Avenue of Spies

by Alex Kershaw

  According to René, who had made a considerable fortune on both sides of the Atlantic as a corporate lawyer, it was none other than his father-in-law who, after conferring with the general, first pressed the Germans to leave the hospital alone, and then “received assurances from [Nazi ambassador] Abetz that the American Hospital in Neuilly, one of the most modern in Europe, would be placed under the protection of the French Red Cross. That was how this American institution, of which my father, General de Chambrun, was the volunteer manager, had escaped the greediness of the Wehrmacht.”

  Abetz was even better connected than the Chambruns. Described as a “man of some breadth but not enough character,” he had been Hitler’s translator and had worked for the Abwehr in Paris before the war. It was said that the Führer and the thirty-eight-year-old ambassador had a special relationship, that the Führer had designed Abetz’s uniform, and that Abetz was always ushered quickly into the Reich Chancellery to see him one on one when in Berlin, a beautiful leather briefcase under his arm. The briefcase contained Parisian pornography, of which Hitler was particularly fond.

  René de Chambrun, who was in fact Pétain’s godson, and his wife, Josée, were often to be seen at Abetz’s parties at the German embassy, in the Hôtel de Beauharnais, at 78, Rue de Lille. “Bunny,” as René was known to family and friends, and Josée, with her dark complexion subtly accentuated by the best cosmetics, her bright eyes, her perfectly plucked brows, and her dark bob, did more than swap small talk over champagne and exquisite canapés. It would later be alleged that Josée, ever clad in the latest fashions of one of her favorite designers—Chanel, Hermès, or Schiaparelli—had spied for Abetz, passing him key intelligence that she had carried with her from America in a diplomatic pouch.

  The Chambruns enjoyed excellent relations with Abetz and, just as crucially for the American Hospital, with several rich landowners around Paris. The general and René had arranged for one of them, a French aristocrat, to supply the hospital with his entire potato crop. Other mutually beneficial deals were struck. As a result, the hospital’s ambulances often carried hidden food as well as patients, and even the odd few cases of wine. The authorities allowed each patient one half liter of wine per day, so the hospital soon had far more wine than even the most alcoholic could drink. Farmers by contrast were parched. “We took 500 liters of wine and bartered the wine for 5,000 kilos of fertilizer,” remembered one of Sumner’s colleagues, Dr. Otto Gresser, who was in charge of food provision—no easy task in wartime Paris. “One farmer gave us 10,000 kilos of potatoes for the fertilizer.”

  Meat was quite another matter. It was, it seemed to those without black market connections, literally worth its weight in gold. Still, Sumner managed at one point to acquire over 300 kilos of beef, a vast amount in wartime Paris. Nevertheless, the meat was quickly consumed and Sumner was soon imploring Dr. Gresser to somehow find more. “Look here,” Sumner told him one day, “if we can’t do any better, some patients are going to have malnutrition.” Somehow more meat was found, but then several suspicious German officials made a surprise visit, having learned that a truck with German markings had made a large delivery. Sumner and his staff just managed to hide the meat in the hospital garden before the Germans could find it. General de Chambrun then had a word with the appropriate official and the nosy Germans promptly dropped their inquiries.

  Sumner relied heavily on the general to keep the Germans at bay on an almost daily basis. As de Chambrun’s American wife, Clara, recalled, the general “received visit after visit from German medical officers of high rank with no other object in view than to take over the whole establishment for the use of their army.” But, due to the de Chambruns’ superb connections, the hospital remained independent. Other Germans, namely the Gestapo, may not have been so easily deterred. Sumner assumed the Gestapo sometimes masqueraded as patients. Yet he believed the hospital was so chaotic, due to what he proudly called his “organized confusion,” that none would be able to work out what was really going on. “They’ll never figure out this madhouse,” he told a colleague.

  Sumner was not deluded. He carefully assessed risk. He was a master surgeon who made critical assessments—for example, whether a patient would live or die—all the time. And so he knew full well that he could be betrayed at any time. All it took was one patient, one nurse, one doctor, to turn informer, to be threatened by one of Knochen’s French thugs, to talk too loudly in a bar, to confide in a traitor unknowingly, and it would all be over. Sumner knew what the Gestapo could do. He knew who his neighbors were. And he needed no reminding that if the Gestapo found out who Dr. Sumner Jackson, the grumpy hero of young English patients, really was, then he would, without a doubt, be faced with the devil’s choice: work for the Gestapo, betraying others, as was their way, or be sent deep into the Third Reich, to a concentration camp.

