by Alex Kershaw
Knochen was quick to assert his new power. In late May 1942, his men took over the role of the German military police in France. With his full colonel’s insignia—an oak leaf—on each collar, he now had real muscle, a status that the snobbish Prussian elites of the Wehrmacht could not challenge. All the hard work and his patience since 1940, when he had slipped into Paris in disguise, ironically as a military policeman, had paid off. He had lost his most important ally, whose patronage would be sorely missed, but as fate would have it he could now dance to an exhilarating new tune—as head of the Gestapo in Paris.
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JUST BEFORE leaving Paris, Heydrich had given Knochen specific orders. The fight against terrorism was to be stepped up dramatically. In his efforts to destroy the resistance, Knochen was determined to employ all the Gestapo’s considerable resources. But he knew he would also need to increasingly resort to more unconventional means, relying on the French criminal class to do much of the necessary torturing and murdering of select enemies. To this end, Knochen held a meeting at the end of June 1942 with one of his associates in the Parisian underworld, the gangster Henri Lafont, one of many career criminals whom the Gestapo had hired after releasing the most talented from prisons throughout Paris.
“You must devote yourself,” Knochen ordered Lafont, “to the battle against the English agents at large in Paris, the Gaullists and communists, and anyone who sabotages the friendship between Germans and the French.”
The mustached, wiry, and always impeccably dressed Lafont had for some time tried to ingratiate himself to Knochen. For a wedding present, he had given him a white Bentley, three of which Lafont had acquired and famously prized. And for the SS-Standartenführer’s fiancée he had found a diamond necklace. He had neglected, of course, to explain that he had stolen the jewels during a raid on a rival gang of black marketers. Such gifts were essential. Forty-year-old Lafont, whose real name was Henri Chamberlin, had made millions of francs from the black market under Knochen’s protection.
“From today,” stressed Knochen, “I want you to review your organization. Of course, you can carry on your black market activities, but they will from now on just be a cover and the source of your finances. Keep the men who’ll be useful. Let the others go. I want a complete overhaul of your organization so it gives absolute priority to fighting espionage and terrorism.”
Lafont tried to protest. He was very happy being a bandit. He didn’t want to start a secret war against his own countrymen.
Knochen was not impressed. Lafont was the Gestapo’s made man, the most powerful gangster in France. But there were plenty of other sociopaths vying to replace him. He would do as he was told and keep his mouth shut about it or else. Knochen was now head of the Gestapo in Paris, the new Nazi boss of bosses, and Lafont had better not forget it.
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ALTHOUGH 72, AVENUE FOCH was a hive of activity early that summer after Heydrich’s visit, no Gestapo offices were busier than those at number 31, less than a hundred yards from the Jackson family home. It was among the most imposing buildings on the avenue, once owned by Madame Alexandrine de Rothschild of the Jewish banking dynasty. That June of 1942 what happened inside was immensely ugly, for it became the epicenter of the Gestapo’s efforts to annihilate the Jews in France.
The architect of the Final Solution, SS colonel Adolf Eichmann, had arrived in Paris from Berlin and set up an office beside his aide Captain Theodor Dannecker at number 31. His objective was simple: with Knochen’s help he was to deport “all French Jews as soon as possible.” Six groups were due to leave on July 6. Publicly, of course, no French or German official gave a hint of the mass genocide already under way throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. Instead, they propagated the fiction that a Jewish state in the East was being formed. In Vichy, Pierre Laval noted during a cabinet meeting: “It would be no dishonor to me if I were to send the countless number of foreign Jews who are in France to this state one day.”
The question was: Who would take the Jews into German custody, the Germans or the French? On July 4, in Knochen’s spacious office overlooking the flower beds along Avenue Foch, his colleague SS-Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker insisted the SS round up the Jews. Knochen disagreed. René Bousquet’s gendarmes should do so instead. Without their help, after all, there was insufficient SS manpower in France to remove the Jews en masse.
Dannecker snapped that Knochen should make sure the French understood they were the ones who were to take orders, not vice versa.
“Why the endless nitpicking?” replied an exasperated Knochen.
Wiser heads prevailed and Knochen got his way. The French themselves would clear France of its vermin. This was crucial for political reasons. In recent months there had been a rapid increase in killings of Germans in France, especially by the mushrooming communist resistance. In response, the Germans had devised a code des otages—law of hostages—that basically meant executing fifty to a hundred Frenchmen to avenge every dead Nazi. René Bousquet had made sure these hostages were mostly communists, Vichy France’s best-organized and most violent enemies. The indiscriminate execution of so many French patriots had, however, only made matters worse. The German occupiers were now widely reviled. If they were seen to be rounding up women and children, there was serious risk of massive public unrest. So it was crucial that the French police, not the SS, be seen to be carrying out arrests.
