Avenue of Spies

by Alex Kershaw

  It certainly was. Even the most ardent collaborators knew they might have backed the wrong horse. There would be a price to pay. Life magazine in the United States had that summer already published a list of prominent Frenchmen alleged to be major collaborators. It had included the name of René de Chambrun. Life had also reported that some of these people were going to be “assassinated.”

  The headlines in the Paris newspapers got worse. On November 11 the Germans occupied Vichy France, their tanks rolling to the shores of the Mediterranean. Pétain was in effect reduced to a figurehead. Collaborators could no longer pretend to be cooperating with the Germans for the good of France. True friends were not in the habit of invading without warning.

  From his offices at 72, Avenue Foch, Knochen wrote to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler about attitudes in the capital. Many people had “changed their position.” The successful invasion of North Africa had created a “hitherto unknown Germanophobia” with the vast majority of the French, who now expected Allied victory. There was a “general rejection of all things German.” Mass deportations of Jews to the East were no longer possible because of French bureaucrats’ “lack of understanding.” While German civilians were making great sacrifices to preserve the Third Reich, in Paris German occupiers were being treated with “arrogance and disdain”—a sure sign of “insufficient volition.”

  On February 2, 1943, there was even more cataclysmic news, this time from the Eastern Front. The Germans had been defeated at Stalingrad. Although propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels did his best to minimize its damage, the story of the surrender to the Red Army of General Friedrich von Paulus with more than a hundred thousand Wehrmacht troops gave countless millions great hope.

  The Nazis in Paris barely flinched. Their revolution would continue. As if realizing that time was now of the essence, they stepped up a campaign to purify French culture. The Louvre had long since been emptied. Cinemas mostly showed insipid Teutonic propaganda. On May 27, 1943, in the courtyard of the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, over five hundred works by Miró, Picasso, and other artists designated as degenerate were placed in a giant bonfire and torched, smoke and ashes spreading into the dusk. That same day Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who had replaced Heydrich as head of the RSHA, sent a twenty-eight-page report to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Hitler saw the report in early June. It was a summary of all the latest intelligence that Knochen and his colleagues had gathered about the fast-growing “Secret Army”—the French resistance. There was no time to lose. Knochen and his fellow Gestapo must destroy de Gaulle’s underground before it could threaten Nazi rule. Maximum force was required. Failure to annihilate the growing numbers of terrorists was out of the question.

  TEN

  NUMBER 11

  IT HAD BEEN three long years since the Nazis had arrived, marching down the Champs-Élysées, ripping down tricolors in those early days and replacing them with lurid swastikas, plastering their ugly propaganda and warnings everywhere, casting a long shadow over the City of Light. By the spring of 1943, like so many Parisians, Phillip Jackson, now fifteen years old, had grown to deeply resent the arrogant men in field gray, many of whom continued to gather in the upscale bars and restaurants in his neighborhood.

  Each morning, Phillip heard the sound of jackboots as the Germans stomped along the Avenue Foch for seemingly endless training in the Bois de Boulogne. After breakfast he said good-bye to his mother and the maid, Louise Heile, and set off for his school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly. Rarely did he venture west along Avenue Foch. It took a few minutes longer to get to school that way. But sometimes he did head along the avenue, toward the Bois de Boulogne, passing SS guards and sleek black Hotchkiss and Mercedes saloons parked outside several buildings before turning left where Avenue Foch met the Rue de la Pompe. His school’s address was 106 Rue de la Pompe.

  Most days, Phillip walked instead along the Avenue Victor Hugo. It, too, was popular with the Nazis. At number 72 was the Polo restaurant, a favorite with the Gestapo, as were the nearby Presbourg and Sports cafés, where beguiling Russian countesses dressed in Chanel and Hermès, with extravagant hats, conspired with their fascist lovers as they sipped chilled champagne. A few doors away, at number 79, were the offices of the Otto Bureau, responsible for the censoring of books. Even Shakespeare had been banned.

  In Phillip’s eyes, Paris had lost much of its gaiety under the Nazis. The news booths along Avenue Victor Hugo no longer sold sweets and spinning tops but instead copies of Signal, a German propaganda magazine, Das Reich, a dour Nazi newspaper, and phrase books for the “Fritzes” who massed at all the main tourist sites in Paris. Toy stores had closed. The pond at the Palais-Royal had no water. Boys could no longer play with sailboats there. Because of shortages, most children had wooden rather than leather soles on their shoes. It was hard to play hide and seek because of the loud clicking of wood on sidewalk. Those without access to the black market or food supplied by relatives with large gardens and farms were malnourished. Only the very rich were overweight, it seemed, and could find new clothes. Some infants wore dresses stripped from their sisters’ largest dolls.

  That spring of 1943, Phillip arrived at school on time and ready to study. He knew his father had high expectations. Sumner was determined Phillip would have every advantage he had not; above all, that meant a first-rate education. Before the occupation, Phillip had excelled academically. But after a year at the Catholic school in Enghien, he had fallen behind his brightest peers at Lycée Janson de Sailly, and his father was not happy about it. Sometimes, he made Phillip recite passages from the classics, expecting him to get every word right. It was as if he was making up for his own lack of early education.

  Phillip knew his father had had a tough Yankee childhood—that he had grown up amid great beauty in Waldoboro, Maine, but with very little money, and had attended a small village school until, at age fourteen, he had left to help put bread on the table, joining his father in a quarry, breaking rocks. Sumner had been big for fourteen, almost six feet tall, and proven a good laborer. A year later, at Phillip’s current age, he had begun to care for a local doctor’s horses and was soon running errands for the doctor, who took a strong interest in Sumner and told him he could still get a good education. He, too, could become a doctor. He encouraged Sumner to return to school and even paid some of his tuition. Sumner worked every spare hour when not studying, tending to the school’s playing fields, cleaning the toilets, with little time to socialize with other students, but was able to pay his own way through high school, Bowdoin College in Maine, and then he finally qualified as a doctor at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, where in a 1914 yearbook, at age twenty-eight, he chose the motto: “He doeth well who doeth his best.”

  Sumner expected Phillip to work as hard as he had. There could be no excuses for doing less, given how privileged Phillip’s upbringing had been. According to a family friend, Sumner was not “light-handed” when it came to punishment. And he worried about his son’s moral education. What was he to tell him about mankind? “Should I say to him: ‘Men are good’?” Sumner asked a friend. “Or must I tell him: ‘Men are wicked’?” He was also concerned that his son was too cosseted, unable to stand up for himself, and hired a former professional boxer to give Phillip a few lessons in self-defense. Phillip had quickly learned how to parry and punch in the living room at 11, Avenue Foch, the heavy carpet rolled back to give him a better footing.

  The boxing lessons proved a good investment. Among Phillip’s classmates that spring was the son of fascist forty-three-year-old Pierre Pucheu, the Vichy interior minister, a rabid anti-Semite who wanted France to be at the heart of a new Europe, crisscrossed by four-lane autobahns, united by anti-Bolshevism. For some time his son had bullied Phillip’s classmates, among them Jews who had not yet been deported. One day Phillip caught him in the act, angrily punched him in the face, and made his nose bleed. Within a year the boy’s father would also be punished. Pierre Pucheu would
become the first leading collaborator to be executed under de Gaulle’s jurisdiction in North Africa.

  Lycée Janson de Sailly’s motto was “Pour la patrie, par le livre et par l’épée” (“For the homeland, by the book and by the sword”). As with many of his classmates, Phillip took these words to heart. By this point in the occupation, his school was in fact a hotbed for Gaullist sympathizers, dozens of whom would soon join the resistance. A whole battalion of graduates would fight in the Vosges Mountains, bordering Germany, in late 1944.

  Unlike communist youths in the poorer quarters of Paris, Phillip was not about to start throwing bombs at the Germans goose-stepping past his bedroom each morning on the Avenue Foch. But he had long yearned to do something to defy his occupiers, and so, as with so many of his peers, that spring he became a vandal. Sometimes he would filch pieces of chalk from classrooms when his teachers weren’t looking. On his way home, as he walked along Avenue de la Grande-Armée to Place Victor Hugo, he would glance around to make sure no one was looking and then pull out the chalk and scrawl a “V for Victory” sign on a wall or the side of some building. Sometimes, he took a few seconds longer to etch the Cross of Lorraine, de Gaulle’s chosen symbol for the Free French.

