by Bower, Tom
During at least two interrogation sessions Aubrac remembers quite clearly regaining consciousness to see Barbie sitting behind his desk with a very beautifully-dressed young woman on his lap:
She never said anything and they even kissed full mouth in front of me. It was his way of showing virility. Her presence spurred him on. Looking back I sometimes even think that he wasn’t that interested in getting any information. Fundamentally he was a sadist who enjoyed causing pain and proving his power. He had an extraordinary fund of violence. Coshes, clubs and whips lay on his desk, and he used them a lot. Contrary to what some others say, he wasn’t even a good policeman, because he never got any information out of me. Not even my identity or that I was Jewish.
Courageously, and despite his injuries, Aubrac refused to give up his cover – ‘Claude Ermelin’ from Tunisia. His wife, Lucie, had contacted him the day following his arrest. Enclosed in a bundle of clean clothes addressed to ‘Claude Ermelin’ was a half-completed crossword puzzle. Among the dirty clothes which she collected a few days later was a completed crossword puzzle – within it a message, by now sadly outdated: ‘Maxwell’.
Desperately, the shocked and disorganised remnants of the Resistance council secretariat searched for ideas to mount a rescue operation although they still did not know exactly where Moulin and the others were held. It was a forlorn attempt. The move to Paris destroyed whatever chance there was.
Independently, Lucie Aubrac soon heard that her husband had not been moved to Paris, and was still at Montluc. Theirs being an uniquely romantic and indestructible relationship, it was quite natural for Lucie to consider immediately her own plans for freeing her husband. Only a few months earlier she had rescued him from a hospital where he was also under arrest.
On 23 June a well-dressed, attractive woman whose papers carried the name ‘Guislaine de Barbantane’ arrived at the Ecole de Santé. She told the receptionist that she wanted to see the German officer in charge of the Caluire affair. She was shown into the captain’s office on the first floor. Entering with apparent resolution and self-confidence she saw a man of her age, dressed in a light suit and pink shirt; a beautiful girl rested in the background. It was somewhat bizarre. It was not what she had expected. She had carefully thought out her approach.
‘Good morning, M. Barbie. I am a friend of one of the patients you arrested at Dr Dugoujon’s in Caluire. You cannot keep him because he has very serious tuberculosis. He has to take special medicines.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Ermelin.’
‘How long have you known him?’
‘About a month.’
‘Where does he come from?’
‘Tunisia.’
Barbie burst out laughing, threw Aubrac’s file onto the desk, and pulled out a photo of their son: ‘And who is he?’
‘That’s my godson. He was with us on holiday. He’s an orphan. I look after him.’
‘Your friend’s name is really Valette. He doesn’t need medicine but a cigarette and a glass of rum. Understand?’
Lucie burst into tears (genuine tears because she believed that Aubrac was to be shot). ‘I’m crying because I’m ashamed. I’m expecting his child. How am I going to confess my sin to my parents? For someone like me it’s a disgrace to have a lover.’
Barbie seemed quite moved. ‘Ah, Mademoiselle. Men, men, you should never trust them.’
On 29 June Lucie tried to see Barbie again. It must have been during a break in her husband’s interrogation sessions. His mood had changed. Quite brusquely, pushing her into the corridor, he shouted, ‘I’ve already told you, it’s all over for your friend. I don’t want to see you any more.’
Undeterred, she tried indirect approaches. Gestapo officers working in other departments were gently ‘seduced’ with gifts and charm to get their help in persuading Barbie that she should have one last meeting with Raymond. At last, on 20 October, she was told that Barbie had finally agreed. She was expected at Gestapo headquarters the next day. But by then seeing Raymond was no longer so important.
Over the previous weeks she had been keeping a close watch through binoculars on the daily movements of the lorries carrying the prisoners between the prison and Gestapo headquarters. She had also recruited eleven members of the Armée Secret to help her hijack the lorry carrying Raymond. The attempt was timed for 21 October, the very day she was due at the Ecole de Santé.
