by Bower, Tom
There is little eyewitness evidence of Barbie’s own activities during the June and July carnage. He was ‘seen’ in a few villages and there are accusations that he committed several murders. Ludwig Henson, the Gestapo chief at Chambéry who was answerable to Barbie, claimed at his trial in Lyons in February 1948 that ten executions in Arbin on 21 June 1944 were carried out on Barbie’s explicit instructions. ‘It was Barbie himself and his men who went to fetch the prisoners and took them to the place where they were executed.’ Another Gestapo officer, Ernst Floreck, in a statement to the Lyons court, claimed that Barbie was present and responsible for at least thirteen mass executions between April and July, killing at least 212 people. Floreck, who was himself a self-confessed torturer, described Barbie as ‘the biggest bastard of them all’.
There is no reason to believe that Barbie altered his methods of work in Lyons. At Montluc, which was his direct responsibility, the ‘cleaning out’ suddenly became a daily occurrence. But with railway lines to Germany routinely cut, deportation to concentration camps became rarer. Instead, groups of prisoners were regularly told to come out of their cells, ‘without your belongings’. Loaded onto lorries, they were driven by the Gestapo from Lyons either to isolated fields in the country or to small villages throughout the Ain. With their handcuffs removed, they filed slowly towards hedgerows or copses and were ordered to stand forlornly in a line or lie on their stomachs. According to the very few Frenchmen who miraculously survived their wounds, little was said besides a muted farewell. The sub-machine-guns (often of British or American make and seized from the Resistance), were fired and the executioners returned to Lyons. Pressure of work, indifference about the possibilities of detection and the sheer habit of killing meant that the bodies were invariably left where they fell.
Some victims were allowed to write farewell letters to their family, but those written towards the end of the German occupation were never passed on; they were destroyed by the milice or Gestapo. Henri Mazuir’s letter to his wife, written before his execution in December 1943, survived:
My darling little girl, Give my love to your mother and to Roger. My last thought will be for you and for my parents. A few tears fall on my letter. They are the last. They are the last gift I can make to thank you for our 39 months of marriage. My poor darling, you are very young and the pain will be cruel. I ask you to think of me in your prayers. God has not abandoned me yet, and in a few moments I will be able to hear mass and take communion. I love you and embrace you with all my strength. Be happy and make a new life … Long Live France.
By the beginning of July, the Lyons Gestapo’s ability to maintain the security of the region had dropped considerably. Although Gestapo bureaux throughout the area were still receiving reliable reports from collaborators and passing them on to the Wehrmacht, the swift battle against Maquis camps throughout the Ain plain had become essentially a military operation. Determined to restore German control over the vital Rhône-Saône corridor, at least nine thousand German soldiers were mobilised to fight the Maquis for the third major operation that year. The principal targets were the ‘free zones’ of the Ain and Vercors.
In the Ain, Nantua and Oyonnax were under total Maquis control; German control of other towns depended on the strength of the Wehrmacht contingent present at the time. The Wehrmacht objective was simply to kill as many Maquis as possible, and force the remainder to disperse. On 10 July the Wehrmacht, operating in fast-moving columns from several directions, reoccupied the Ain. Among those forced to move were Johnson and Petit whose headquarters were in the very pleasant Château Wattern at Izernore, just north of Nantua. Their tranquillity was shattered by the sound of a bombardment. German panzer tanks were heading in their direction but had confused their intelligence and were aiming at a château on the other side of the valley. ‘Petit ordered us to retreat towards the Jura,’ remembers Johnson. ‘There were three hundred creeps with us, including the sous-préfet of St Claude and his mistress, who was still wearing high-heeled shoes.’ As they withdrew, the RAF indiscriminately dropped tons of arms most of which were seized, to Heslop’s fury, by the Wehrmacht.
Two days later, seventy-two RAF planes dropped arms and ammunition over Vassieux, in the Vercors. Within a week the German army had been diverted to surround the plateau area which had been proclaimed a ‘Free Republic’ forty-three days earlier. Their attack began on 21 July. Within two days the French were crushed, claiming losses of 500 maquisards and 200 civilians killed, and 500 houses destroyed.
