Avenue of Spies

by Alex Kershaw

  Not long after, during a roll call, Phillip caught sight of his mother as she was being moved from one part of the prison to another. At least she was alive and close by.

  In her cell, Toquette was somehow able to get hold of a pen and write a postcard and then send it, via the Red Cross, to her sister, Tat. It was dated June 22, 1944.

  My Sister,

  You can write to me two pages written very clearly…I am well and my morale is good…I saw my son and husband the other day during an inspection. They are together and that makes me happy. I have nothing: toothbrush, etc….My comrades try to help but they have very little, too. Please try to send a few things but no food.

  Kisses,

  Your Sister

  Then they were moving again. At 7:00 a.m. on July 7, 1944, Sumner and Phillip were ordered out of their cell, handcuffed to each other, and—as the Allies fought fiercely to expand their beachhead in Normandy—were ushered out of their dungeon and into the light and taken into a waiting bus, where the guards placed Sumner, who looked all of his fifty-nine years, and Phillip. The bus was old and moved slowly, hour after hour, late into the night before finally coming to a stop beside a wheat field. The prisoners were told they could get off the bus and walk into the field to urinate. Phillip was seated, handcuffed, beside his father, and both agreed to get off and were soon shuffling into the wheat field. Phillip looked around. There was a slight chance of getting away. “Shall we run?” asked Phillip. “No,” said his father. “It’s no use.” He knew they would not get far handcuffed together, and would probably be shot in any case as soon as they tried. So they wearily climbed back onto the bus and a few hours later, around 3 a.m., arrived in Compiègne, where Sumner had been interned in 1942, some fifty miles northwest of Paris. Then they were led to a very different part of the camp reserved for enemies of the Third Reich: a bare barracks that was heavily guarded and overcrowded with men waiting to be sent to Nazi Germany, and infested with vermin, fleas, and lice. But it was an improvement over Moulins: Phillip and his father received Red Cross parcels. They were not beaten, nor did they go hungry.

  An SS officer called Captain Heinrich Illers, answering directly to Helmut Knochen and meeting on an almost daily basis with him at 72, Avenue Foch, oversaw and organized each day’s deportations from Compiègne. Despite the repeated requests of the Red Cross, that summer he refused to free any of the prisoners or suspend the deportations, having been instructed to hold a firm line by Knochen, described in a British intelligence report that summer as being increasingly “brutal, often drunk, regarded as the most powerful man in France, arrogant, self assured.”

  As far as Knochen was concerned, prisoners such as the Jacksons were terrorists with whom he was “at war.” “My job was to safeguard the security of the German army,” he explained, “and I considered myself to be at war against the resistance, just as I was against the Allied armies.”

  Meanwhile, on July 14, 1944, Toquette was placed on a train headed north. She was determined to remain strong, to survive whatever ordeal lay ahead, and to notify her family of her plight. Again she somehow managed to find a piece of paper and wrote a brief note to her sister, Tat. She may then have thrown the note through the bars of the boxcar window. In any case, it landed near the tracks and, miraculously, someone found it and he or she posted the letter to Tat in Enghien, not daring to write their name on it for fear of reprisal. The letter arrived in Enghien on July 20.

  My Sister,

  I am headed for Paris. Jack and Pete left here (Moulins) a week ago…I got your package with the small checked dress…

  Your Sister

  By the time Tat read the letter, Toquette had arrived in the outskirts of Paris, where she was taken to Romainville prison, a stone barracks built around a large courtyard surrounded by high walls, the last stop before Germany for many in the resistance. It was Bastille Day and there had been massive and forbidden demonstrations in Paris to celebrate, with more than 100,000 Parisians marching through the city. Notably, the French police had done nothing to stop the marchers, and German soldiers had been forced to fire into the air to disperse protesters.

  Toquette was placed in a barrack with several other women, some of them American, all of them members of the resistance. She could hear a distant barking and the sound got louder the next day. It was Allied gunfire. Many of the women believed they would not be deported because the Americans were now so close. “Don’t worry too much,” the camp commander had recently told some of them. “I don’t believe Romainville will be evacuated to Germany. You will be liberated here by your compatriots.”

