The Resistance

by Matthew Cobb

  FRANCE THREATENED WITH BEING EMPTIED OF ALL ABLE-BODIED MEN IN TWO WEEKS STOP AWAIT YOUR CALL FOR VIOLENT AND TOTAL RESISTANCE STOP HAVE DECIDED TO TAKE UP REPEAT TAKE UP IMMEDIATE ACTION STOP HOPE TO PRODUCE UNANIMOUS MOVEMENT OF DISOBEDIENCE AND REVOLT STOP REQUIRE HELP AID AGENTS AND ARMS482

  The Swiss press reported that there had been a ‘rising in the Haute-Savoie’ (the mountainous border region), and the BBC soon picked up the story, praising the ‘légion des montagnes’ (‘mountain legion’). It appears that at least several hundred young men were holed up in the area, desperate for food and weapons.483 Following a series of increasingly agitated messages from France, and with the enthusiastic support of Moulin, RAF planes tried to drop supplies but were apparently prevented by bad weather.484 Over the next few months, more and more young men decided simply not to go to Germany. A new word soon entered the French language, a Corsican term for mountainous scrubland – maquis – describing both the place where groups of men were living in the mountains as well as the groups themselves. With amazing rapidity, the maquis soon spread throughout the country; as the British historian Rod Kedward has put it, ‘the concept did not exist in January 1943; it was everywhere by June’.485 As the concept became a reality, the Resistance began to change completely.

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  The appearance of the maquis heightened tensions within the Resistance. Virtually all the Resistance’s money came from the Free French. The Resistance simply could not survive on its own funds – the general population was poor, it was dangerous to ask for money openly and enormous sums were required to pay full-time workers and produce large numbers of newspapers and leaflets. In turn, de Gaulle and his colleagues relied completely on the UK and the US to provide them with money. (This point was not lost on Roosevelt, who suggested that Churchill should threaten to cut off funds to bring the French leader to heel.)486 When the cash arrived in France, it had to go through Moulin. This inevitably led to frustration, as he was unable to satisfy everyone’s needs.487

  Combat, which had a large number of full-time workers to support, was particularly vulnerable to financial pressures. In February 1943 US Intelligence, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), offered Combat 10 million francs a month (more than the budget for the rest of the Resistance put together) in return for military intelligence. Frenay accepted the proposal, which involved channelling the money through Switzerland. Both sides were being disloyal: Frenay should have let Moulin know what he was up to, and the Americans were encroaching on British and BCRA territory – any military intelligence that Combat could collect should have gone to London.

  When Moulin finally learned what was going on – two months later – he was furious as it threatened his control over the Resistance, and weakened the links between the résistants on the ground and the Free French. Although the ‘Swiss affair’ was soon condemned by all the Resistance leaders (except Frenay), Moulin realized that he could make something of the issue. In May he sent a report to London, insinuating that Frenay’s link with the USA made him an ally of General Giraud, and using the affair to appeal for more money. His message concluded:

  Nef [Frenay] has just received the first 10 million [francs] from the Americans. At the same time, I am unable to meet the most elementary needs, having no money left. Yet again, I am sending you an SOS. The responsibility of the Fighting French is very great. This situation must be remedied as soon as possible.488

  Although Frenay accepted Moulin’s dominance, on 19 May he wrote to de Gaulle, threatening a split if sufficient funding was not forthcoming.489 Frenay’s attitude was not simply based on an argument over money – above all, it was a question of politics and of military strategy.

  De Gaulle and Delestraint, like the British and, to a lesser extent, Moulin, thought the Secret Army should merely give the Allies a helping hand, by a campaign of sabotage and harassment.490 Frenay had a different view. Two letters written in April and May 1943 outline his ideas:

  Liberation and revolution are two aspects of the same problem that are indissolubly linked in the minds of all our members . . . A revolutionary army appoints its leaders and does not have them imposed . . . We have not forged an army . . . In reality we have created groups of partisans who want to fight even more for their liberties than against the invader.491