Significantly, the city of Lyons itself stood isolated from the seeping chaos and bloodshed in the countryside. The Groupe Franc, unlike the Maquis, lacked a hinterland into which it could disappear and the townspeople were unwilling to take risks. Under Barbie’s direction, the Gestapo had effectively limited potential armed opposition in the birthplace of the Resistance. There were isolated attacks but they were definitely counterproductive. On the night of 26 July, a bomb was thrown into the Moulin à Vent, the popular restaurant on the Place Bellecour, frequented by Gestapo officers including Barbie. No one was seriously injured. At noon the following day, Erich Bartelmus arrived outside the damaged building with five prisoners from Montluc, including the Maquis leader, Albert ‘Didier’ Chambonnet. All five were shot and their bodies left where they lay as a deliberate warning to others contemplating any attack on the Gestapo. The executions stunned the Lyonnais, who were perhaps unaware that similar shootings were a daily occurrence in the countryside. Loyally, Bartelmus, who now lives in Trippstadt, West Germany, has consistently refused to reveal whether the order to attack was given to him by Hollert or Barbie, but by then reprisals had become so routine that it is possible he simply cannot remember. Fearful of the inevitable condemnation, no Resistance group has ever admitted responsibility for the attack.
‘Operation Dragoon’, the long-awaited American landing on the southern coast of France, was successfully completed on 15 August. With the Allied armies in the north on the verge of a final breakthrough towards Paris, the German occupation of the south was doomed. Only the 198th and 333rd German Infantry Divisions, and the XIth SS Panzer Division, stood between the American Seventh Army and Lyons. On paper the German army looked impressive, but it was seriously weakened by insufficient supplies and untrained soldiers, and its numbers depleted by movements to defend the north. Berlin gave the command for them to commence an orderly, fighting retreat. At Gestapo headquarters, Knab and Barbie gave the orders for a final ‘cleansing’ operation.
Heslop and Petit, realising that the speed of the American advance depended on a clear run through the Belfort Gap, mobilised the Maquis to harrass any German defensive position. Throughout the countryside, Maquis groups launched into the final battle with savage gusto. It is a mark of the Maquis’s success in the Ain and Savoie, that the speed of the American advance and the rapid retreat of the Germans was far beyond the expectations of Allied planning staff at SHAEF headquarters.
Two days after the Allied landings, the ‘clearing’ operation at Montluc was accelerated. On 17 August, 109 prisoners, mostly Jews, were taken to Bron airport on the outskirts of Lyons, shot and buried in the bomb craters which pockmarked the field. Three days later, 110 men and women were driven from Montluc to the disused fort of St Genis-Laval. According to a sworn statement by Max Payot, a member of the milice who worked in Gestapo headquarters, ‘Fritz Hollert, my boss, walked up to me and rubbing his hands gleefully said, “Today we’ve got some good work to do.” At 7.00 a.m., thirty-five of us were in Place Bellecour. At first I thought it was going to be a major police operation, but I realised my mistake [and] understood it was going to be more executions.’ When the convoy reached the Fort, the prisoners’ hands were tied up, led in small groups to the first floor, and systematically shot. Payot sent the prisoners up the stairs. After some time, ‘the prisoners had to walk over a heap of their former comrades. Blood was pouring through the ceiling and I could distinctly hear the victims fall as they were shot. At the end
the bodies lay one and a half metres high, and the Germans sometimes had to step onto the bodies of their victims to finish off those who were still moaning.’ The bodies, covered in petrol, were then burnt and the building dynamited.
While the fire was raging, we saw a victim who had somehow survived. She came to a window on the south side and begged her executioners for pity. They answered her prayers by a rapid burst of gunfire. Riddled with bullets and affected by the intense heat, her face contorted into a fixed mask, like a vision of horror. The temperature was increasing and her face melted like wax until one could see her bones. At that moment she gave a nervous shudder and began to turn her decomposing head – what was left of it – from left to right, as if to condemn her executioners. In a final shudder, she pulled herself completely straight, and fell backwards.