  The BBC had first proposed the daubing of the V sign in public places as an act of resistance. On July 21, 1941, Parisians had looked toward the Eiffel Tower only to be greeted by the monstrous sight of a giant V hanging from it, a very public attempt by the Germans to appropriate the symbol, which proved a dismal failure. Despite severe penalties for those caught, young Parisians like Phillip still scrawled it everywhere, on dusty Wehrmacht trucks, shop windows, beneath posters of the grandfatherly Marshal Pétain, and across every swastika they could find.

  One day that spring, Phillip’s luck ran out. The family’s maid, Louise Heile, found a piece of chalk in his trousers pocket while doing the laundry. A gentle and thoughtful woman in her thirties who had grown up in Alsace-Lorraine, she was utterly devoted to Phillip. But she thought she should mention the discovery to Toquette, who was less than pleased. She forbade Phillip from scrawling any more V signs on buildings in the neighborhood. His father also admonished Phillip. There were to be no more childish stunts, nothing that might draw the Gestapo’s attention to the family’s presence on Avenue Foch.

  —

  THERE WAS in fact no more dangerous place to practice patriotic vandalism: by then more than a dozen buildings on Avenue Foch had been requisitioned by the Gestapo. Some Parisians had taken to calling it “Avenue of the Gestapo.” The German criminal police, the Kripo, had taken over number 74. The great car manufacturer Louis Renault had long since departed number 88; it was now used by Knochen’s men, who had also occupied number 19, a mansion that had belonged before the war to Baron Edmond de Rothschild.

  At number 84 a former police detective working for the SS’s counterintelligence branch, the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, had set up a formidable organization under Knochen’s watchful eye. Forty-two-year-old SS-Sturmbannführer Hans Kieffer had a thick mop of wavy black hair, deep-set eyes, and a slightly upturned nose, and had been an accomplished gymnast in his youth. He had the tenacity, it was said, of a stubborn bloodhound, and Knochen had formed a highly effective relationship with him, a near-perfect liaison. Knochen would naturally have worked with none less. That was why Kieffer, the Third Reich’s finest spy catcher, had been sent to Paris to coordinate Knochen’s counterintelligence efforts. Such a posting would have been given only to the very best.

  As with his close colleague Knochen, with whom he was in daily contact, Kieffer preferred to blend into his surroundings, opting for tweed suits and plain trilbies when working the streets. He had no great love of the Führer, nor any intellectual pretensions like Knochen. He was a bluff policeman, priding himself in hunting down enemies of the state and then getting them to cooperate. If that meant playing the hard man, then so be it. But he preferred to use charm: sitting his British suspects down and having a friendly natter over tea and biscuits, or a piece of delicious pain fantaisie with hot black coffee, not the ersatz mouthwash favored by less effective Gestapo men. He had fine English cigarettes and real chocolate for those who talked.

  By the summer of 1943, Knochen’s own headquarters had expanded to include number 70, the large mansion next door. Number 76 was the base for a thirty-eight-year-old SS colonel named Hermann Bickler, a brutal Alsatian who led a unit of Frenchmen working for Knochen and specialized in infiltrating and tracking down the terrorists who belonged to the resistance. Neighbors kept their windows firmly closed that summer so they didn’t have to listen to the piercing screams of Bickler’s victims. His favorite technique was the “bagnoire” (“bathtub treatment”), which consisted of plunging a terrorist into a tub of ice water and then keeping the terrorist’s head underwater until he or she almost drowned. Others on Knochen’s payroll were even more inventive: they filed victims’ teeth; slashed their feet with rusty razors; and used soldering irons and blowtorches when the standard softening-up routine of kicking, stomping, and punching failed to work.

  Never had so many psychopaths and sadists been based on one street in Paris. Yet remarkably, even eighteen months after America’s entry into the war, the Jacksons’ presence at Number 11 had still gone unnoticed. Their home had not been requisitioned and turned into a Gestapo office or torture chamber. Dr. Sumner Jackson, the widely respected head of the American Hospital, was still at large, able to bicycle each morning, wearing an old WWI flying helmet for protection in the wind and rain, past his newest Gestapo neighbors.