  Sumner’s activities became even more perilous following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Hitler’s audacious attack proved a boon to the resistance as thousands of French communists responded to the call from Joseph Stalin to take up arms and defeat Nazism wherever it held sway. Attacks on German soldiers in Paris soared. Many French communists also began to join escape lines, helping downed Allied aircrews get back to Britain. In response, the Germans posted stark warnings throughout the country, marking a dark turn in Nazi occupation policy:

  NOTICE

  Any male who would aid, directly or indirectly, enemy air troops coming down in parachutes, or having made a forced landing, would facilitate their escape, would hide them, or would come to their aid in any manner whatsoever, will be shot on the spot. People who seize crews forced to land, or parachutists, or who contribute, by their behavior to their capture, will receive an award of 10,000 francs.

  If caught, Sumner now knew that some of his neighbors, the Gestapo, would not hesitate to have him killed. Never had he had so much to lose. Why not play safe for a while? Why not join the vast majority of the French, hovering in the gray zone between heroism and collaboration? Was the risk really worth it?

  —

  IT WAS early on October 2, 1941, when the explosions awoke Paris. But there was no sound of planes overhead. At 2:30 a.m., in the Rue des Tourelles, a bomb went off. At 3:30 a.m. there was another explosion in the Rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, and then just after dawn a massive boom on the Rue de la Victoire. Glass shattered, covering the street. In all, there were six detonations at synagogues around the city. A seventh failed to go off. It was the French who had left these bombs, surely, proving they really did despise the Jews, just as the Nazis did.

  Helmut Knochen had in fact orchestrated the whole affair, hoping to set off a wave of spontaneous violence similar to that of Kristallnacht in 1938. He had ordered one of his men, SS-Obersturmführer Hans Sommer, to find the dynamite used in the bombs and to provide a getaway car for a group of hired French thugs. Unfortunately, there were two German victims: the explosions injured two German soldiers. The military authorities investigated and Sommer soon revealed that Knochen had been behind the bombings. The Prussian generals running Paris were outraged. There had so far been an uncomfortable truce between the Gestapo and the military, between the SS and the Wehrmacht grandees, who were perfectly happy to sit out the occupation in an elegant Parisian hotel, taking no part in Hitler’s race war against the Jews. It was now time for the Gestapo, part of the ever-growing hydra of the SS, to be firmly put in its place and for the military to assert its power in dictating policy and the policing in France.

  Five days after the explosions, General Otto von Stülpnagel, the military commander of France, finally learned of Knochen’s role in the outrage. He despised Knochen and had worked hard to contain him, in fact ordering him to cease all intelligence gathering and communication with Gestapo seniors in Berlin. Now Stülpnagel pushed to have Knochen disciplined—at the very least, to have him sent back to Germany in disgrace.

  Later that October, there was yet another explosion, caused by a stray bomb
from the RAF that landed on the Avenue Foch and sadly missed all of the Nazi abodes. Nonetheless, it was a foreshadowing of sorts. Over the next two months, according to a German intelligence report, seventeen more bombs were set off in Paris by the resistance. By the time the last one exploded, Knochen was no longer residing at 72, Avenue Foch. Stülpnagel, it seemed, had won his fight with the Gestapo and Knochen found himself back in Berlin, his glittering career cut short just as he was about to reach his prime.

  —

  NOT LONG after Knochen’s ignominious exit, a bitter cold spell settled over Paris. The Jacksons steeled themselves for a second winter under the jackboot. Phillip and Toquette were once again living mostly on Avenue Foch, spending weekdays there so that a delighted Phillip could return to his old school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly. It was at their home on Avenue Foch one evening that Phillip and his parents first learned from the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, marking America’s entry into the war in the Pacific. On December 11, four days after the Japanese attack, Hitler declared war on the United States, confident he could easily defeat the racially inferior Americans.