  At Compiègne the next day, July 15, 1944, Phillip joined his father in a long line of some two thousand prisoners and walked, under guard, toward the railway station. As he crossed a bridge, Phillip looked down at the gray waters of the Oise River and again thought of escape; but then he saw that the river was not deep enough to jump into without breaking his neck, and so he trudged on. He and his father were placed in a wagon marked with a sign indicating how many cattle it could contain. Then the doors were closed and they were issued a small loaf of black bread and a piece of sausage for the journey. There was precious little water and the heat was oppressive. Then they were moving slowly east toward Germany.

  The train stopped after a few hours when it was discovered that seventeen men had escaped from one wagon. Soon they were rolling again, crossing into Germany, passing through a long tunnel. Then came the heart-stopping sound of firing. One of the guards had shot randomly into a carriage of 103 men and killed a man. Others were wounded. To his horror and shock, Phillip saw German guards carrying the first dead man he had ever seen. The whole episode was surreal, something so brutal and inhuman it surely could not be happening. When he had learned that his parents were part of the resistance, it all seemed such a great adventure, an exciting game. No more. Not now. He had never imagined this. He watched, terrified, as the men dumped the corpse by the track, so much carrion for the buzzards and crows, a chilling introduction to the Third Reich.

  There was talk that the train was bound for Dachau in Bavaria, Hitler’s first concentration camp, erected in 1933, but no one really knew where the train would end up. Sumner remained stoic, making not a single complaint, as if he wanted to set an example for his son, who was by now desperately thirsty. The journey to the east continued—endlessly, it seemed—and in the corner of the boxcar, a pile of feces grew higher. Then the train halted. They had arrived at a labor camp called Neuengamme, ten miles southeast of Hamburg, established in 1938, and where more than 50,000 people would die by the war’s end.

  SS guards opened the boxcar doors. They were shouting, holding whips and leashes to large dogs, which snarled and barked loudly. Phillip saw the SS begin to whip and punch prisoners as if they were emptying the wagons of useless cattle, ready to be slaughtered, and he and his father were herded into a large basement and ordered to undress. A man wielding what looked like a pair of shears stood near a Slav who was so hirsute that he resembled an ape. The man with the shears held the Slav by his penis and tried to shave around it. They were issued odd clothes and wooden clogs for shoes; a man with a paintbrush splashed stripes down Phillip’s and Sumner’s backs to indicate they were “political” prisoners, and they were given numbers, to be stitched onto their jackets. Phillip’s was 36461. His father’s was 36462.

  There seemed little chance of escape. Phillip saw that the camp was completely enclosed by high fences of electrified barbed wire. SS men stood in guard towers, manning machine guns. He walked with other prisoners, including his father, toward a barrack. He was wearing old rags and wooden clogs, his head was shaved, and everything he owned had been stolen, including his name; he was now just a number. However, all that he had left was all that he needed: he was in hell, but he was still beside his father.

  The following day, July 19, 1944, from her barrack in Romainville, Toquette again wrote to her sister, Tat, in Enghien. Somehow, she managed to get the letter smuggl
ed out of the prison—it would be the last Tat would receive from her:

  My Sister,

  Since the 14th, I am at Romainville camp. I hope to stay here…forbidden to write, have visits but I can have a package a month. If you send something be sure I am still here by giving [the prison gate guards] each package….Jack and Pete must be together at Compiègne since July 7, they left Moulins a week before me. My health and morale are excellent. People leave here frequently for Bitche in Alsace Lorraine—a German transit camp…no one is sure of their tomorrow.

  FOURTEEN

  THE COUP: JULY 20, 1944

  KLAUS VON STAUFFENBERG, a tall and handsome thirty-seven-year-old German colonel, stood alone in a bathroom inside Adolf Hitler’s Prussian headquarters—the so-called Wolf’s Lair. It was 12:26 p.m. on July 20, 1944. Von Stauffenberg activated a bomb inside a briefcase, left the bathroom, and then walked down a long corridor and into a conference room. Hitler sat behind a table, toying with a powerful magnifying glass, his spectacles lying on a map. Stauffenberg placed his brown leather briefcase under the table, a mere six feet from Hitler, then excused himself, mumbling that he had to take an urgent phone call. He slipped out of the room and hurried down a corridor to make his escape.

