Voices from the Dark Years

by Douglas Boyd

  The confidence engendered by news of the landings in the south sometimes went too far. Six young maquisards in the little Girondine village of Landerrouat attached a French flag to a black Citroën car and drove through the village in triumph – only to be greeted by German machine gun fire. Rapidly hitting reverse gear, the driver headed out of the village. Two of his passengers jumped out and legged it across the fields. Their four comrades, the Germans from Landerrouat in close pursuit, drove straight into another column of Germans coming the other way and ended what was to have been the morning of triumph dead on the road for their relatives to find.

  SS officer Alexander de Kreuz was placed in command of a squad sent to the Paris station at Pantin, to remove from a transportation train five men, including de Gaulle’s former military representative in Paris, Colonel André Rondenay. The SS drove their victims outside Paris to Domont and shot them, ordering Feldgendarmerie soldiers to bury the bodies while they returned heroically to the base in rue des Saussaies to drink champagne, as was the custom after SS executions. For most Parisians, even drinking water was in short supply. The Metro no longer worked at all and electricity and gas supplies were totally unpredictable. Like the Milice, gathered in Vichy’s spa buildings with their families and an assortment of livestock they intended to take with them on their flight to the east, the capital’s Doriotists huddled in the PPF HQ on rue des Pyramides with their families, waiting for Wehrmacht transport to rescue them while some party comrades in Gironde rounded up all the Jewish refugees they could find on 5 August by lying in wait outside the free restaurant of Ste-Foy-la-Grande at lunchtime. After driving them across the last remaining bridge over the Dordogne in brilliant sunshine, they gunned them down in a vineyard overlooking the town and returned singing marching songs from the First World War – Auprès de ma blonde and En passant par la Lorraine.

  In the Paris embassy, Abetz was obligingly issuing travel documents to anyone who wanted to head for Germany before the Allies arrived. He also took the time to send a telegram to Ribbentrop protesting that Kommandant von Gross Paris General Von Choltitz was acting with disgraceful brutality – this to deter Berlin from replacing him with a hard-line Nazi, who would implement Hitler’s mad plan to detonate explosives placed on the bridges, in Notre Dame and other churches, in the Senate, at Les Invalides and the Opéra.2 Thanks to Von Choltitz’s genius for procrastination, they were never blown.

  Following news that the Americans and French under General de Lattre de Tassigny were moving out from the Operation Anvil bridgehead, Déat, de Brinon, Darnand and Doriot joined the lemming rush to the east. In Lyon, Klaus Barbie lined up sixteen Jews in front of a firing squad at the Fort Montluc in another act of senseless murder. At Drancy, Aloïs Brunner had to content himself with one cattle truck for fifty-one VIP prisoners and a couple of passenger coaches for himself and his staff, attached to a train reserved for an anti-aircraft battery. Transport 79 – the final instalment of Drancy prisoners for the gas chambers – pulled out of Bobigny station Auschwitz-bound at 5.30 p.m. and slowly progressed eastwards along the Seine.

  Among Brunner’s prisoners was aircraft constructor Marcel Bloch, arrested under his cover name Dassault.3 Also in the wagon was a 12-year-old boy and Henri Pohoryles, who had left the colonie in Moissac to join the Armée Juive commando that assassinated the Ukrainian Gestapo aides. Shrewd enough to note that in Paris a month after D-Day there were at most 300 Resistance members with arms and the training to use them, he had nevertheless been tricked into bringing the Armée Juive leaders to a false-flag meeting in Paris, where the man he thought was a British agent revealed himself as German Intelligence Officer Karl Rehbein, who put them all under arrest. Surviving to found the Dassault Aviation company, Bloch later recalled his fellow passengers divided in adversity on the journey, the communists huddling at one end of their uncomfortable moving prison to leave a gap between themselves and the VIP ‘rich Jews’, neither group speaking to the other.

  On the night of 16 August, curious curfew-breakers noticed a small convoy of trucks heading out of Paris westwards. They were no last-minute reinforcements for the front, but an execution squad that cut down thirty-five young Frenchmen with machine pistols in the Bois de Boulogne and left the bodies for passers-by to find under the trees.