That morning, the group took up their positions. The lorry failed to emerge – there had been a breakdown. The group dispersed, and quickly changing into different clothes Lucie rushed to the headquarters. Raymond, convinced that his wife had been arrested, pretended that he did not know her.
‘What,’ shouted Lucie, ‘you don’t recognise me? You are a real bastard. You knew me only too well. I’m expecting a child of yours. And this child must have a name. I don’t care if they shoot you or deport you, but you’ve got to marry me.’
Raymond realised that an escape plan had been set in motion. ‘Wearily’, he agreed and they were given permission to meet once more to formalise the marriage. Lucie left the Ecole de Santé knowing that Raymond would undoubtedly be travelling that night in a lorry back to Montluc. She alerted her group and they took up their prearranged positions, several of them armed with specially acquired silencers.
As expected, the lorry emerged from the Ecole de Santé into the night. Two armed soldiers sat in the front with the driver, three more in the rear with orders to shoot any prisoner who tried to escape. The fourteen prisoners were chained in pairs; Raymond had deliberately chosen a partner who looked daring and strong. A darkened van, its side windows removed, slipped out unobtrusively in front of the lorry. Inside sat Lucie. Another van and a car followed behind. After just four minutes the first van began to overtake the lorry and as it drew level with the driver’s window three silenced machine pistols spattered the front cab. The lorry came to a sudden but safe halt by the kerb in the Boulevard des Hirondelles. All three Germans had been killed outright. The soldiers in the back jumped out in surprise, only to be sprayed similarly with gunfire. Two were killed, one escaped. Within weeks the Aubracs had been flown back to Britain, Lucie having discovered, in the meantime, that she was in fact genuinely pregnant. Brave and successful as Aubrac’s rescue was, it still remained an isolated victory against Barbie that year. To some it seemed that Lyons had been transformed from the ‘Resistance capital’ to the ‘Gestapo capital’.
Moulin’s arrest had been a real catastrophe for the Resistance. For those who had worked closely with those arrested, the ensuing months were very difficult, not least because of the certainty that there would be further betrayals. The Resistance was quite used to picking up pieces and patching up damaging blows, but the destruction which followed Caluire was considerable. Organisationally, everything had to be moved within twenty-four hours. That meant immediate exposure for dozens of people as well as further confusion and inevitable arrests.
Politically, Moulin’s arrest had immeasurable consequences. Moulin was not just a leader of a group of disparate guerrillas; he was developing a political movement. Had he survived, he would undoubtedly have possessed considerable political influence after the German defeat. With his disappearance, the communists seized opportunities which otherwise they would have been denied. For France, these were crippling consequences in the immediate postwar years.
For the victor, naturally, came the rewards. First a personal congratulatory letter from Himmler to the ‘Einsatzkommando’, including Barbie, ‘for their high efficiency in the pursuit of crime and their indefatigable devotion to the battle against Resistance organisations in France.’ In November he was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class, with sword.
Berlin’s only criticism of his conduct that year was his failure to produce more children to increase the Aryan stock. In his reply he explained that the birth of his daughter Ute had been very difficult and his wife needed a year’s rest. During this time Dortmund had been bombed, forcing
his wife to move to her mother-in-law’s in Trier. The overcrowding in his mother’s house and the fact that he had returned home only once in two years, had prevented them satisfying SS requirements.
THE DEVASTATION
The liberation of Oyonnax on 11 November 1943 was a mere thirty-minute event, but it was a symbolic, even historic gesture.
This small town, sixty miles from Lyons, lies in the south of the Ain province whose inhabitants and terrain proved over the next nine months to be ideal for Maquis life and operations. The town’s ‘liberation’ was in fact just a parade, organised in the utmost secrecy by Major Romans-Petit, the leader of the Maquis in the Ain, and probably one of the best Maquis leaders in France. A First World War hero, he had come from Paris in December 1942 determined to fight the occupation. During that first year about one thousand men had joined him in the hills. Virtually unarmed, with very little food and inadequate shelter, their only strategic asset in the summer of 1943 was the rugged countryside in which they lived and the potential support of the inhabitants. The Maquis, he felt, needed a show of force, a demonstration that they were more than law-breaking hillbillies. With the town sealed off and communications cut, his men were drawn up in the town square, ready to perform an act they had been rehearsing for some weeks in the hills.