At Gestapo headquarters in Place Bellecour, prisoners were shot in their cells or at the top of the stairs leading down to the basement. The fate of the 800 prisoners still remaining at Montluc was seemingly sealed.
By 20 August, the German forces were falling back in the face of the advancing American army, fighting a stiff but organised retreat. In Lyons, the German military command under General Wiese was ordered to hold the city until the retreating XIth SS Panzer Division had passed through. It was a difficult mission which he fulfilled with ruthless efficiency, cool nerve and fanatical dedication. Confronted by an insurrectionary strike in Villeurbanne, he ordered Wehrmacht units to crush the uprising; they demolished blocks of apartments where suspected resistants were hiding, and indiscriminately shot anyone on the streets, frantically clinging to their fragile control. The city was gripped simultaneously by terror and hope. For the first time, the Gestapo were compelled to make compromises. In a signed letter to Knab, Yves Farge, a Resistance leader, threatened that Germans taken hostage by the Maquis would be executed as a reprisal should any remaining prisoners in Montluc be killed. Uncharacteristically, the Gestapo hesitated. While forty Jews were taken immediately, probably on Barbie’s orders, to be executed, the other prisoners remained for the moment untouched.
On 24 August, Cardinal Gerlier, horrified by the St Genis-Laval massacre, went to Gestapo headquarters, to plead with the Germans to stop the killings. That evening, Knab was again personally threatened by a Resistance messenger that there would be reprisals if any of the 800 prisoners were shot. According to Wilhelm Wellnitz, the Gestapo’s telex officer who left Lyons with Knab, the Gestapo chief was forced into concessions because many German soldiers were being shot in the back. The Wehrmacht refused to continue to support the Gestapo’s operations. At 9.50 that evening, the prisoners inside Montluc suddenly realised that the Germans had abandoned the prison. Outside in the streets, Resistance fighters who had come to help the inmates heard loud, rousing singing as the embattled and tearful survivors sang La Marseillaise.
It is believed that Klaus Barbie left Lyons for the first time on 22 August, and travelled north towards Dijon. Grenoble had been liberated that day and it seemed that German control of Lyons was on the verge of evaporating. The city was drifting towards anarchy. Over the next twelve days, the Wehrmacht, in spite of barricades and sniping, steadily patrolled the town, allowing retreating units to pass through unhindered. Vistel, realising the weakness of the Resistance, spent the last days of the occupation struggling to prevent rather than encourage an attack on the Germans. The Gestapo withdrew from the city undefeated, having methodically destroyed all their records. The absence of any documentary evidence successfully hampered French prosecution of former Gestapo officers.
According to a former American intelligence officer, Barbie confided to him after the war that he had returned to the city during that last week ‘to clean up the mess’. Over twenty of his closest collaborators, Frenchmen who could reveal the truth about his crimes over the previous twenty-one months, were murdered. His girlfriend was also allegedly killed. Although he now claims that his right foot was injured during a Maquis attack while he was travelling to Dijon, he told the same American that his foot was injured during the final massacre. He left the city a wounded man. Lyons was finally liberated by the American army on 3 September.
On 14 September, Barbie was recommended for promotion to captain. In his report SS Sturmbannführer Wanninger wrote:
Barbie is known at headquarters as an SS leader who knows what he wants, and is enthusiastic. He has a definite talent for intelligence work and for the pursuit of crime. His most notable achievement was the destruction of many enemy organisations. Reichsführer SS Himmler has expressed his gratitude to Barbie in a personal letter commending his pursuit of crime and his consistent work in defeating Resistance organisations. Barbie is dependable in both his ideological approach and character. Since his training and during his employment in the SD, Barbie has led a regular career as a director of the ‘senior service’ and, providing that there is no objection, it is recommended that he be promoted as from 9 November 1944 from SS Obersturmführer to SS Hauptsturmführer.
THE FUGITIVE
Wounded and shaken by that last, grim week in Lyons, Barbie was taken first to the St Peter military hospital in the Black Forest and then transferred to Halberstadt. Unlike most other SS officers he was quite realistic about Germany’s plight. Despite the shrilly optimistic news broadcasts pouring out of the Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin, his recent experiences convinced him that the war was lost. Yet, as for so many other passionate Nazis, it was impossible for him to imagine any alternative to defending the Reich. So, despite his injuries, he volunteered to fight on.