  At 12:42 p.m. there was a massive explosion. Smoke filled the room as splinters and plaster flew everywhere. Stauffenberg heard the explosion as he made his way through a security perimeter. Surely, this time it was all over. By later that afternoon he was in Berlin, where he set about ordering his fellow conspirators to secure the city. At 5:00 p.m. he called fifty-eight-year-old General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel in Paris and told him that he had assassinated Hitler. Stülpnagel went to work carrying out his crucial role in the conspiracy, quickly ordering the 1,200 SS and Gestapo men in Paris to be arrested. The likes of Knochen were, it was assumed, prepared to support Hitler to the last breath. They had, after all, sworn “absolute allegiance” to him. Their motto was “Unsere Ehre heisst Treue” (“Our honor is loyalty”). This “blood oath” was engraved on Knochen’s dress dagger and his uniform’s belt buckles.

  All along the Avenue Foch, Major General Walther Brehmer’s men of the 1st Guards Regiment surrounded buildings and hid in bushes in gardens. There was the shrill of a whistle. Trucks and cars moved into position, then another whistle. Hundreds of troops quickly overwhelmed sentries, some of them having fallen asleep that humid evening, and then stormed the Gestapo’s headquarters. In his office, a shirt-sleeved SS general Karl Oberg, Helmut Knochen’s immediate superior, was talking on the telephone with Otto Abetz, when his adjutant burst in. The adjutant said the commandant of the Paris Security Division, Major General Brehmer, was in the reception room nearby. He was very agitated and demanding to see Oberg.

  Oberg carried on his phone conversation. Seconds later two doors into his office burst open. Brehmer stepped over to Oberg’s desk and placed his hand on the cradle of the telephone, ending the conversation with Abetz.

  Oberg put the receiver down. “What’s this about, Mr. Brehmer?” “Acting on orders of the Military Commander, I am here to place you under arrest.”

  There was no sign of Knochen at number 72. He had gone to have dinner at the German embassy with an old friend, Karl-Theodor Zeitschel, a specialist in Freemasonry and Jewish affairs in the embassy’s political section. As the pair ate, one of Knochen’s aides interrupted and told him he was required to return as soon as possible to 72, Avenue Foch.

  Otto Abetz later recalled that only one shot was fired as Brehmer and his men arrested the 1,200 Gestapo and SS men in Paris: “An SS sentry had presented arms a little too energetically to Brehmer.” One of Brehmer’s men shot him on the spot. But, amazingly, there was no bloodbath. Knochen’s colleagues on Avenue Foch, including his expert spy-catcher Hans Kieffer, were placed under guard with scandalously little protest. Theodor Dannecker, the “mad sadist” who had been based at Number 31, avoided the roundup, having been dispatched to Hungary that March to annihilate Europe’s last remaining Jewish ghettoes. This spectacular lack of opposition to the Paris coup on the part of the SS would not go unnoticed by Himmler and others in Berlin.

  Word spread fast through the great hotels of Paris: the reign of the SS “black bastards” was at an end. Political prisoners would be freed as the insurrectionists set about making peace with the Western Allies. Finally, there was real reason to hope. Everyone could breathe easier, including the collaborators, ever more paranoid about how they might be blackmailed or used as pawns by Knochen and his secret army of informers and enforcers. At the École Militaire, headquarters for the German 1st Guards Regiment, Wehrmacht soldiers were already preparing to shoot Oberg and Knochen the following morning: they were piling sandbags high in the courtyard to stop stray bullets.

  “At last we’re going to finish with the black bastards,” said one soldier. “Then we’ll soon have peace.”

  Meanwhile, Knochen, suspecting that something was amiss on Avenue Foch, decided to find his immediate superior, Oberg. It didn’t take long for him to learn that Oberg was being held at the Hôtel Continental on Rue de Castiglione, close to the Opéra. He ordered his driver to take him there. As soon as Knochen entered the lavish hotel, its entrance lined with gold-enameled columns, he was placed under guard and led across the deep carpets and beneath several massive crystal chandeliers and taken to a similarly grand suite, where he found Oberg under guard.

