by Bower, Tom
Julien Favet, a farmhand, was working in the nearby fields at the time. Usually one of the children brought his lunch and, when no one came, he returned to the village. As he walked into the drive, he saw the children filing out of the house. ‘The Germans were loading the children into the lorries brutally, as if they were sacks of potatoes. Most of them were frightened and crying. When they saw me, they all began shouting, “Julien! Julien!”’ As he moved towards the children, a rifle butt was stuck in his ribs. In the midst of the confusion and noise, there was a loud shout. Theo Reiss had tried to jump out of the lorry and escape. ‘They grabbed him,’ remembers Favet, ‘and started beating him with the butts of their rifles, and kicking him in the shins.’ Held back by a soldier, Favet was helpless. ‘Then a German came up to me. I’m sure it was Barbie. For a moment he looked at me, spoke to another German, then said, “Get out.” I left, walking backwards.’
There is no reliable confirmation that Barbie did go to Izieu, but his involvement in the arrests and subsequent deportation is beyond doubt. At 8.10 that evening, a telex signed personally by Barbie was sent to Gestapo headquarters in Paris: The Jewish children’s home in Izieu (Ain) was closed down this morning. A total of 41 children aged 3 to 13 [sic] were arrested. Additionally, all the Jewish personnel – comprising ten people, including five women – were also arrested. Money or other valuables were not discovered. Transport to Drancy follows 7.4.44. Signed Barbie. Reiss, another child and Zlatin were deported on 15 May to Reval, Estonia, and shot. The others were dispatched to Paris. Just six days after leaving Lyons, on 13 April, the children and adults were reloaded onto another train destined for Auschwitz, where with just one exception (Lea Feldblaum, a young assistant), they were all gassed.
Barbie has persistently denied involvement in the Izieu arrests and deportations. Wanting to distance himself from any responsibility for the war crime of genocide, he insists that his role was purely administrative. ‘I signed the telex only because Eichmann’s people were not around at the time,’ was his explanation when questioned during the Seventies. He chose to ignore that the Gestapo’s Jewish sub-section was under his direct command and that he had heard a year previously, from other SS men who had returned from eastern Europe, the final fate of all the Jews whose deportation he had authorised.
With that administrative chore completed, Barbie drove straight to St Claude. The 157th Reserve Division had requisitioned the Hôtel de France as headquarters for the operation, and the Gestapo were allotted offices on the fourth floor. On the first day there was no Maquis to interrogate and Barbie, with his small entourage and one hundred Wehrmacht soldiers, drove eight kilometres south to the small village of Larrivoire. As in all villages, the Gestapo’s first suspects were the mayor, the priest and the schoolteacher. Drawing up outside the village school, Barbie marched in and demanded to see the local schoolteacher. It was Good Friday and the teacher, Roseline Blonde, was at home. As a detachment of soldiers went in search of Blonde, other soldiers had already set fire to farmhouses at the edge of the village and begun systematically ransacking the remaining houses, stealing, and drinking whatever they found. Each house was pillaged, then set ablaze. Soon the whole village was burning. Only the village sacristan’s house was spared. He was a known collaborator. After the mayor had been found and shot, Barbie demanded that the petrified villagers bring the teacher to him. But Blonde had already run into the hills.
Barbie already knew, probably from the village sacristan, that Blonde was a Maquis sympathiser who had allowed local maquisards to use the school for meetings, storage and to check on informers. But by the time villagers had found her in the woods, Barbie had already left with the parting threat that, should they fail to deliver Blonde for interrogation, the whole village would be deported.
Blonde was in a panic. She could see not only her own village burning but also, on the skyline, a fierce red glow from the nearby villages of Sièges and Viry. Their inhabitants were to suffer appalling atrocities. Blonde felt she had little choice. As she reluctantly returned to her village, she was assaulted with undisguised venom by her friends and neighbours. Without exception, they blamed her for their catastrophic misfortunes and insisted that two villagers escort her to St Claude to make sure that she did not change her mind. She left, too alienated from the village ever to return.
