Avenue of Spies

by Alex Kershaw

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  ON JANUARY 10, 1944, Phillip Jackson celebrated his sixteenth birthday. Much of his time was devoted to studying for his baccalaureate. But when he didn’t have his head in a book, he must have been aware of the strain his parents were under. Nothing could go unnoticed. They always needed to be alert, questioning things, on their guard. They knew their luck might only hold for so long. It was wise to be paranoid. Some days, given their location, it must have seemed that the men in trench coats walking past the house were actually watching them, sitting in local cafés and restaurants and pretending to read newspapers, waiting to pounce.

  It was not just the Gestapo and Knochen’s private army of criminals who were now hunting for the resistance. That January of 1944, the Vichy organization called the Milice arrived in Paris. They were paramilitary French fascists, trained and well armed by Knochen’s immediate superior, SS general Karl Oberg. The Milice was headed by forty-six-year-old Joseph Darnand, a decorated World War I hero, who had been quick to realize who his real patrons were—Knochen and his colleagues on Avenue Foch—and eager to please given the enormous power they conferred. It wasn’t long before Darnand’s private army set about arresting, torturing, and killing more or less as they pleased. Their most famous victim was the politician Georges Mandel, a high-profile enemy of Nazism before the war who had been imprisoned by the Gestapo but was then actually seized from their custody and brutally murdered by the Milice.

  Even the willfully blind Josée Laval, René de Chambrun’s wife, busy most days visiting the Rochas and Schiaparelli fashion showrooms, began to worry about what might happen to her and her family given the murderous actions of the Milice. They would surely all be punished. One evening at Laval’s official Paris residence, the Hôtel Matignon, she confided her fears to her father. “We’ll all be hanged for what the Milice have done,” said Josée. “I don’t mind hanging but not with Darnand.”

  The resistance struck back, killing Milice and Vichy officials all across France. One bisexual American-born resistance agent, known simply by his alias, “Tom,” worked that winter as an assassin, executing informers and their Gestapo contacts. His specialty was seducing homosexual Gestapo officers—easily picked up in various bars frequented by black marketers and gay gigolos such as the café Le Colisée on the Champs-Élysées—and then dispatching them with an ice pick that he’d concealed under the bed while they slept beside him. “The biggest problem and the greatest danger,” he recalled, “was not the killing itself. It was the disposal of the body. I worked with a team of young men, powerful men. They could pick up a body like a loaf of bread and all but tuck it under their arms, wrapped up in sacking, or stuffed into an empty steamer trunk or a wooden crate.”

  Tom vividly recalled how dangerous it was to work in the resistance in Paris, particularly anywhere near Avenue Foch. One day he tried to make contact with a fellow agent in a street not far away. It was thick with Knochen’s agents. Their black Citroëns were parked outside most cafés. They stood dressed in heavy trench coats, leaning against lampposts, trying not to be observed. Tom could always tell if they were Knochen’s men because they were forever “reading” the same page of the same newspaper. It seemed that Knochen had informers in every café and restaurant. By some estimates, more than 30,000 Frenchmen and -women worked in some capacity for him, three times the number of French gendarmes in the city. He had apparently recruited every vengeful prostitute and jilted lover and then deployed a vast dragnet to watch for suspicious activity in every railway station, in every food queue and cinema.

  Insurrection brewed all that winter. Passions rose as Paris began to starve. Boys could be seen stealing into the city’s parks to cut blades of grass and stuff them into their pockets so they could feed the rabbits they reared for meat in their bathtubs. It was estimated that Parisians had lost on average forty pounds since the Germans had arrived. The most common after-dinner treat was a bitter-tasting cigarette to dull hunger pains. Cats had all but disappeared on Paris streets, as they had been cooked and eaten by the famished. Most of the city’s bakeries were closed. In the poorest neighborhoods, far from the Avenue Foch, people were dying of hunger. Before the war, Toquette had been able to buy a kilogram of butter for fifteen francs. Now, if she could find the money, it cost well over a hundred times that on the black market.

  An American journalist called Alice-Leone Moats, who had slipped into Paris in disguise from Spain, was struck by the tawdry, depressed air in the city: “The avenues and streets were made ugly by the hundreds of German soldiers in their gray-green uniforms who crowded the pavements.” She looked around and saw that “Nazi flags disfigured the government buildings and huge signs…defaced other buildings which had been turned into amusement centers for soldiers of the Army of Occupation. The fountains in the public squares no longer played, the streets were unkempt and dusty…Wooden sawhorses wrapped with rusty barbed wire hedged in the Hôtel de Crillon, the Ministry of Marine, the Place Vendôme entrance of the Ritz and every other place where the Germans were quartered.”

  Everything seemed to be slowly falling apart. The metro was not running properly, due to shortages of electricity. The projectors in cinemas on the Champs-Élysées, where Phillip sometimes watched movies, were powered by teenagers on bicycles hooked to generators, as were the printing presses of some resistance groups.

  Early that February, Sumner came down with pneumonia. He also wrote to Elizabeth Ravina, a nurse whom he had befriended, about his “family’s dire need of clothing.” According to another friend of the family, Clemence Bock, “Sumner was drawn and careworn and went about in an old army sweater with a hole that showed his elbow when he took off his long surgical coat.” Despite his pneumonia, he still rode his bicycle, specially constructed for his large frame, from Avenue Foch to the hospital and back each day, a First World War flying helmet squeezed onto his head to fend off the cold.

  Like many Parisians, the Jacksons often listened to the BBC, gathering around a radio placed as far from the windows at 11, Avenue Foch, as possible with the volume turned low on General de Gaulle. So many other people were tuning in illegally—some had been executed for the offense—that a joke was making the rounds about a Jew who had murdered a German soldier and devoured his heart at 9:20 p.m. The punch line was: “Impossible for three reasons: A German has no heart. A Jew eats no pork. And at 9:20 everyone is listening to the BBC.”

  At the American Hospital, Sumner still struggled to keep patients fed and warm. On February 9, 1944, Max Shoop, one of the governors, reported that there were serious problems finding food as the winter got colder and stretched on. Yet, despite intensifying air raids, not a single window in the hospital had been broken. Shoop also worked closely as a spy for Allen Dulles, who was heading up the Office of Strategic Services, America’s first international spy agency, in Berne, Switzerland. He was in fact OSS agent 284, a key liaison between the French resistance and the OSS. Through Shoop, Dulles supplied explosives and large sums of cash to the French resistance.

  Did Shoop know about Sumner and his help for OSS agent Donald Coster in 1940? Was he aware that Sumner continued to help others to escape France? His Swiss colleague Otto Gresser, who helped manage the hospital’s day-to-day affairs, recalled that Sumner “from time to time hid one or two [aircrew] who had been shot down but weren’t killed. He would take care of them. Of course, it was very serious.”

  The stakes had never been higher. Never had Sumner been in such great danger at work and when he returned to his home on Avenue Foch. The latest gang of psychopaths to set up camp in the neighborhood, the Berger Group, was based just a hundred yards to the west of the Jacksons’ home, at 180, Rue de la Pompe, almost within spitting distance of Knochen’s office at 72, Avenue Foch. The previous occupant was thirty-seven-year-old Comtesse von Seckendorff, one of Knochen’s most accomplished informers, code-named “Mercedes.” She had since moved to an even more impressive address, 41, Avenue Foch, just around the corner.

&
nbsp; The Berger Group was under the command of thirty-three-year-old Friedrich Berger, a veteran Abwehr agent before the war and an accomplished black market operator until employed by the Gestapo on Avenue Foch. Members of his band included Denise Delfau and Hélène Muzzin, sisters and both mistresses of Berger when not working as his secretaries. There was also Rachid Zulgadar, an Iranian taxi driver nicknamed “King Kong,” a seasoned torturer who was especially creative when getting women to talk and had no problems keeping muscle-bound young communists’ heads under water. Women were made to sit naked on ice until they broke down or passed out, shivering and screaming. Berger preferred to waterboard victims first and then beat them almost to death. He had no time for electrocution or sleep deprivation, both favorites of the Milice, opting to cause maximum agony as fast as possible.

  No wonder the mental asylums in Paris that winter were said to be full of people who had gone insane after a visit or two to the torture chambers of the “Nazi Triangle,” whose most notable addresses were 5, Rue Mallet-Stevens; 93, Rue Lauriston; and 180, Rue de la Pompe; and of course the Gestapo mansions all along Avenue Foch. The Jacksons were now living at the heart of Nazi evil, at the center of a vast web of informers, spies, and cold-blooded mass murderers. The enemy—Knochen and his men—were so very close by. Such was their reputation that Parisians talked fearfully of being “taken to the Avenue Foch,” never to return.

  It took immense sangfroid to maintain one’s composure, to stay even-keeled when every ugly man in a gray suit and trilby was a potential killer under orders to fire if one decided to run. The stress for many within the resistance, not just for Toquette and Sumner—who were only too aware of the growing dangers surrounding them—became too much to bear. Every shrill of the telephone, every knock on the front door, every shifty look from a stranger, might herald the end.

  Every time Sumner arrived home on his bespoke bicycle he knew he might have been followed. Knochen had “physiognomists” working for him, men who had previously prowled the lobbies of casinos on the lookout for cheaters, and who were now paid handsomely by the Gestapo to recognize fugitives who were most wanted by Knochen. They kept photos of key figures in the resistance concealed in their hatbands. That way they only needed to make a quick check of a photo and then make an arrest. In Sumner’s case it would take no time at all to hustle him into an unmarked black Citroën idling a few yards away and take him to one of the many interrogation rooms now to be found on “Avenue Boche.”

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  WINTER TURNED to spring. As the first daffodils and crocuses appeared in the gardens along the Avenue Foch, Sumner was one day contacted by a French police officer. The man had excellent sources. He knew a great deal about what was happening on Avenue Foch. For some reason, finally, the German authorities had woken up to the fact that an American family still lived there and had not been interned. “Be careful,” the Frenchman told Sumner, “you’re being watched.”

  There is no record of how Sumner reacted. But Clemence Bock, who had taught him French in the twenties and remained close to the family, later recalled that Sumner was not deterred. He was “very careful, very prudent” but he was not about to stop helping the Allied cause, and neither was Toquette. They were certain the Allies would arrive to liberate Paris soon. It was just a matter of keeping their nerve for a few months at most.

  As the first buds appeared on the chestnut trees along Avenue Foch, all Paris was on edge, not just those who, like the Jacksons, were working in the resistance. On April 21 the city was badly bombed by the Allies. “The sky is alive with enormous stars, with multicolored tracers, signs of a human astrology none can yet decipher,” recalled one Parisian. Number 11, Avenue Foch, had no basement for shelter. When his parents weren’t paying attention, Phillip ran upstairs to the fifth floor, to the maid Louise’s room, and in darkness looked up at the dramatic skies. Houses nearby shuddered from the shock waves. He had only to touch the window to feel the vibration—like a “bird’s heartbeat” as one neighbor, the right-wing journalist Alfred Fabre-Luce, a friend of Josée Laval’s living at 56, Avenue Foch, described it.

  Remarkably, five days later, on April 26, Marshal Pétain paid his only visit to Paris during the occupation, shortly after his eighty-eighth birthday. There were massive crowds. His regime was deeply unpopular, with Laval universally loathed, but Pétain himself was still seen as the onetime savior of France. Around the same time, Goélette’s head of Paris operations, Paul Robert Kinderfreund, contacted Toquette and warned her to be extremely vigilant. Fevered rumors were sweeping through the underground. It was said that the Gestapo was paying more than ever for information on airmen who had been shot down. Those who helped evaders were to be quickly executed along with their families.

  April became May. The weather was glorious. Paris had never looked so beautiful, recalled the writer and painter Jean Hugo: “Without the stain of petrol fumes, the chestnut trees on the Champs-Élysées were a brilliant green.” Lithe young Parisiennes, their bodies hardened and legs toned by four years of cycling, hopped out of velotaxis and strutted through the Tuileries Garden, smiling in the sunshine, wearing knee-length skirts, often in all-the-rage Scottish plaid, and large and elaborate hats—among the few garments during the war through which Frenchwomen were able to express their flamboyance.