  —

  ONE DAY early that summer of 1943, a man of medium height, aged twenty-three, with light brown hair, bright eyes, and fine features, stepped into the Rue de Traktir and walked north all of ten yards. He knocked on a door of the Jacksons’ ground-floor home, located at the corner where Avenue Foch met the Rue de Traktir. He was just a few yards from the front garden where his younger sister Anne-Marie had played with Phillip Jackson before the war. The intense young man’s name was Francis Deloche de Noyelle. The son of a diplomat, he had grown up as the next-door neighbor of the Jacksons at number 1, Rue de Traktir, right beside the Restaurant Prunier.

  Since January, Deloche de Noyelle had worked for the resistance, moving around France from Montpellier to Grenoble in the lee of the Alps, recruiting for a major resistance network that took its ultimate orders from General de Gaulle. It was also his task to locate addresses that could be used as “drop boxes,” where valuable intelligence in the form of photographs, blueprints, and stolen documents could be deposited before being ferried to de Gaulle’s intelligence organization in London.

  Deloche de Noyelle knew he could trust Toquette. She and Sumner were close to his parents. They were “good people.” Inside number 11, Avenue Foch, Deloche de Noyelle explained to Toquette that he belonged to a resistance network, Goélette, part of a much broader organization called the BCRA (for Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action, or Central Bureau of Intelligence and Operation), commanded by a “Colonel Passy.”

  “We need a spot in Paris,” Deloche de Noyelle told Toquette. “You are in exactly the right place—on the ground floor. There are two exits onto different streets. People know there’s a doctor’s office at this address. It’s a place where a lot of people could go in and out without attracting attention like other places. Would you be willing to help?”

  Over seventy years later, Deloche de Noyelle would remember that Toquette “did not hesitate for a second.” Of course she would help.

  De Noyelle explained that Goélette was based primarily in Vichy, where information about Pétain and Laval was being secured. It was also where Goélette operated a secret radio by means of which coded messages were sent to London. One of the network’s key couriers was code-named Greenfinch. Toquette would never know his real name. Another important figure was thirty-eight-year-old Paul Robert Ostoya Kinderfreund, code-named Renandout, Goélette’s head of intelligence in Paris. The Germa
ns had seized several of his operatives in recent months, so he was especially careful about security. It was crucial to keep contact between members to a minimum to avoid betrayal. The Gestapo, headquartered on Avenue Foch itself, was prepared to pay large sums for the right kind of information.

  Toquette had listened to the BBC and de Gaulle’s speeches, like many others in France. She wanted to do her part in the fight against Nazism. But in joining the resistance she would be making a momentous decision, risking not only her and Sumner’s lives but also that of their only child. They would be particularly vulnerable given their address. Unlike most of those working for Goélette, they would not be able to change their names and hop from one safe house to the next. If they were betrayed, Knochen’s men had only to walk up the street to arrest them.

  Having conferred with Sumner, who supported her fully, Toquette sat Phillip down and told him of the decision to join the Goélette network. She made it clear that, at all costs, he was not to talk to anyone about it. No one could be fully trusted. Even within the family, as much as possible was to be kept secret from each other. It was safer that way. For his own good, Phillip would be sent to the family’s country house at Enghien, ten miles away, when Goélette agents met at 11, Avenue Foch.

  Sumner and Toquette were concerned above all about doing what they could to protect their son, hoping that he would somehow be spared if they were caught. “What you can’t see can’t hurt you,” Sumner told Phillip, determined like Toquette to hide everything they could from him, certainly their dealings with other members of the resistance, such as Kinderfreund, known to them and others simply as “R” or “Renandout,” and Louis Joubin, code-named “Gustave,” another leading member of the network. Given the importance of Avenue Foch as a network hub for Goélette and place where key intelligence would be deposited, no radio would be operated from the address. That would be too risky. It was just as well given that the Gestapo ran an elaborate radio detection operation on the first floor at number 84.