  The greatest conflict in history had finally entangled Americans in Paris more than two years after Hitler invaded Poland and eighteen months after Paris was occupied. It didn’t take long for the Germans to turn their attention to the estimated two thousand U.S. citizens who were still at large in the city. On December 18, 1941, the Germans arrested a total of 340 American men under the age of sixty. Notably, Sumner was “permitted to remain at liberty,” undoubtedly due to General de Chambrun’s influence. Sumner’s fellow Americans were interned at a camp fifty miles northeast of Paris in Compiègne.

  Another Christmas approached. There was so much snow that some Parisians, pining for the pistes of the French Alps, went skiing on the slopes of Montmartre instead. General de Chambrun’s wife, Clara, busy most days running the American Library in Paris, remembered that there was a “feast” at the American Hospital that took months to prepare. “Under the Germans’ very noses, clandestine pigs were raised and fattened, and the menu always included ham, bacon and sausage,” she would later write. “The songs ran the musical gamut from ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ to ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee.’ ” Everyone tried to raise each other’s spirits, she added, by stressing that the next Christmas France would be free.

  Among those celebrating in the hospital were forty British wounded POWs. They could look forward only to grim incarceration when they returned to the POW camps from where they had been sent for treatment. Sumner apparently did what he could to help some of them fully recover in more hospitable climes by sending them, sometimes in the hospital’s ambulances, along an escape line to sunny Spain. America’s entry into the war had marked a point of no return. Just as he had in the last war, it was now his duty to do all he could to help the Allied cause.

  EIGHT

  AVENUE BOCHE

  THE HEINKEL LANDED at Orly airport, about half an hour’s drive from central Paris. Among the carefully selected entourage of SS officers and propaganda photographers waiting for the plane to come to rest and the doors to open was Helmut Knochen, back in Paris after a bitter Christmas exile in Berlin and for once in full uniform, his Iron Cross dangling from his left breast pocket. It was early on May 5, 1942, when a tall and slim figure, with an aquiline nose and piercing blue eyes, emerged from the plane. A few minutes later, Knochen was photographed on the runway, welcoming thirty-seven-year-old Reinhard Heydrich to France.

  As a general in the SS and chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), Heydrich already pulled the key levers of terror, being in charge of the Gestapo, the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD), and the Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo). Tens of thousands had been murdered on his orders. Millions more would eventually die as a result of his carefully planned answer to the Jewish “problem” in Europe—the Final Solution, the greatest crime in human history. He now wanted to extend the reach of the SS so that it dominated every aspect and corner of the Third Reich, including France. Hitler no less called him, without irony, “the man with the iron heart.”

  Knochen was delighted to see Heydrich once more. Indeed, were it not for Heydrich, he might by now have been banished to some Einsatzkommando in the East and be leading middle-aged Hamburg policemen, armed with cases of schnapps to deaden the disgust after a long day of rounding up shtetl Jews and filling pits with their bullet-riddled corpses. Instead, he was back, living in high style like some Prussian prince from the last century, on Avenue Foch. It was glücklich Zeit (“happy times”) for Dr. Bones. Just a couple of months before, on February 27, he had married an attractive Aryan, Willerbel Ruth, in Paris. She had given him a son a year earlier to add to a girl, three years old, from his first marriage in 1935 when he had been busy helping organize the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. There had been a fancy wedding reception for Knochen and Willerbel at the German embassy, hosted by none other than Otto Abetz.

  It was Heydrich who had made sure that Knochen returned to Paris earlier in 1942, after his sojourn in Berlin. Knochen’s immediate superior, a slack libertine called Max Thomas, was made to pay the price for the synagogue debacle. Meanwhile, senior Nazis in Berlin had removed Helmut’s nemesis, General von Stülpnagel. Seen as too effete and lenient, he was replaced by his own cousin.

  Heydrich had arrived in Paris to set matters straight: to put the SS and Gestapo in their rightful place in the hierarchy of power, above the military. It was why Knochen was no doubt grinning from ear to ear that morning of May 5, slavishly fawning over Heydrich at Orly airport before joining his boss on the ride into Paris. They were soon in the southern outskirts of Paris and then crossing the Seine and entering the Place Vendôme, dominated by a high column, built to celebrate Napoleon’s great victory of Austerlitz, with a veneer of spiraling bas-relief bronze plates made from the 133 cannons captured at the battle. A statue of Napoleon, bare-headed, holding a sword in his right hand, stood atop the column, directly opposite the entrance to the finest hotel in all of Nazi-occupied Europe: the Ritz.