That same day, July 4, 1942, Pierre Laval himself recommended during a meeting with Theodor Dannecker in Paris that children younger than sixteen also “be taken away” with their parents. Dannecker was delighted by Laval’s unprompted offer and with Knochen’s help he arranged for more than eight hundred teams of French police to move through five of the city’s arrondissements, placing Jews they arrested onto fifty buses, painted green and white, that had been specially requisitioned from Paris’s Compagnie des Transports. In all 27,388 names were selected from lists of registered Jews.
The Grande Rafle—the Great Roundup—began on the night of July 16 and lasted well into the following day as 13,152 Parisian Jews, including 4,000 children—thanks to Pierre Laval—were rounded up, with around half of them taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, or Vél’ d’Hiv, a large velodrome beside the Seine. The medical conditions at the Vél’ d’Hiv were atrocious. There were no lavatories. There was only one water tap for more than 7,000 people.
Sumner Jackson had been sending ambulances to care for the sick in internment camps since 1940 but was now barred from or unable to send staff to the Vél’ d’Hiv. He had noted the flight of Jewish neighbors in 1940. He and Toquette had also been deeply dismayed when the Nazis introduced anti-Semitic legislation. Now their worst fears were being realized. The unthinkable was happening: French citizens were being seized at the very heart of what had once been arguably the most civilized city in the world. The screams of Jews committing suicide pierced the silence in some quarters. The famous German writer Ernst Jünger, serving in Paris, noted with matter-of-fact precision in his diary that he had heard “wailing in the streets” as families were torn apart, mothers separated from their children.
Knochen’s staff worked hand in glove with the French police, some nine thousand of whom were involved in the roundups. According to one account: “It was a rafle conducted in keeping with the best of French conditions, for at noon the policemen returned to their posts to have lunch while higher-ranked and better paid set off to nearby restaurants. Only after the sacred déjeuner could the manhunt continue.”
Women’s cries could soon be heard throughout the Vél’ d’Hiv. “On a soif!” (“We’re thirsty!”) they called out.
Only two doctors were allowed inside the velodrome, equipped with little more than aspirin. After five days of misery, those incarcerated were transferred in cattle trucks to camps at Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande, and Drancy, a modernist high-rise development built in the 1930s also known as La Cité de la Muette—the City of Silence.
Meanwhile, along Avenue Foch and elsewhere, truc
ks loaded down with furniture and other Jewish possessions could be seen after deported Jews’ homes were ransacked. The looters belonged to a special Gestapo task force, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, actually headquartered on Avenue Foch. Eventually, according to the Nazis, this looting saw 69,619 Jewish homes, 38,000 of which were in Paris, “emptied of everything in daily or ornamental use.”
At the end of July, after more than 14,000 Parisian Jews had been rounded up, the Catholic Church in Paris made a belated appeal to Pierre Laval on the children’s behalf. But the Vichy premier was adamant: they all had to go. And they did. Less than four percent of those sent east returned. Not one was a child.
Sumner and Toquette, like all well-informed Parisians, were aware of what had happened during the Grande Rafle and were appalled by it. According to one account, Sumner had done what he could, sending the American Hospital’s ambulances to the deportation camps so they could fetch the seriously ill. But it had been impossible to make these patients disappear once they had recovered. The Germans had made certain that patients were returned to the deportation centers. It would have been heartrending for Sumner to watch. He had dedicated his life to healing and saving others. More than ever, he must have been determined to do whatever he could to defeat Nazism, to put an end to the reign of the mass murderers now living on Avenue Foch.
NINE
THE SHADOW GAME
WHAT SUMNER FEARED most would happen any day finally did: on the morning of Thursday, September 24, 1942, French gendarmes arrived, unexpected, at the American Hospital in Neuilly. They had come to arrest him.
Had Sumner been betrayed? It may have come as a relief to discover that the gendarmes did not want to hand him over to the Gestapo but rather were arresting him, along with hundreds of other American men under the age of sixty-five, so he could be placed in internment. Ironically, Jackson was about to take a vacation and had already packed a bag. Through General de Chambrun’s maneuverings, he had avoided internment in the weeks following Germany’s declaration of war on the United States in December 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor. But since then the authorities had become increasingly strict. Finally, he was going to have to join his fellow adult Americans in captivity.
News spread fast through the hospital, and several of Sumner’s colleagues were able to talk briefly with him before he left, perhaps for good. Some handed him hastily prepared gifts as he made his way out of the hospital, including bundles of food and a few bottles of excellent wine, which he stuffed into the deep pockets of his overcoat. He was then escorted to a nearby police station, where the gendarmes placed tags around his neck and made him sign several documents. Then he and other Americans were taken in a bus to the Gare du Nord. Miraculously, Sumner spotted a railway worker at the station whom he had recently treated. Sumner asked him for a favor. Would he contact Toquette? He gave the railway worker the telephone number for 11, Avenue Foch.