Dressed in his captain’s uniform, with white gloves and wearing all his decorations, Petit shouted at the top of his voice, ‘Maquis de l’Ain, follow my command.’ According to Petit, the small but rapidly growing crowd of curious sightseers looked on with, ‘… complete amazement, followed by delirious happiness. Men, women and children shouted, “Long live the Maquis, long live France!”’ At the war memorial, Petit laid a wreath with the message, ‘From tomorrow’s victors, to those of 1914–18.’ Emotional scenes followed a rousing performance of La Marseillaise, and with everyone in tears, Petit returned with his motley army to the hills to start the campaign against the occupation.
In September 1943, Richard Heslop, now code-named ‘Xavier’, had been sent by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, the head of SOE’s French section, on a reconnaissance mission to the area. In his briefing, Buckmaster told Heslop, ‘We need to know everything there is to know. This is an important area, and when we invade Europe your groups will have a major job to disrupt communications and delay German troop movements.’ Heslop’s mission was to assess the Maquis throughout the whole of south-east France. Depending on his recommendations, the Allies would decide whether or not to devote special attention to the area. ‘If you recommend that we go ahead,’ said Buckmaster, ‘then you will be in charge of all the Resistance in the provinces.’ Over fourteen days, Heslop covered the four provinces over which Barbie ruled. As if on a Cook’s tour, he was efficiently picked up and deposited in a seemingly endless review of Maquis camps, men on parade and caches of hidden arms. ‘What saddened me most,’ he wrote, ‘was the low morale of the men who had been hiding for months in the Maquis camps. They were depressed.’
The first area Heslop saw was the beautiful mountains of the Haute-Savoie. Fine for holidays, he concluded, but too dangerous for guerrilla warfare where Maquis groups could easily be trapped. The next stop, the Ain, attracted him most. The countryside was an ideal mixture of rolling hills, valleys, plenty of woods and hiding places, but also lush pastures suitable for parachute drops and landings. The Ain ‘was real guerrilla country’. Most important of all, Heslop was convinced that he and Petit could work together.
Within forty-eight hours of delivering a favourable report to London, Heslop was flying back towards Lyons with an American radio operator, Paul Johnson, an ex-OSS agent. Their network, code-named MARKSMAN, was set to revenge Barbie’s destruction of the other SOE operations in late 1942. Filled with enthusiasm, Heslop immediately began the routine but vital hunt for landing zones, places to store supplies, the selection of safe houses, particularly for Johnson to use for his transmissions, and, with Petit, the appointing of group leaders. But he also needed a quick boost for morale. The remedy was an RAF drop. As the parachutes floated earthwards in a series of drops during October, the young Maquis began to shrug off their feeling of desperate isolation and enthusiastically started training sessions for their campaign against the Germans.
The news of increased guerrilla activity in the Ain did not take long to reach Gestapo headquarters in Lyons. Reports from collaborators in Oyonnax had mentioned that the Maquis were carrying newly-supplied British guns. Daily, vital rail traffic was being disrupted as Maquis groups blew up lines in remote country areas. Even the special trains which had been built to clear the lines of explosive charges had been hit. With monotonous regularity, the Maquis were looting supply trains and carrying off consignments of food, which they now used to sustain their increasing numbers. Maquis groups had scored major hits, destroying the power station at Le Creusot and a major ball-bearing factory at Annecy. Wehrmacht patrols driving through country districts were being attacked and, on occasion, even completely wiped out.
Knab had to face the unpleasant fact that the Ain was fast becoming bandit country, damaging not only the Wehrmacht’s morale and prestige, but also endangering German security. He wanted to retaliate immediately. General Pflaum, commander of the 157th Reserve Division, agreed. With continuous rumours of Allied plans to land in the south of France, his operational priority was to guard the vital supply line to Germany and the Reich’s border with Switzerland. Pflaum’s immediate problem was that most of the troops in the area were reservists and garrison troops unsuited for fast operations. To Knab’s irritation, Pflaum had first, as a matter of routine, to consult his corps headquarters; the Gestapo had little patience.