  A radio played in a corner. Knochen was still dressed in civilian clothes; he was the only man not in uniform. These days, wearing his gray SS uniform other than at formal occasions at the embassy and other protected places was to invite assassination. Clocks struck midnight throughout Paris. The radio continued to play. Then came a sound never to be forgotten. Hitler’s voice could be heard on the radio in the hotel suite and throughout Paris, amplified by loudspeakers in other hotels and public places. Electricity had been found for a few minutes so that as many Parisians as possible could listen to the Führer.

  Hitler’s voice seethed with rage.

  “A very small clique of ambitious, wicked, and stupidly criminal officers forged a plot to eliminate me and, along with me, virtually the entire leadership of the Wehrmacht,” Hitler declared. But the plot had failed. Hitler had survived the explosion at his headquarters. Now he would carry out savage revenge: “We will settle accounts the way we National Socialists are accustomed to settling them.” That usually entailed prolonged torture before being hanged to death from a meat hook.

  Meanwhile, fifty-two-year-old Günther Blumentritt, a tall and pale Prussian who was chief of staff to Germany Army Command in the west, arrived at Gestapo headquarters at number 72, Avenue Foch. The first senior SS officers he saw wanted to know why they had been arrested. Clearly, there had been a colossal mistake. Hadn’t there? Acutely aware of the immense bloodshed that might occur if the SS in Paris went on the rampage, as Hitler would want, Blumentritt eagerly offered to help reconcile senior Wehrmacht and SS officers. He was delighted when the SS officials at number 72 agreed to go along with his plan. “Their attitude was very decent,” he recalled, “and they showed a willingness to help in hushing things up.”

  At 1:30 a.m. Lieutenant General Freiherr von Boineburg-Lengsfeld, the garrison commander of Paris, ordered that the SS and Gestapo be freed, and then made his way to the Hôtel Continental to meet with Oberg and Knochen. He found the pair sitting in a suite, sharing a bottle of brandy, listening to the radio.

  Oberg jumped up on seeing the fifty-five-year-old former Panzer division commander, a tall German nobleman in polished riding boots.

  Boineburg-Lengsfeld made the “Heil Hitler” salute.

  “What damned game is this you’re playing?” shouted Oberg.

  Boineburg-Lengsfeld said that General Stülpnagel would explain matters himself at the Hôtel Raphael nearby. The equally grand building, with immaculate black-and-white-tiled floors and polished wood-paneled walls, stood on the Avenue Kléber, less than five minutes’ walk from Avenue F
och. From its wrought-iron fringed terraces matted in ivy, it was possible to see the Arc de Triomphe a few hundred yards away.

  Oberg left with Knochen. They were soon passing through the large bar of the Hôtel Raphael. Expensive drapes hung at the tall windows; a lush red carpet stretched from wall to wall. At one table Stülpnagel was seated, deep in conversation with Otto Abetz, the German ambassador.

  Stülpnagel stood up on seeing Oberg. Oberg looked furious, as if he might strike the general, but Abetz quickly intervened.

  “What happens in Berlin is one thing,” Abetz declared. “Here what matters is that the Normandy battle is raging and so here we Germans must show a united front.”

  Oberg grudgingly agreed. Although an ardent Nazi, he was also a pragmatist. He had forged excellent relations with several senior Wehrmacht generals in Paris and had actually served in WWI in the same regiment as Stülpnagel. Aides brought over wine and champagne. Glasses were handed around. Corks were popped. The French were good for one thing. Heavy drinking of grand crus ensued.

  Knochen remained sober enough to realize that the arrest, without so much as a fistfight, of the entire SS and Gestapo hierarchy on Avenue Foch would not impress the most senior Nazis in Berlin. It would be best, as Otto Abetz suggested, if the SS and the military worked together to cover up their respective failings given that the common enemy was fast advancing on them. Over a million Allied troops were fighting in Normandy, headed toward Paris. There and then Knochen devised a plausible way for everyone to save face. It had all been part of some training operation, a mere “exercise.”