Barbie meanwhile had hastened back to St Claude. The Wehrmacht had finally captured some members of the Maquis. At the Hôtel de France, Munich-born Corporal Alfons Glas, a twenty-five-year-old member of the 99th Mountain Infantry Regiment, saw the uniformed Gestapo officer several times over the next two days:
He was very noticeable by his behaviour: presumptious, even arrogant. We were irritated that he didn’t feel any necessity to salute our officers. His belt was always crooked, leaning towards the side where his gun was hanging. He had a 9mm American pistol and always carried an American sub-machine-gun. He walked around town completely unprotected, the sort of man who really didn’t know the meaning of fear that he might be shot by someone from the Resistance.
On the afternoon of 8 April, Glas was sitting at a table in the middle of the hotel’s dining room on the first floor. Six or seven prisoners arrived in the hotel dressed in normal clothing and were ordered to stand with their arms leaning against the wall. The rumour soon reached Glas that one of the prisoners was Joseph Kemmler, an Alsatian Maquis leader:
When Barbie came in the room, the prisoners were visibly frightened. After questioning the others briefly, he turned to Kemmler, questioning him in French, and Kemmler just answering, ‘never’. Barbie hit Kemmler in the face with his gloved hand. He repeated his questions and then hit him again. After having been hit like this three or four times, Kemmler began to bleed from his nose and mouth. Barbie then walked towards the piano which was a few steps away and, with his gloved and blood-smeared fingers, began to play the first bars of the song, Speak to Me of Love. Then he went back to Kemmler and asked more questions. Again he only got the answer, ‘never’. He hit him again.
By then it was night and Kemmler was separated from the others and taken upstairs. The following day the interrogations began again, again in the dining room, although this time behind a glass partition. Glas watched as before: ‘Barbie stood in the rear. Kemmler was standing, alternately being hit by two Frenchmen with a rope, half-an-inch thick, which had a metal snap-hook fixed to the end. They kept hitting him between the shoulder and the thigh, never the head. Barbie asked him questions, followed by more blows.’ Glas watched the interrogation for about ninety minutes until Kemmler was unable to stand. The two Frenchmen carried him to a chair with arm rests, to prevent him falling down. Barbie then left the room. Glas, with several others, watched Kemmler sit quite still and then with a shudder lean forward. ‘About five minutes later, a urine puddle formed underneath his chair. That was how I knew he was dead.’ Kemmler’s half-burnt body was found several days later in les Moussières, brought there by Barbie himself when he raided the village and shot four men suspected of helping the Maquis.
While Kemmler slowly died, Barbie went outside into the Place du Pré, where the town’s population had been ordered by loudspeaker announcements to gather. René Chorier was typical of many who hesitantly walked towards the square. Twenty-three years old, he had dodged labour conscription and had joined the Maquis. It was only by chance that he was in the town to see his father when the German troops arrived. ‘They had machine-gun posts on all the roads, and even in the mountains overlooking the town. There was no chance of escape and, knowing that they were about to search every house, it was better to risk going to the square.’ Surrounded by more machine-gun posts, about 2,000 men were waiting forlornly to be checked. Amid considerable tension, Chorier watched as Barbie, rushing backwards and forwards, screaming orders at Wehrmacht soldiers, tried to organise a check of all identity cards. ‘It was taking too long, so Barbie just gave instructions and began picking people out at random. At about mid-day my mother arrived. She wan
ted to give me some food. As she began to walk towards me, Barbie went rushing up to her, shouting furiously, and gave her a kick in the buttocks.’
By 4.00 p.m. the SS had finally selected about 300 men. Chorier was among them. ‘One of the men began making a fuss about being arrested for no reason. They just shot him.’ On the side of the rail truck which carried the 300 to Buchenwald, the Germans scrawled ‘Terrorists from the Jura’. The whole town had been punished for the deaths of five Wehrmacht soldiers. As the prisoners were being loaded onto the train, soldiers under Barbie’s direction went to La Fraternelle, the local co-operative store, and plundered it for that night’s dinner.
The next morning, at 10.00 a.m., Roseline Blonde arrived at the hotel. It seemed to her as if she were volunteering for immediate execution. Instead, she became involved in an extraordinary display of a split personality. Sitting eating mushrooms and cream, Barbie interspersed his threats to have her immediately shot with a long monologue about the frivolity of women, the latest book he had read, and about football. Why, he asked the teacher, could French intellectuals not understand German charms and qualities. ‘You are an intellectual, you are a schoolteacher. You should be cooperating with the Germans.’ Blonde’s interrogation was broken up by a farce. A soldier, cleaning his gun, mistakenly fired a shot. The glass partition shattered and there was panic. While Barbie beat the soldier, someone arrived with apparently urgent news. ‘They all rushed off like madmen. As Barbie was rushing out, a soldier pointed to me questioningly, and Barbie just said, “Take her away.”’ Blonde was sent to Ravensbrück.
Over the next four days, Barbie rushed frantically and haphazardly through an area south of St Claude, from Villard-St-Sauveur to les Moussières, Les Bouchoux, Molinges, Viry and then north to Morez. In each village there are accounts of betrayals, arrests, intimidation, incineration, plunder, beatings, torture and finally execution. Read together, the eyewitness accounts amount to a description of uncontrolled, frenzied savagery rather than a calculated investigation to crush the Maquis.
On 13 April, in one typical encounter, Barbie arrested Baptiste Baroni in Molinges. To intimidate the Frenchman, he pushed Baroni outside and showed him the body of Gaston Patel whom he had just executed. Where, Barbie wanted to know, was the local Maquis chief Dubail, alias ‘Vallin’. Baroni pleaded ignorance. Acting the part which so delighted Barbie, he ordered a heavily bruised maquisard to be pulled out of a nearby Gestapo lorry and asked Baroni whether he recognised the man. Again Baroni pleaded ignorance. Casually Barbie told the maquisard that he was therefore free to leave. After walking a few steps, German soldiers shot him down. Now Barbie dragged Baroni to a farmhouse from which Dubail emerged. ‘Here’s your chief,’ shouted an exultant Barbie, ordering the house’s incineration. A few hours later, Dubail was shot. Baroni was sent to a concentration camp, but he survived the war.
With hindsight, it is not hard to judge that these operations were militarily abortive and politically counter-productive. Individual deaths could not destroy the Maquis. Throughout the two-week operation, the Germans went into villages and towns and, albeit temporarily, succeeded in intimidating those inhabitants who were helping the Maquis; but they rarely felt sufficiently secure to venture into the fields and forests to hunt their enemy. By the end of April 1944, they had good reasons for fear.
In his report to headquarters, General Pflaum suggested that the lack of contact with the Maquis proved the success of the mission and that the area was finally ‘clean’ – a self-serving exaggeration and distortion. More significantly, he revealed a major confrontation between himself and Knab. Senior SD officers, wrote Pflaum, had tried to give orders to the Wehrmacht, and at least two regiments had complained. Apparently they had refused to participate in SD atrocities. The SD had mercilessly burnt down Sièges, wrote Pflaum, because ‘the operation had not until then been sufficiently spectacular for them’. His only recourse after furious arguments with Knab was an appeal to his corps command for a directive about the SD’s authority over the Wehrmacht. He was reassured that the Wehrmacht was not answerable to the SD, even during a joint operation. His complaint that Gestapo intelligence was not always reliable, was also noted. Pflaum’s contemporary report was, however, ignored by a French court at his trial after the war. He was condemned for allowing soldiers under his command (according to his own report) to kill 148 people, many ‘while trying to escape’, to arrest 923 people and to burn down 204 houses. German casualties overall were six dead and fourteen wounded.
The arguments between the Wehrmacht and the SS were the backlash of their joint frustration at not being able to cause anything more than fear and considerable dislocation among Maquis groups. Railway lines were still being regularly blown up, convoys attacked and Germans killed. However, there was still no suggestion that German military control around Lyons was at risk. German occupation laws were still accepted by the vast majority of Frenchmen. Life in Lyons continued as normal: Knab even issued an order that any Lyons nightclubs which had closed were to reopen. Defiantly, the Gestapo were letting the townspeople know that they did not fear the imminent Allied invasion.
