by Alex Kershaw
No one in Berlin would be totally convinced, least of all Himmler, who was soon anxious to punish Knochen and others for their lack of resolve during the coup. Knochen would not know this, or that Himmler had viewed him as suspect for several months, or that someone close to the Reichsführer-SS in Berlin had turned him against “Dr. Bones.” That April, on a visit to France, Himmler had confided his misgivings about Knochen to Oberg himself, complaining that Knochen was “not enough of a soldier and too much of a diplomat.” Damning words indeed. Himmler had added that it was not the right time to replace Knochen, but Oberg was to “inculcate” in his urbane deputy a more “military attitude.”
The failure of the July plot to kill Hitler had enormous repercussions. The Führer was convinced that he had been spared in order to save the Third Reich, and he began to plan an ingenious counterattack against the Allies that would that December erupt as the Battle of the Bulge, the greatest land battle ever fought by the United States. The coup’s failure also removed what little trust Hitler had for the Wehrmacht’s high command. More than ever, he would rely on the SS to perform crucial tasks. In Paris the change was immediately clear. Ordinary troops on the street had to give all officers, especially the SS, the Nazi salute. Loyalty to Hitler was all that counted.
The Gestapo and SS were now, without question, the masters of all Paris. Knowing their tenure would be short, they were as determined as every other German occupier to savor their last nights in the City of Light. Knochen and his colleagues were confined no more to the likes of the One Two Two brothel and a five-story nightclub run by Knochen’s man Henri Lafont where Lafont’s Jewish-German lover, a beauty called Carmen Palma, crooned “The Man I Love” by Gershwin. Le Tout-Paris belonged to the SS, as did Maxim’s; La Tour d’Argent; Le Boeuf sur le Toit; Le Fouquet’s; Sheherazade; the cabaret Lesbos on Rue Sainte-Anne, where the sultry lesbian Suzy Solidor sang “Lili Marleen” in French; L’Amiral, where Django Reinhardt, a gentle Gypsy giant, played exquisite guitar; and Le Beaulieu, where Edith Piaf and Yves Montand filled the house every night. More and more of the unsmiling men in gray with the twin lightning bolts on their lapels could also be seen in the Ritz, perhaps the last great bastion of decorum in occupied Paris. The hotel’s manager noticed how some senior Wehrmacht officers on the General Staff would “turn pale” when Knochen’s colleagues entered the dining room.
To keep up appearances, following the aborted coup in Paris, the Gestapo began to investigate more than a thousand German officers in France. But neither Oberg nor Knochen, wanting to maintain good relations with the German military command, pushed hard for the revenge Hitler demanded. Maintaining security was critical, and the German occupiers could no longer afford to be divided. Ten of the July 20 conspirators based in Paris were eventually executed, hundreds jailed, but little was done to pursue most of the senior figures still at large. Both Oberg and Knochen, increasingly flustered by news of the Allied advance in Normandy, were much more interested in waging war on the last remaining threat to their power in Paris: de Gaulle’s secret army, waiting patiently in the shadows for the right moment to strike.
FIFTEEN
AVE MARIA
A BLACK MARIA pulled up outside 84, Avenue Foch. Inside was a striking young British woman with a fierce intensity in her eyes: twenty-three-year-old SOE agent Violette Szabo, described by a colleague as a “dark-haired slip of mischief” with a cockney accent that made the five-foot-three-inch Paris-born F Section operative all the more impish. She was also the mother of a two-year-old called Tania, whom she desperately missed. She had been dropped into France on her second mission on June 8, the deadliest shot her training school had ever produced, just forty-eight hours after D-Day. In a fierce battle with SS soldiers on June 10, she had sprained her ankle while trying to escape and been captured and then handed over to the Gestapo. It was now August 10, 1944.
She looked through the small grille at the back of the Gestapo van, catching glimpses of the gardens, statues, and neat riding paths of Avenue Foch. She guessed where Knochen’s men were taking her: the place where the Gestapo interrogated their prisoners. In London her SOE masters had told her all about the place. It was where Knochen’s men tortured young women like her. The van moved along a smaller inner road that gave access to the large mansions on the northern side of Avenue Foch. It pulled up outside number 84. Heavily armed guards pulled back a black gate and the van swept into an underground tunnel and then emerged in a courtyard.
The courtyard had a door that led to an elegant central staircase. On the ground floor were Knochen’s agents in charge of Belgium. She was escorted up the stairs, past the first floor where his French agents worked, and then up more flights, to the third floor, where Knochen’s radio experts had played the “Funkspiel” so brilliantly, transmitting back to London on seized radio sets. She was led through doors into a passage on the fourth floor. Here was Knochen’s counterintelligence domain: Gestapo department IV E.
There was a large office directly to her right, next to a toilet. She was placed in a room nearby. A man entered. He looked to be in his twenties and was wearing an elegant suit. His attitude was unnerving, for he was assured and polite, a professional. She said nothing during the interrogation and was soon taken away, but not long after they brought her back from one of the small cells that had served as maids’ quarters before the war, and the suave young man stood in front of her once more. He asked questions and still she said nothing. This time men brought in torture implements, the standard Avenue Foch equipment, including riding whips, truncheons, and pliers, which were shown to her.
“Will you answer now?” asked the well-dressed young man.
“I won’t. I won’t.”
The German motioned to assistants, and she was soon in agony. Now would she talk?
“I won’t. I won’t.”
They tried again and still she gave nothing away, and the more they tortured her, the less responsive she became, as if the pain sealed her lips tighter, until it was clearly a waste of time to inflict more. “I have given you your chance,” the young German said. “As you won’t speak, there seems to be nothing left but the firing squad.”
One of Szabo’s torturers offered to help her walk from the room. “Don’t touch me,” she hissed as she limped back to her cell. Szabo was the last known SOE agent to be interrogated at 84, Avenue Foch. She had no idea when she would be called back to be tortured again, or if she would leave her cell next time only to be taken to the nearby Bois de Boulogne and shot. She was in agony but also elated, because she had not talked and had given no names.
Szabo was not called back to the torture room. She could sense that all was not well among Knochen’s men: they were nervous, quick to anger, knowing the Allies were fast approaching and would soon be in Paris. But it was the French they feared most. Pent-up rage, long-repressed emotions of shame and humiliation, were set to explode to the surface. The resistance could smell blood, and not just German. Miniature coffins, small enough to fit through letterboxes, were being delivered to high-profile collaborators on Avenue Foch and elsewhere. Even the most naïve knew that their days were numbered. They would soon become the hunted. Should they flee to the Reich with their German friends, or stay and risk the wrath of the vengeful?
Later that day, Violette Szabo was removed from 84, Avenue Foch, and taken to Romainville prison, where she was placed in a section with other women with just as much pluck and spirit as herself, including Toquette Jackson.
—
SINCE ARRIVING at Romainville, Toquette had become close to several other prominent members of the resistance. They included Virginia d’Albert-Lake, a spunky twenty-four-year-old American from Dayton, Ohio, who had married a Frenchman before the war and then, with her husband, helped more than a hundred Allied airmen escape France before being arrested that June. Another remarkable American was forty-eight-year-old Lucienne Dixon, who had worked at the Elizabeth Arden salon in Paris before joining the resistance. Then there
was thirty-seven-year-old Maisie Renault, the strikingly attractive sister of Gilbert Renault, code-named “Colonel Rémy,” arguably the most important figure in the French resistance. