoying. After some thought I realised that the only solution was to let him ‘escape’ again. So instead of sending him to Montluc, I sent him to a German Red Cross hospital. Then, a few days later, I arranged with the doctor that one night the guards should be taken off duty for fifteen minutes. I told Hardy the plan and he escaped through the window.
Hardy, of course, disputes the whole account, saying that he was brave, clever and lucky. ‘Escape,’ said Hardy, ‘always seems fantastic to those who haven’t done one.’ Knowing that he could only have escaped by breaking a padlock on the window, j
umping two floors, and then despite a wounded arm, heaving himself over a wall, all of those who were left back at the house in Caluire, and who survived the war, have been quite willing to accept Barbie’s version. To escape from Barbie no fewer than three times needed more than luck and skill alone.
Soon after Hardy’s escape, the others were driven to the Ecole de Santé. The interrogations, threats and beatings began soon after their arrival. The first session ended at 11.00p.m. that night. All of them, including Aubry, Aubrac, Moulin, were loaded into a lorry and taken to Montluc.
Early the next day Barbie raided Aubry’s home. His haul included four million francs, a mass of seriously incriminating documents and the arrest of some other Resistance workers. He then returned to the Ecole de Santé to continue the interrogations. Three of those arrested, but not Moulin, were taken to Barbie’s room. Each of them was brutally beaten and ordered to reveal the identity of ‘Max’. Aubry, his shoulder dislocated by Barbie’s blows, faced three mock executions during those first twenty-four hours.
It was during the second day, 23 June, that Barbie won his prize. Someone still unknown, possibly tortured beyond endurance, revealed Moulin’s identity and he was immediately brought from Montluc for his first interrogation. When Dr Dugoujon saw him return that night, he could scarcely walk. There was a bandage around his head. On the following day, he was taken back to Barbie’s office for further questioning. Looking through the peephole of his cell door, Aubrac saw him return. Unable to walk, he was supported by two German soldiers. He was barely recognisable. An hour later, a prison officer fetched Christian Pineau, another prisoner who later became a minister in de Gaulle’s government. Pineau had been allowed to keep his razor and had become the unofficial prison barber. According to Pineau, he followed the officer through the silent prison to a courtyard where a man was lying motionless, stretched out on a bench. A guard stood nearby with the gun slung across his shoulder. ‘Shave him!’ Pineau was told by the officer. To his amazement, Pineau realised that it was Moulin:
He had lost consciousness, his eyes were hollowed as if they were buried in his head. He had an ugly bluish wound on his temple. A low moan escaped from his swollen lips. There was no doubt that he had been tortured by the Gestapo. Seeing me hesitate, the officer said again, ‘Shave him!’ I asked for some soap and water. The officer brought some and then went away. Slowly I tried to shave him, trying not to touch the swollen parts of his face. I couldn’t understand why they wanted to put on this macabre performance for a dying man. When I’d finished I just sat next to him. Suddenly, Moulin asked for some water. I gave him a drink, then he spoke in a croaking voice a few words in English which I didn’t understand. Soon after he lost consciousness. I just sat with him, a sort of ‘death-watch’ until I was taken back to my cell.
Pineau was not the only one to see the results of Barbie’s interrogation that day. Until 1943 Gottlieb Fuchs was the Lyons Gestapo’s official interpreter. On his own admission, he was Barbie’s favourite. Fuchs claims that on Friday 25 June, in the afternoon, he was sitting alone in the reception at the Ecole de Santé when he heard an enormous noise on the first floor, just by Barbie’s office. ‘I saw Barbie in his shirtsleeves dragging a lifeless body down the steps. Its hands and feet were tied up. He stopped for a moment on the ground floor to get his breath back. Then he started dragging the body again down more steps towards the cells in the basement. The man had been badly beaten around the face and his clothes were torn.’ Fuchs later discovered that Barbie’s victim was Moulin.
Over the years Fuchs has contradicted minor points of his own account of that incident. But he has been consistent about what he heard Barbie say when he emerged from the basement: ‘If he doesn’t die, I’ll finish him off in Paris tomorrow.’ Fuchs says that he then went down to the cells and found Moulin severely tortured and in a semi-coma – the same condition in which Pineau was to see him four hours later.
Barbie’s post-war account of Moulin’s interrogation is, in all its versions, very different. For one thing, Gestapo headquarters in Paris, having heard about the arrests, ordered that everyone should be brought north immediately. Clearly the generals in the Avenue Foch wanted to question the leaders of the French Resistance themselves and not leave it to a mere lieutenant. Barbie had an obvious interest in concealing that, against these orders, he had already worked on Moulin himself.
But everyone, including Barbie, agrees that throughout his interrogation Moulin did not reveal anything and did not betray one member of the Resistance. It was probably on the afternoon of the first day that Barbie pushed a piece of paper in front of the already beaten Moulin and shouted at him, ‘I want names’. Moulin, still insisting that he was Jean Martel, a decorator and gallery owner from Nice, picked up the pencil and drew a sketch of his tormentor. Barbie says that he then took the piece of paper and wrote Jean Moulins (sic) on it and pushed it over to the injured man. According to Barbie, Moulin just crossed out the s. ‘It was because he had finally admitted his real identity that, when he was taken back to his cells, he spent the next three hours banging his head against the wall, trying to commit suicide. I later punished the guards for not preventing it.’
Barbie’s claim never to have ‘touched’ Moulin is plainly ridiculous. After the war he claimed that Moulin was handed over to the French police just a few days after his arrest, ‘perfectly healthy and uninjured’. In his later versions, contradicting himself, he describes how he personally accompanied Moulin to the Gestapo headquarters in Paris. Barbie’s only regret in 1979 was that his wife had not kept the sketch which he had sent to her: ‘It would be worth $50,000 today. But one doesn’t think about those sort of things.’
Moulin travelled to Paris towards the end of June. Barbie went with him. He was taken directly to a large villa in Neuilly, the home of a fugitive millionaire, which had been requisitioned by General Bömelberg, the head of the Gestapo. Only the most important members of the French Resistance were imprisoned there, those who according to the Germans were to be given ‘honourable treatment’. In neighbouring rooms were Delestraint and Aubry. Neither saw Moulin at the villa. Aubry’s last view of Moulin was in Bömelberg’s office in the Avenue Foch. Unconscious, Moulin lay stretched out on a chaise longue. According to Aubry, Barbie was in a neighbouring room, ‘clicking his heels in an exaggerated way in front of Bömelberg who stood there chain smoking.’ Aubry says he also heard Bömelberg say to Barbie in French, ‘I hope he will pull through. I wish you good luck.’ It’s an unlikely touch but supports all the available evidence that Bömelberg and the Gestapo leadership were at pains to conceal their gross mishandling of Moulin, and their utter failure to extract either information or a propaganda coup from their star prisoner.
On 29 June in Berlin, six days after Moulin had been identified, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the whole SS in Berlin, sent a secret report to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister. Headed, ‘The Secret Army in France’, it contained a description of the events at Caluire and an account of Hardy’s arrest. ‘During the course of his interrogation,’ wrote Kaltenbrunner, ‘the head of railway sabotage, Hardy, alias “Didot”, made a full statement and, amongst other things, confessed to having worked out a plan of about 150 pages on sabotage operations to be carried out on the railways under the Anglo-American invasion plan.’ (Hardy naturally denies the whole account, insisting that he could never have remembered the massive ‘Plan Vert’.)
About Moulin, Kaltenbrunner wrote: ‘“Max” himself did not come to the meeting. He had probably been arrested in a French police raid.’ The Gestapo in Paris had deceived Kaltenbrunner to conceal their bungling. Now, attempts by German doctors to resuscitate him having failed, Bömelberg’s only problem was how to dispose of the dying Moulin.
Secretly, on 7 July, an unconscious body on a stretcher was placed on a military train bound for Frankfurt, Germany. Moulin was dead on arrival. Some evidence suggests that he died en route at Metz. By 9 July the body had been brought back to P
aris and cremated at Père Lachaise. De Gaulle’s ambassador to France, more knowledgeable than anyone else about the organisation, plans and resources of the Resistance, had died without the Germans gaining any benefit from what in other circumstances would have been presented as a major triumph.
Barbie had, in the meantime, returned to Lyons. Just one of those arrested in Caluire still remained in his care, Raymond Aubrac. Aubrac was soon to discover that Moulin’s death had not affected Barbie’s attitude towards torture. On the contrary, he was even more determined to get the information which was denied him by Moulin’s death.
Aubrac had already suffered under interrogation. Three days after his arrest, on 24 June, soldiers had taken him from his cell at Montluc and driven him to the Ecole de Santé. ‘We were thrown like dogs into the cellars. I was afraid, very afraid. I knew the reputation of the “Butcher of Lyons”.’ After a short time, his wrists handcuffed behind him, he was taken to Barbie’s office on the first floor. ‘The door banged behind me. He was by the window. Not a very big man, a little tubby. I was twenty-nine, he was thirty. I never really saw his eyes because he always stood against the light. For a moment the atmosphere seemed so relaxed. It was summer and he was in his shirtsleeves.’ Aubrac’s illusions were quickly dispelled. Barbie was holding a truncheon. ‘He looked mockingly at me, enjoying his power, even looking forward to torturing me.’
Over the next days there was never a moment when Barbie even bothered to try subtlety and guile to seduce Aubrac into cooperating. He had decided that the temptation to end the violence would be the only incentive to Aubrac to betray his cause. He thereupon launched into an orgy of extraordinary viciousness, which many others must have endured who did not survive to recount their ordeal: ‘He screamed at me, “Where are the arms? Where is the money?” I didn’t answer. He screamed, “Filthy pig” and began hitting me violently on my head. I soon fainted which was a consolation because I couldn’t then feel any pain. But when I came round, he immediately began hitting and kicking me again.’