  A few adjustments had been made to the hotel since before the war in order to adapt to the new clientele. A small room, previously called the “writing room,” had been converted to a checkroom where considerate Germans were requested by hotel management to please deposit their pistols and any other weapons. The formal dining room was reserved for the German command of Paris, but high-profile collaborators and the very rich could nonetheless be found discreetly seated at many tables. The famous Ritz croissants had alas disappeared from the room service menu, but there was plenty of caviar by the time Heydrich came to visit. Bertin the barman had served cocktails to Hemingway before the war. Now he mixed a mean martini for the highest ranks of the Gestapo. Bertin claimed to have invented the Bloody Mary in the twenties to help Hemingway recover from yet another hangover.

  Also in residence while Heydrich was at the hotel were several notorious collaborators. René de Chambrun’s most famous client, Coco Chanel, had lived there since August 1940 in rooms 227 and 228 on the same floor as Madame Marie-Louise Ritz, who owned the hotel and stayed in rooms 266 and 268. The actress Arletty, a dear friend of Josée de Chambrun who would later be famous for her role in Les Enfants du Paradis, shared one of the hotel’s famous brass beds with Luftwaffe officer Hans-Jürgen Soehring, ten years her junior. “Mon coeur est francais,” Arletty would protest after the war. “Mon cul est international.” (“My heart is French…[but] my ass is international.”).

  The following morning, May 6, 1942, Knochen was hard at work once more, introducing Heydrich to the men who really mattered in France, including thirty-three-year-old René Bousquet, Laval’s appointment as head of the French police. Bousquet, a suave and persuasive operator, tried to convince Heydrich that German interests in France would be best served if he allowed Vichy to maintain control of the police. Knochen was inclined to agree, for he knew that if the SS wanted to solve the Jewish
problem in France, only Bousquet’s gendarmes could accomplish a large-scale deportation. The SS did not have sufficient manpower. Bousquet managed to charm Heydrich into agreeing with him. “With men like him,” Knochen would later stress, “we could prepare the future of Europe.”

  Heydrich’s sojourn in Paris was not all about business. Knochen made sure of that. “Heydrich saw a lot of people and he loved Paris, parties and women,” recalled Knochen, who helped introduce Heydrich to the city’s many pleasures, and was also only too happy to provide entrée into its highest society. Knochen was by now very well connected, having attended several salons where, as he put it, “la plus haute société” gathered. One was held every Thursday afternoon at the home of the American-born Florence Gould, who lived just around the corner from Knochen’s offices at 129, Avenue de Malakoff. Knochen also attended parties hosted by another American woman, Nina Crosby, who was married to Melchior de Polignac of the Pommery champagne dynasty. Then there was Madame Olga von Mumm, another rich champagne heiress and a friend of Josée de Chambrun, daughter-in-law of General de Chambrun.

  On May 11, 1942, after a most enjoyable and productive visit, Heydrich bid adieu to Paris. He would never see the city or Knochen again. Just sixteen days later, on May 27, he would be fatally wounded after two Czech agents trained by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) attacked him, rolling a bomb underneath his car in Prague. He died on June 4, aged thirty-eight, having told Himmler on his deathbed that the world was “just a barrel-organ which the Lord God turns Himself. We all have to dance to the tune which is already on the drum.”

  With Heydrich gone, Knochen could no longer count on support at the highest levels in Berlin. He would have to be doubly careful not to disappoint his SS seniors from now on. Heydrich’s death was, however, of great benefit to Knochen in the short term. In the days before his assassination, Heydrich had believed that Hitler would shortly send him to assume total control of France. After Heydrich’s death, the task of destroying all opposition to Nazi rule fell instead to none other than Knochen, who was promoted, and to a rotund SS general called Karl Oberg who would be the overall SS commander in France. A former doctor and World War I veteran, not once had Oberg shown hesitation when it came to eliminating enemies of the Reich. In the words of the mayor of Paris, Pierre Taittinger, he would soon prove to be “a demoniacal creature capable of doing anything for his Fuehrer. A perfect incarnation of the brute beast, he seemed to have taken on the task of making himself detested and in this respect he succeeded perfectly.”