  Impatient with the stop-go progress on the severely disrupted railway network, Brunner commandeered a car and continued his personal funk-flight by road, leaving Milice and SS guards in charge of his prisoners. Security relaxed with his departure, after which prisoners were allowed to find drinking and washing water at stops. Twenty-seven of the fifty-one escaped at about 1 a.m. on 21 August; of the twenty-four others, the obviously Orthodox were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz, the 12-year-old boy taken to Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg as one of a battery of children used for medical experiments. Dr Kurt Heissmeyer injected them regularly with tuberculosis bacilli ‘in the interests of science’. Fifteen days before Germany surrendered he gave them all their final injection. Had it been simply to stop them accusing him in an Allied war-crimes court, he could have used something more immediately lethal than tuberculosis. However, when British troops liberated Neuengamme, they found the twenty children hanged – a slow death when the weight of a child’s body has been reduced by malnutrition.

  With the police on strike, German loudspeaker vans patrolled the streets of Paris warning that disorder would be dealt with by force. Few civilians ventured onto the streets as the exodus of Germans choked the main thoroughfares with overloaded ambulances, staff cars, trucks and vehicles of all descriptions. Warned by Abetz to leave for Germany voluntarily if he did not want to be taken under arrest, Laval called a last ghost of a cabinet meeting before spending his final night in the Hôtel Matignon. On the morning of 18 August, Abetz formally closed the embassy and promised the concierge he would soon be back, before leaving with an escort of SS officers to pick up Laval and his wife. Also in the cortège was Abetz’s mistress and a certain amount of loot the ambassador had managed to accumulate for his personal use. Laval takes up the story:

  About ten o’clock the German Ambassador appeared at the Hôtel Matignon, together with the chief of the German Police. The cars of the Gestapo were lined up before the door. A notice of the order of arrest was served on me. Such were the conditions in which I was forced to leave Paris.4

  Were they? Or was he stealing Pétain’s alibi? Informed by Renthe-Fink at 10 p.m. that he would be taken to Germany by force if he did not consent to leave immediately, the marshal played for time. The departure was delayed until 5.30 a.m., then 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. Meanwhile, Ménétrel tried to persuade his master to slink out of a service entrance of the Hôtel du Parc disguised as a workman, but Pétain retorted, ‘Such an escapade is fit neither for my age nor the dignity of my position.’

  He spent his last night in Vichy dictating a political testament and a final Paroles aux Français before going to bed. At 7 a.m., the Papal Nuncio and Swiss Minister Stücki arrived as requested to witness before history that he was leaving under compulsion. Stücki played the main part, ensuring that the ‘violence’ should be sufficient to show that Pétain had not gone of his own free will and yet provoke no shooting by the marshal’s bodyguard. The farce was played out when Gestapo officer Detering arrived with 200 SD men, who surrounded the hotel and forced open the revolving door, jammed with a couple of chairs. The security gate on the stairs was also forced in front of the guards, who took no action.

  Outside the door of the marshal’s suite, Detering knocked politely, but two inner doors had to be forced before he came upon the head of state in shirt and trousers, doing up his shoelaces. Ignoring the intrusion, the marshal finished dressing, took his breakfast and was escorted out of the building at 8.15 a.m., the small crowd of onlookers piping up an unhappy Marseillaise in his honour. His destination, and Laval’s, was the Hohenzollern fortress town of Sigmaringen between Stuttgart and the Swiss border where, in the ruins of the Reich, some author
ities put the number of big and small fry of the Vichy regime who had held out until the final collapse as high as 30,000.

  The regime that had started as comic opera ended as a real-life première of Sartre’s stage play Closed Circuit5– a metaphor for hell, in which the waiter in a windowless but comfortably furnished hotel room explains to four mystified characters, ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres!’: hell is the other people, with whom they are locked up for eternity.

  Back in the capital that Pétain and Laval would see again only as the setting for their trials ending with death sentences, the Hôtel Majestic was deserted. In the Hôtel Meurice on rue de Rivoli, General Von Choltitz sat calmly chatting to his staff. Having decided not to comply with Hitler’s order to destroy the city, he would have been condemned to death on return to Germany and had nowhere else to go.