On 26 May the atmosphere in the city changed dramatically. In a prelude to the Normandy landings, seven hundred B17 and B24 bombers attached to the 15th US Air Force carried out a daylight raid over Lyons and other cities in southern France. Starting at 10.43 a.m., 1,500 incendiary bombs and explosives were dropped onto the city. Officially the targets were military sites, power stations and railway lines but, as so often, the bombers unintentionally destroyed much more. Houses, factories and offices collapsed under the onslaught. In Lyons, at least 717 people were killed and 1,129 were injured. Pro-German sympathies and resentment against the Allies rose proportionately. Within four days all the rail lines had been repaired, but the anger remained. Alban Vistel, the regional Resistance leader, cabled the Free French government in Algiers: Effect on morale even more disastrous than material effect. Population painfully indignant … Ready for all sacrifices but useless ones. [Resistance] are capable of cutting rail lines more effectively …
The town’s only consolation was that among the unintended targets was the Gestapo headquarters at the Ecole de Santé. The buildings were destroyed and an unknown but substantial number of prisoners were killed. A few Gestapo officers also perished. Those who survived could no longer feel immune from the Allies. Gestapo methods did not change. Only the venue. Interrogations were now carried out at the Place Bellecour.
The day after the bombing, a Maquis ambush organised by Heslop attacked a milice convoy. Twelve milice were killed and thirty-eight wounded. It was the second major attack that week. Earlier, over seventy maquisards had ambushed a German convoy at the Bois d’Illiat, killing, according to the Maquis, fifty-two Germans and wounding about one hundred and thirty. Barbie admits that attacks on Germans were answered by reprisals, but there are no records of massacres during the last days of May. The Gestapo were now fully occupied trying to counter an epidemic of attacks on the railways. Obeying the call from London, the Resistance were not only cutting the lines, especially those linking Lyons with Germany, but also destroying bridges and tunnels. Under Heslop’s orders, a Maquis sabotage squad destroyed a complete engine depot and fifty-two locomotives at Ambérieu. Another SOE group, PIMENTO, the only early one to survive Barbie’s first year in Lyons, wrought havoc on the railway lines linking Lyons with the south and east of the country. The preparation and waiting were finally over. The Nazis were to be challenged and fought to the bitter end.
A rash of major battles now broke out between hundreds of Maquis and the Wehrmacht. As in so many other parts of France, the news from Normandy hypnotised many with hope of early victory, inciting groups of maquisards around Lyons to declare their own liberation prematurely. Roads leading into villages were blocked by felled trees; proclamations were read announcing provisional governments; collaborators were executed; everywhere maquisards came out of the forests in a show of force.
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nbsp; On 8 June, in Dortan, a mile from the burnt-out shell of Sièges, a Maquis group proclaimed the Fourth Republic. For four weeks the villagers enjoyed their liberation and forgot about the occupation. The Germans, they felt, would be more concerned about fighting in Normandy. Their exhilaration ended when they heard the menacing sound of grinding truck engines and the news that ‘thousands of Germans’ were poised to attack. Most fled into the hills and woods. Effortlessly, German soldiers and contingents of Russian soldiers from the collaboration army led by General Andrei Vlassov recaptured Dortan, torturing, raping and murdering those who remained. All 178 houses in the town were burned down. As the refugees in nearby hamlets watched their homes burning, they were suddenly attacked by mortar fire, and by machine-gun strafes and bombs from the air. Across the fields, German troops were advancing in a vast chain. There was no escape. For four days the area was pillaged and the inhabitants terrified until the Germans withdrew without even bothering to conceal their activities. All that remained was the local château which was used by both the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo during the weeks as a convenient site for rape and torture.
Dortan’s experiences were a carbon copy of similar incidents throughout the Ain: Maquis groups seizing control of towns, villages and hamlets, barricading roads, and waiting for the German attack. With predictably methodical ruthlessness, the German arrival meant the destruction of the liberated village. At least 200 civilians in the Ain were shot dead during the three weeks after the Normandy landings. Panic gripped the Wehrmacht, milice and the Gestapo. Without provocation or reason, Germans passing in convoys took fatal pot shots at farmers in their fields, shoppers in the streets or old people in their gardens.