Posted to Halle in north Germany, Barbie found himself with a ragbag of recruits drawn from every service – sailors, engineers and reservists. After brief training, they were to be thrown into the fight at Baranow-Bruckenkopf in yet another bid to repulse the Allied advance. For Barbie, the elitist, it was a shock. These were not the sort of Germans with whom he was accustomed to fight. ‘I took one look at them and thought to myself, “I’m prepared to die, but not with this lot.”’
The Allies had finally broken through the Ardennes and were closing towards the banks of the Rhine. Ever anxious to protect his own interests, Barbie obtained a special pass and disappeared into the chaos which was engulfing the country. It was a depressing and bewildering sight for a passionate Nazi. The trains were disrupted, the roads clogged with frustrated military traffic, the towns and cities were already badly scarred by the bombs and the food supply was at a critical level. But there was still some reassurance. The remorseless machinery of the police state was still functioning, albeit not as smoothly, and people remained as obedient as ever. Anxious and isolated, Barbie’s only thought was to make for Himmler’s headquarters in Berlin. It was like going home for comfort. Near Brandenburg, however, he was stopped and ordered to join another hastily formed unit which would soon be recklessly moved up to the retreating front. Flashing his pass, he once again avoided the final commitment and arrived safely in the burning capital.
The city was dominated by a mood of helplessness, panic and unreality. Barbie went straight to 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, the Gestapo headquarters. All that remained was the basement. Only the cells were occupied – filled with the last enemies of the Reich, most of whom would be executed before the final capitulation. Among them he saw Friedrich Fromm, one of the ‘20 July’ conspirators, impatiently pacing up and down. He was executed soon after Barbie saw him.
Barbie proceeded to Hitler’s bunker in the Wilhelmstrasse. There was little reassurance to be found there either. In the yards outside, senior Nazi officials completely divorced from any reality, were lecturing fourteen-year-old members of the Hitler Youth about their duty to the Fatherland, as if there was neither a war nor a defeat imminent. The extraordinarily theatrical scenes above ground accurately mirrored the fantasies of those below. There was a simple choice to be made: either join the charade, or leave. Characteristically unwilling to be sucked into anything that might jeopardise his own safety, Barbie’s immediate thought was of
self-preservation, but without unnecessary disobedience. ‘I had to hold my mouth and just be very quiet. Very quiet. But what could I do? The only alternative was to be posted to my unit based in Hanover. I went to Werner Braune, who was head of personnel – unfortunately he was among the last to be executed at Landsberg in 1951.’
Braune delivered a long speech about why Barbie should stay and defend the Reich in Berlin. Here was another who spoke as if Germany was on the verge of victory. More than ever convinced that he had to leave, Barbie compromised and left for Düsseldorf.
At the beginning of April, in anticipation of the Allied victory, there had been a revolt among the tens of thousands of slave workers who had been forcibly brought from all the German-occupied countries to work in murderous conditions in the Rühr mines and factories. Barbie was a natural recruit to any unit commanded to quell an uprising. Like untamed animals, squads of SS officers moved mercilessly through the disease-ridden and infested camps shooting anyone who dared show anything other than total submission.
From Düsseldorf the unit moved to Krupp’s capital city, Essen. On the other side of the Rhine, the British and American armies were poised to speed into the heartland of Germany. Slave workers were refusing to go down the coal mines. ‘I had a great idea. We could throw them all down into the pits and drown them.’ Whether serious or not, there was no time to implement the plan. The threat from the miners was insignificant compared to that from the Allied armies who had crossed the river and arrived in Essen. For the second time Barbie was in the front line, only now there was no retreat. The Allies crossed the Rhine bridge at Remagen on 7 March. Realising that he was a wanted man, Barbie withdrew from the fight. Like a trapped tiger, he travelled frantically through what remained of the unoccupied Rhineland, seeking the security of SS leadership but also for orders which made sense. He was an unwilling and unhappy witness to the collapse of an empire which he wanted to serve loyally even beyond its last gasp.