  On the façade of the nearby Hôtel de Ville the tricolore flag flew again for the first time in fifty months, having been occupied by the FFI after killing the drivers of two broken down Wehrmacht trucks at Levallois in the north-west of the capital and thus acquiring four machine guns, twelve sub-machine guns, 250 pistols and ammunition. The Paris police fortified the Préfecture opposite Notre Dame Cathedral, but all the months of planning for this moment between the various factions of the Resistance in the capital were now revealed as empty talk. When the communists declared a ‘general insurrection’ against the remaining Germans in the city, the Gaullists asked sarcastically what weapons they intended to use.

  The entire stockpile amounted to only 600 small arms, until weapons could be taken from German prisoners and casualties. In one early attack a truckload of German grenades was ‘liberated’. When the nervous drivers of two fleeing German trucks collided near Place de Clichy, the loot included nine machine guns, fifteen sub-machine guns and eight Mauser pistols. The Hotchkiss arms factory yielded twenty sub-machine guns. During the next six days a force of about 3,000 men and women – it was afterwards claimed to have been 7,000 or even 20,000 – was armed piecemeal in this way to man the barricades of furniture, sandbags, paving stones and trees, where they captured a few unlucky Germans who had lost their way.

  At 7 o’clock on 19 August, 2,000 Paris policemen in civilian clothes assembled on the parvis between Notre Dame Cathedral and the Préfecture. Accustomed to receiving orders, they milled around aimlessly with no one in charge. A truck arrived, from which a few automatic weapons and rifles were distributed. A sentry opened the main door of the Préfecture and they poured inside to sing the Marseillaise as a tricolore flag was hoisted on a flagpole. The PCF’s would-be commander of Paris, ‘Colonel’ Rol, arrived on his bicycle with his homemade uniform in a brown paper parcel, furious that the police had not waited for him. Hastily changing clothes in an office, he emerged with the intention of taking command, but they had other ideas.

  In distant Auch, Renée de Monbrison and her children were staying in yet another borrowed home. For days, they had been watching open trucks heading north carrying German wounded. On 19 August the German garrison drove out of the town with orders to regroup further north. One imagines the civilians at moments like this huddled in cellars, awaiting the ceasefire. Reality is so often different. Renée had packed the children off that day to the local swimming pool with a picnic. She heard them come running back to the house yelling, ‘Auch is liberated!’ Her 18-year-old daughter Françoise, who spoke perfect English, jumped into the first Allied jeep to enter the town and kissed a wounded British liaison officer sitting in the rear seat, Captain T.A. Mellows. Colonel Hilaire of the Armée Secrète and an American officer also got a kiss, as did the Polish driver, before Françoise was told to get down and behave herself because they were there to kill Germans, not to be kissed by pretty girls.

  Throughout her wanderings, Rénée had kept intact her last packet of tea in the assumption that her liberators would be English and in need of a good cuppa. When she now proudly presented them with her precious gift, the result was laughter all round: tea was one thing they had plenty of. Despite the public relief in Auch that the enemy had gone, Mellows warned the family that the Germans were not far away, having been halted at a barricade on the bridge at Isle-Jourdain, which was manned by local Maquis units. Dusk brought a stalemate, the Germans unable to cross and the Maquis unable to drive them back. After dark, the FFI ‘Armagnac battalion’ arrived and completely surrounded the German positions. At dawn, sporadic firing intensified until the arrival of the Corps Franc Pommiès. Now outnumbered, the scattered German groups surrendered, one by one.

  Since that left no armed enemy forces in the département of Gers, everyone congratulated themselves on having liberated their part of France without Allied intervention. Groups of musicians were playing in the streets of Auch, people of all ages dancing from sheer joy. For the de Monbrison family, the joy was tinged with sadness at the news that Captain Mellows had been killed in a skirmish only a few kilometres away.

  Elation after years of fear combined with a sleepless night to trigger one of those shameful scenes of the Liberation where young women with shaven heads were driven through the streets with babies in their arms by jeering neighbours, most of whom had never lifted a hand in anger for the past four years. The worst excesses of stripping girls naked and painting swastikas in tar on their breasts were avoided in Auch that morning when miliciens and other male collabos were rounded up and forced to parade around the town with some forty women accused of various crimes.