  In no case can these men be compared to the soldiers of a regular army, even if they are members of the AS [Secret Army]. The relative degree of discipline they display is much more like that of a revolutionary army, and that is only right, because one of the missions of the AS is to participate in the seizure of power.492

  Frenay realized that this could mean a major conflict between the Resistance and de Gaulle. As he put it to Moulin:

  You seem not to realize what we really are – a military force and a revolutionary political expression. If on the former point, and with the reserves I expressed at our last meeting, we consider ourselves to be under the orders of General de Gaulle, on the second point we retain our full independence.493

  Frenay was not Lenin. He was not arguing for a socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist class. But he sensed that the Resistance, through its solidarity and its mobilization of growing numbers of people, could produce something more than a return to pre-war normality. These feelings were heightened by the appearance of the maquis – many résistants now felt that the time had come for immediate action, not for playing the waiting game. They even gave de Gaulle’s orders (‘attendre’ – ‘wait’) a scornful name – ‘attentisme’ (‘prevarication’, ‘temporization’) – implying that was all London could offer in the way of military strategy. Although de Gaulle and Moulin had repeatedly tried to assert Free French control over the Resistance, they had not been able to resolve the key problem. The Resistance, growing in size and confidence, did not necessarily want the same future as de Gaulle.

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  Before the Resistance could reach that future, it had to survive. As 1943 went on, life became increasingly difficult. At the end of January the head of Combat’s hit squads, Jacques Renouvin, was arrested at a railway station in the Limousin. Having led armed actions throughout Vichy France, including the sabotage of the Hispano-Suiza aero-engine factory in Toulouse, Renouvin was a key target for the Nazis. Probably his most spectacular stunt was the simultaneous destruction of ten government offices in the Non-Occupied Zone on 29 July 1942.494 Betrayed by a Nazi infiltrator, Renouvin was swiftly taken to prison near Paris where he was tortured. Desperate to save him, twenty of his comrades travelled to the capital and worked out a daring plan to free him. But they in turn were arrested, and Renouvin was soon deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he died in January 1944.495

  Escape was sometimes possible. So, too, was revenge. At the beginning of April two radio operators of the PAL circuit were arrested near Paris, together with their liaison agent, a young student named Louis Goron (‘Gilbert’), who immediately talked to the Gestapo. Within a few days a further twenty people were arrested, including ‘Pal’ himself, Jean Ayral, a twenty-one-year-old who was in charge of parachute supply operations in the northern zone. Ayral was bold, and lucky – he charged his guard, knocking him over, and then ran out through the front door of the hotel where he had been held by the Nazis. With his cover blown, Ayral was ordered back to London. But before leaving he worked out who was responsible for the disaster and got the information to ‘Médéric’, the head of the hit squad run by a small Resistance group called Ceux de la Libération (Those of the Liberation). In July the SOE closed their file on the affair with a curt note: ‘Goron was eventually liquidated by Médéric in May 1943.’496 Behind that laconic description there was a grim reality. As Ayral wrote in his diary:

  Gilbert’s parents suspected something was wrong but said nothing. Gilbert was pale, the car drove towards the Meudon woods. Médéric and Gilbert were in the back seat. Two shots were fired and Gilbert crumpled over, hit in the head and heart. Médéric and the driver carried Gilbert’s body to the
edge of the woods, where it was discovered the next day.497

  The first half of 1943 brought a vicious wave of repression against the Resistance. In March the Nazis stumbled on a mine of information following the arrest of Resistance members in Lyons – a suitcase containing the archives of the MUR and of the Secret Army. In total, 137 documents containing 163 names, many of them uncoded, fell into the hands of the Nazis.498 Among these papers was a copy of a letter Frenay had sent to OSS in Switzerland as part of the ‘Swiss affair’, in which he described in precise detail the organization and activities of the Resistance. This find was deemed to be so important it was immediately brought to Hitler’s personal attention. The Nazis now had an accurate picture of the whole of the Resistance, with the exception of the Communist Party. In particular, they now knew that the leader of the Resistance was ‘Max’. He was the man they most wanted to capture.