  Toquette also wore Scottish plaid but she seldom smiled. Nor did her husband. Clemence Bock noted how early that May “little by little [Sumner] became more and more tired, with an absent air.” Bock began to worry about the family. Not long after, she received a letter. It was not signed. “If you go to the Avenue Foch,” it read, “don’t think of visiting the people you know there.” Bock ignored the warning and paid a visit to Toquette on Monday, May 15. They chatted and Bock gathered some lilies of the valley from the front garden that faced onto Avenue Foch. It was obvious that Toquette was anxious and she was clearly relieved when Bock went home.

  The following day, May 16, 1944, the OSS in Berne sent a report to Washington in which it was noted that the French resistance in France was waging an ever more violent war against the Germans. In the first four months of 1944, 2,500 Germans had been wounded and almost 900 killed. Two thousand railway wagons had been damaged. In response, the Gestapo fought harder than ever to destroy the legions of ever more daring “terrorists” springing up across France. Knochen’s assorted bands of criminals conducted indiscriminate sweeps, rounding up anyone remotely suspect. In Paris, every jail was soon full. To make room for even more enemies of the Reich, fifty members of the resistance were executed each week.

  D-Day was just a couple of weeks away. Those like Toquette and Sumner who were heavily involved in the resistance as the invasion neared could not be told in advance its exact date, but everyone sensed it would be someday soon and they listened to the BBC, especially on the first, second, fifteenth, and sixteenth of that May for messages that would indicate if the invasion was imminent. If it was then they would hear the words L’heure des combats viendra. The hour of battle will come.

  One of the most popular underground newspapers, Defense de la France, caught the mood of the resistance that May, calling for reprisals against the Germans, collaborators, and the hugely despised Milice: “Kill the German to cleanse our territory…Kill the traitors, kill those who betray, those who aided the enemy…Kill the men of the Milice, exterminate them…Shoot them like mad dogs on the street corners….” One resistance activist was heard to comment that he had a long list of people he was planning to shoot and “there wasn’t a German name on the list.”

  Avenue Foch had never been so dangerous. Just a hundred yards from the Jacksons’ home at number 11, Knochen’s head of counterintelligence, Hans Kieffer, still worked long into the night at number 84, determined to utterly destroy the last remnants of Allied spy networks in Paris. He and Knochen’s other spy hunters had continued to play the “radio game” with seized SOE radio sets. Tipped off by highly paid informers, Knochen had prepared “mousetraps” throughout
Paris and had then ordered his men to arrest anyone seen entering or leaving them. The Gestapo had even had informers placed in concentration camps such as Buchenwald, Dachau, and Ravensbruck in case imprisoned spies and resistance workers revealed the names of colleagues still at large.

  Knochen was so effective that SOE agents were recalled to London in the face of seemingly inevitable betrayal. He had finally won the spy game against the British. His spy hunters had destroyed Prosper and removed the SOE from Paris. In a final flourish that May, a last transmission was sent to SOE in London over a captured radio set: “Thank you for your collaboration and for the weapons you have sent us.” The British replied: “Think nothing of it. These weapons were a mere bagatelle for us. It was a luxury we could easily afford. We shall soon be coming to fetch them.”

  It was around May 20, 1944, when Knochen’s men claimed yet another victory. Finally, they penetrated the Libération escape line that Sumner had been a part of. The Englishwoman Gladys Marchal, who had in August 1943 escorted Manos to Sumner Jackson’s office at the American Hospital, was arrested in Paris. It was later alleged that she was interrogated by Knochen’s agents but then released after just twenty-four hours, which was highly unusual. Had she talked? Had she betrayed Sumner Jackson? Soon after, another member of the same escape line, a man named Gilbert Asselin, fell victim. He, too, had helped Manos reach safety and would have been able to name names, including the “underground” couple that lived at 11, Avenue Foch: Sumner and Toquette.

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  IN A SMALL MOUNTAIN TOWN called La Bourboule in the Auvergne, fifty miles southwest of Vichy, a group of Milice men dressed in blue jackets, brown shirts, and wide blue berets prepared to storm a building. They had been reliably informed that leaders of the Goélette resistance network were inside. It was in the early hours of May 24 when the Milice burst in and arrested seven agents, including two women and the group’s leader, Claude Vallette, who were then handed over, along with incriminating documents, to Knochen’s men in Vichy, commanded by thirty-six-year-old SS captain Hugo Geissler.