  Most of the women were shorn, the majority because they had gone with German soldiers. Whilst this was regarded as permissible business activity for prostitutes, those girls and women guilty of falling in love with a German were universally punished, while wives of POWs absent in Germany who had had a German boyfriend risked prosecution as well. In the crowd screaming at and spitting on its victims, 18-year-old Madeleine Martin was so carried away by the general excitement that when a neighbour accused a woman of having denounced her husband, who had been deported to Germany, Madeleine took the scissors she was holding and continued hacking off her victim’s hair until she was completely bald. Now Madeleine says, ‘What a terrible thing it was to do! But at the time, I just wanted to hurt someone to make up for all the fear and unhappiness.’6

  A former Abwehr major extrapolated from his own experience to estimate the number of anonymous denunciations made during the occupation at 30 million.7 Most of the letters were never opened because there would not have been time. Judging by the handwriting and spelling of those that were, the majority had been written by the poor and underprivileged to get even with those above them in society or enjoying some advantage they lacked. Specific motives varied from the desire to be rid of an inconvenient wife, a violent husband or a business competitor to family feuds and the hostility of the steward at Château St-Roch towards Renée and her family, whose arrival threatened to expose his illicit selling of estate produce on the black market. In turn, many of those betrayed delivered others to the Gestapo to save their own skins. A high proportion of the anonymous letters came from women seizing the power of life and death over spouses and neighbours. When those denounced were male, one might argue that in a country that denied women the vote or any other participation in public affairs, the writers were collectively teaching a lesson to the men who had voted for Pétain in the casino at Vichy.

  What is strange, is not that the collabos should have been summarily punished at the Liberation, but that the violence usually died down after the crowd had had its understandable moment of triumph. A few men were lynched, many beaten up, others later put on trial, but after the humiliation of the women in Auch there was no escalation of violence, although the new police commissioner in Moissac noted the possibility of a later ‘personal settling of accounts by those to whom the official punishment did not seem severe enough’.8 With much weaponry and explosives hidden away after the cessation of hostilities, it was inevitable that a number of collabos saw their shops or houses dynamited. In the worst reported incident,
‘ten masked persons went to the home in Moissac of two women recently released from imprisonment [for collaboration], shaved their heads and attempted to rape the younger one’.9

  The liberation of Moissac took place the day after that of Auch. When an FTP Maquis formation joined up with the Corps Franc Pommiès to infiltrate the town and clear it of Germans, heavy machine-gun and mortar fire greeted them from the Carmelite monastery on a hill dominating the town. Three civilians who strayed into the streets were accidentally killed and two others shot by a German firing squad. That night the Germans were trigger happy, understandably seeing ‘terrorists’ everywhere, but before daybreak the sound of firing died away as the enemy withdrew, dumping in the canal large quantities of arms and ammunition and leaving all their personal baggage behind to be looted by the locals.

  The FFI ordered the gendarmes to stop the looting and tried to maintain some control over the jubilant population because there were still many German troops in the area. Proving the point, that afternoon they took prisoner 150 bewildered young non-German conscripts left behind without orders or transport. Church bells were ringing far and near and the spirit of revenge was unleashed. Eighty-three alleged collabos were arrested and despatched to the concentration camp at Septfonds, now used to intern those who had sent others there during the dark years. At 1 per cent of the population, this was about the national average – and interestingly mirrored the proportion that had been in the Resistance for any length of time.

  It being a Sunday, Marie-Rose Dupont was with her son at home when a black Citroën with four men carrying rifles and wearing FFI armbands arrived and ordered her to get into the car. Neither then nor at any time later was she accused of anything, nor did anyone mention Willi. One of the men in the car was Albert Dumas, whose family were clients of the salon; the others she knew by sight. They drove her to the collège, now vacated by the Germans, which the FFI had made their temporary headquarters, and locked her up in a classroom with twenty or thirty other men and women. Unable to look at the others, she huddled in a corner with her eyes closed, praying to the Virgin Mary to let her return to her son. Two days later all the detainees were driven by the FFI to the gendarmerie in Lauzerte, 22km to the north. Since there were far too many prisoners for the cells to hold, they were locked in an office where they had to sleep on the floor, suffering frequent verbal abuse from anyone who felt like dropping in, but not otherwise maltreated.