  Three weeks earlier, the Resistance in the northern zone had been hit by the arrest of Moulin’s right-hand man, Henri Manhès. Moulin was alarmed – not only had he lost one of his key links with the Resistance groups in the north, but, as he confessed to his sister one night in the family home: ‘I gave Manhès some photos so he could get a new identity card made for me. The Gestapo might have found them, either on him or in his desk. They turned his apartment upside down, and even cut the legs off chairs, looking for papers.’499

  At the heart of the Nazi web that was being spun to catch ‘Max’ was twenty-nine-year-old Klaus Barbie, a member of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS intelligence service, and head of the Gestapo in Lyons. Despite his unprepossessing appearance – he was ‘a rather run-of-the-mill, slightly vulgar young man’ according to Lucie Aubrac500 – Barbie’s campaign against the Resistance and against French Jews was terrifyingly effective. Moulin could sense Barbie’s presence; he could almost smell the danger. On 7 May 1943 he wrote to de Gaulle, fearing the terrible consequences were he to be captured, and pointing the finger at Frenay:

  I am now hunted both by Vichy and by the Gestapo who, in part due to the methods of some members of the [Resistance] movements, know everything about my identity and my activities. As a result, my task is becoming increasingly hard, while the difficulties are becoming increasingly numerous. I am quite decided to hold on as long as possible, but if I am killed, I will not have had the time necessary to train my successors.501

  Meanwhile, Barbie crept closer. On the morning of 9 June General Delestraint went to Mass in a Paris church, before setting off for La Muette Métro station, where he was due to meet René Hardy, who was in charge of Resistance work on the railways.502 When Delestraint got to the rendezvous, he was arrested. The Nazis had known of the planned meeting for nearly two weeks, ever since Combat member Henry Aubry had left an uncoded message for Hardy in a Lyons letter box that had been ‘blown’ by the Nazis, following the betrayal of a young Resistance member, Jean Multon. Although Aubry soon learned that the letter box had been blown, he did not warn Delestraint or anyone else. Arrested by the SD, Delestraint was interrogated and eventually sent to Dachau, where the SS executed him in April 1945, days before the Allies liberated the camp.

  News of Delestraint’s arrest hit the Resistance leadership badly. Frenay was furious and left for London almost immediately afterwards. Pierre de Bénouville was so concerned about Frenay’s state of mind that he hid some terrible news from his comrade. De Bénouville had just heard that Berty Albrecht, Frenay’s lover and fellow leader of Combat, had committed suicide in Fresnes jail two weeks earlier. Fearing that the news would destroy Frenay, and wanting his friend to focus on picking up the pieces after Delestraint’s arrest, de Bénouville let Frenay get on the plane to London without telling him Berty was dead. Frenay finally discovered the awful truth two months later.503

  When Moulin learned of Delestraint’s arrest, he immediately dispatched a handwritten letter – his last – to de Gaulle, putting the entire blame for the disaster on Frenay and the long-running campaign against himself and Delestraint that had been organized by Frenay, d’Astier and the other leaders.504 He further insisted that the name of Delestraint’s successor should be kept secret from all the leaders of the Resistance to avoid a repetition of the squabbling and the security leaks. There was no reply from London.

  Delestraint was not the only victim that day; unaware of the danger, Hardy had taken the train to Paris – followed by the traitor Multon and the sinister Robert Moog, a French Gestapo agent.505 Arrested en route and taken to Gestapo headquarters in Lyons, Hardy later admitted that he agreed to ‘work for Barbie’, although why, and what exactly that involved, remain unclear.506 A week later Hardy was released. It can be assumed that from that moment onwards he was at the very least tailed by the Nazis. Elementary tradecraft dictated that anyone who was arrested should be isolated from all Resistance activities – they would probably be followed, and they might have been ‘turned’. But the handful of Resistance members who knew that Hardy had been arrested did nothing. Not only did he return to his duties, he even turned up unannounced at a Resistance summit meeting to choose a replacement for Delestraint, held on 21 June, in a doctor’s surgery in the Lyons suburb of Caluire. A meeting that included Jean Moulin.