Sumner arrived at the British internment camp of Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, at lunchtime. The camp was based in an old barracks that had once housed Napoleon’s regiments and was home for the duration of the war to around two thousand British men. The conditions were surprisingly good compared to other camps in the Third Reich. Sumner noted that many of the internees received substantial aid packages from England. The gendarmes allowed him and his fellow Americans an hour and a half for lunch and also permitted them to buy provisions at the camp’s store, where he purchased British-made suspenders; he had never been able to find a decent pair in Paris. He also bought a pipe cleaner. Then he was asked for his name and date of birth and to provide proof that he was a doctor before being taken that evening to the American internment camp at Compiègne-Royallieu, Frontstalag 122 B, some fifty miles northeast of Paris.
Frontstalag 122 B had been set up in January 1942. The barracks were surrounded by barbed wire and overlooked by control towers. To his surprise, Sumner was given a small room where he could enjoy a little privacy. It even had a rug on the floor. The meals were poor compared to Saint-Denis, but thankfully the thousand or so American men interned in the camp received regular Red Cross parcels. Sumner discovered there was a camp nearby called Sector C, run by the SS, where the Germans were holding Jews. It was from there six months before, on March 27, that the very first deportation train had left French soil with a thousand Jews bound for Auschwitz. Conditions were said to have been atrocious. He was appalled by what he learned. His contempt for the “damned Boche” was now absolute.
Sumner was in good company. Some of the men in the camp had served in World War I in the trenches. There were several proud doughboys, Jackson’s favorite kind of Americans. He talked with them at great length, refighting key battles such as the Somme, which he had seen in all its horrors, but was no doubt careful not to mention his help for downed aircrews during these conversations. There were bound to be German spies in the camp. Several of the Americans interned with him had close dealings with the Germans, including a homosexual organist for the American Cathedral in Paris called Lawrence Whipp, who would soon be released, courted by the Gestapo, and then disappear in mysterious circumstances, allegedly abducted by the resistance. His corpse would eventually be found floating in the Seine.
Meanwhile, at the American Hospital, General de Chambrun was trying everything within his power to obtain Sumner’s release. A word in the right ear was required. The general had his own high-level contacts but he also relied on his son René to help deal with the Germans. That summer René had already attended four or five official meetings with the Germans at the Ritz “for the purpose of defending the interests of the American Hospital.” René also regularly visited the German embassy on Rue de Lille to speak with German ambassador Otto Abetz personally, and met with contacts in the Hôtel Majestic, headquarters of the German military command.
Sumner had been in Compiègne barely a week when, one morning early that October, he saw a car with official Red Cross markings pull into Frontstalag 122 B. The door to the front passenger seat opened. Out stepped General de Chambrun. He had succeeded: the German authorities had finally agreed to release Sumner. As the car left the camp, driven by the general’s chauffeur, the general handed Sumner a sheath of press clippings. One included a report from the New York Times that included Sumner’s name as among several Americans “released in France.”
Sumner was happy to be a free man once more, but could not have been pleased by the very public mention of his name. It was crucial to retain a low profile if he was to continue to operate his escape line. By contrast, the general was delighted by the press coverage. What, he asked proudly, did Sumner think of it?
“It’s free publicity,” said Sumner. “Good for the hospital. Show ’em we’re still in business. We need the money.”
Chambrun agreed and went on to complain that the press had misspelled his wife Clara’s name.
There was another aspect to Sumner’s release of note: the Gestapo, his neighbors of two years now, had slipped up. Sumner was a notable citizen of an enemy nation and was likely, given his war record, to try to help the Allied cause. Unwittingly, by not monitoring the American expatriate community more carefully, the Gestapo had allowed a true threat, a “terrorist,” to return to his double life and to his home—which, ironically, was just down the block.
Less than a fortnight after being arrested, a delighted Sumner was reunited with a much relieved Toquette and Phillip and then returned to work at the hospital. Thanks to General and René de Chambrun’s connections, he found himself in a unique position, one he was determined to exploit to the utmost: he enjoyed official protection of sorts. Crucially, he was back in charge of a hospital, a safe haven, from which the Germans had been totally excluded—the ideal place to carry on his private war against the Nazis.
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IT WAS a profound shock to learn of the invasion by Allied forces of Vichy-controlled North Africa. On November 9, 1942, the headlines in the newspapers in the kiosks around the Place de l’ É
toile made bleak reading for collaborators: DIRTY ANGLO-AMERICAN ATTACK AGAINST OUR NORTH AFRICA.
The end of the fantasy came even for the most spellbound of Vichy courtesans after the last leaves had fallen in 1942. At dawn the previous day, more than 100,000 Allied troops had stormed ashore and seized ports in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. “Now this is not the end,” declared Winston Churchill in London. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”
A German embassy official, Helmut Rademacher, dined at the Ritz that evening of November 9. Also at his table was Knochen. Rademacher clumsily exclaimed that the war was surely lost. “[Knochen] was present,” recalled Rademacher, “and though he was easily put into a rage, on that occasion he made no comment.” After lunching at Le Fouquet’s that same day, Josée Laval, René de Chambrun’s wife, wrote in her diary: “The Americans have attacked Algeria and Morocco…I have the same sensation as in May and June of 1940 when life was suspended. It’s the end of an epoch.”