On 6 December, in the small town of Nantua, just ten miles south of Oyonnax, an unpopular married couple who dealt on the black market and were known collaborators, were seized by the local Resistance, stripped naked, daubed with Swastikas and made to walk through the streets. Knab was determined on immediate reprisals. Eight days later, a special train carrying 500 German soldiers drew up without warning at the station and within an hour had sealed off the town. Throughout the day, they aggressively searched every house, arresting 120 men who were deported to concentration camps. Posters, signed by Knab, announced that the arrests were a punishment and a warning to anyone else who tried to besmirch the reputation of the German forces. At the end of the operation, it seemed to the Gestapo to be a good opportunity to teach another town the same lesson. A group of officers, with some milice, drove up to Oyonnax and arrested the deputy mayor, the former mayor and an industrialist. Their bodies were left on the roadside outside the town. The town had paid the price for its temporary liberation.
Christmas in 1943 was not celebrated by Gestapo officers in Lyons with quite the same merriment as it had been the previous year. Germany’s military position had deteriorated. The Wehrmacht, defeated in North Africa, was facing its grimmest test in Russia and Italy. Hedwig Ondra remembers that there was a stiff, formal staff party with Christmas decorations, but that afterwards she and a group of friends cooked for themselves some Austrian and German specialities and sat together talking about home. Barbie and the senior officers enjoyed the temporary seasonal truce with a feisty raucous celebration during which enormous amounts of food and wine were consumed. Nothing, however, could disguise the serious deterioration in German security.
Heslop and Petit had spent Christmas touring Maquis camps, eating excellent food which had been stolen from German convoys, satisfying themselves that morale amongst the considerably swollen ranks of the Maquis had improved. Thanks to Heslop, the Maquis were now well-armed, fed, and clothed, while their dependents were being supported with money sent from London. But these improved conditions did not conceal the very real dangers they faced. The Gestapo had captured ‘Brun’, one of the saboteurs at Le Creusot; he had been slowly tortured, and his naked body was left on the town hall steps as a warning. It was one of the more painful consequences of their gruelling war – that success provoked more atrocities.<
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On 9 January, two German soldiers were shot dead at the station in Lyons. According to Barbie, he was accosted by an army lieutenant demanding immediate reprisals to contain the fury of his troops. ‘I told him not to worry. I had a good idea. I arranged for some cells doors [at the Ecole de Santé] to be left open the following night when there was certain to be an air-raid alarm and sirens. Sure enough they went off, and the idiots in the cells thought they could escape. They came up the stairs, right into the machine-gun post I’d set up. We killed twenty-one of them.’ (A post-war investigation reported that twenty-two were killed.) Barbie’s justification was perversely self-serving:
We were in the right, because they shouldn’t have shot our soldiers in the back. It was against all the laws. We never thought that we would have to put up with such atrocities. But it had all started in Russia. That’s how I got into all this. But there, it was the women whom we really feared. If you fell into their hands … if you saw what they’d done to one’s comrades, then you really became hard. There was nothing else but to do the same.
But as intelligence agents both Knab and Barbie realised that, regardless of individual ‘successes’, the Gestapo’s resources were too limited to fight what had become a small army. Anticipating that the threat to German forces would grow, Barbie sought new allies or at best reinforcements. The choice was very limited. The local milice were given more responsibilities and even more power. Milice courts had been established throughout France in January, but in Lyons the ‘trials’ rarely lasted more than a few minutes; the conclusion was always the same. It was unusual for victims of the milice to be given a trial at all. On the same day as Barbie staged the prison escape, Joseph Lecussan, the regional milice chief, personally arrested eighty-year-old Victor Basch, the national president of the League of Human Rights, and his wife. He shot them the following day, sticking on Basch’s corpse a placard: ‘Terror against terror – the Jew always pays.’ The murders would have been of no concern for the Gestapo, but they alienated the milice even further from the French and diminished their value for the Germans.