  Everything about this meeting was wrong. Despite the presence of so many Resistance leaders, there was no armed security group outside. And although Hardy’s presence was entirely unexpected – he was pushed into attending by Combat member de Bénouville, probably to ensure that the new head of the Secret Army would be amenable to the action-orientated views of Combat – no one seems to have thought there was any problem when he appeared. Raymond Aubrac, who had been released by the Nazis five weeks earlier, came to the meeting with Moulin, when he also should have been kept at arm’s length. Finally, Moulin and Aubrac spent thirty minutes in the centre of Lyons, waiting for a comrade who was to accompany them to Caluire. They should have abandoned the rendezvous after ten to fifteen minutes, but against all the rules they waited. And although Moulin and his comrades turned up at Caluire forty-five minutes late, the five Resistance leaders were still waiting for them. In an ultimate bizarre twist, because Moulin and Aubrac were so late, the doctor’s housekeeper thought they were patients and ushered them, perplexed, into the waiting room, where a number of genuinely sick people were sitting. The two men sat there, uncertain what was happening. Then Barbie and his Gestapo agents burst in, arresting everyone, including the Resistance members in the room above.507

  The Nazis were overjoyed. They had inflicted a terrible blow on the Resistance. They knew that one of their prisoners was ‘Max’, but at first they did not know which of the men it was. Eventually, they discovered. Over the next two weeks Moulin was beaten and tortured almost to death by Barbie, but he was never broken. Fatally injured at Barbie’s hands, Moulin was eventually transferred to Germany, but died en route. The last of his comrades to see him alive was Christian Pineau, who was being held in Montluc prison in Lyons on his way to Buchenwald, his real identity and his true role still hidden from the Nazis. At six in the evening of 24 June, Pineau was called out of his cell and told he had to shave a prisoner who was lying on a bench:

  Imagine my stupefaction, my horror, when I realized that the man lying down was none other than Max Moulin. He was unconscious, his eyes were sunken as though they had been pushed into his head. On his temple there was a nasty purple wound. A slight moan escaped from his swollen lips . . . Suddenly, Max opened his eyes and looked at me. I am sure he recognized me, but he must have found it difficult to understand why I was there. ‘Water,’ he murmured . . . I leaned towards Max, uttered some stupid, banal words of comfort. He spoke five or six words in English, but his voice was so broken and stuttering that I could not understand. He drank some of the water I gave him, then lost consciousness again . . . Max Moulin remained stretched out on the bench where, no doubt, ‘they’ were going to leave him for the night. I never saw him again.508

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  The events at Caluire have fascinated Fr
ench readers and writers for over sixty years, with every possible theory being advanced to explain why the meeting was raided and who identified Moulin as ‘Max’.509 After the war, Hardy was tried twice for allegedly betraying Moulin and the others and was acquitted both times, committing perjury on the first occasion. When Klaus Barbie was eventually brought back to France in 1983 and tried for war crimes, he threatened to make all sorts of ‘revelations’ about the affair, but the wizened and unrepentant fascist shed no further light on events.

  It seems unlikely that we will ever know the truth. In a way, it does not matter. The meeting was betrayed, Moulin was murdered and the others were arrested and were subject to appalling and inhuman treatment. The Nazi machine rolled over these brave men and crushed them. The Resistance, however, continued.

  7

  The Maquis

  The railway line south from Limoges snakes through the small town of Eymoutiers, following the Vienne river, hugging the wooded hillside. About four kilometres west of Eymoutiers, the railway crosses the river on a high viaduct. Here, at around two in the morning of 13 March 1943, the Resistance carried out one of its first pieces of large-scale sabotage. Later in the week, a rail convoy of Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) labour conscripts was due to leave Eymoutiers for Nazi Germany. The nine men gathered that night at the foot of the viaduct were determined to stop the convoy. They carefully loaded a home-made pipe bomb into a gutter that ran into a pier, attached a long fuse and retired to a safe distance. About twenty minutes later there was a massive explosion, and the pier came tumbling down, leaving an enormous gap between the two parts of the viaduct, bridged pathetically by two thin lines of rail, like a child’s toy. The STO convoy was cancelled.510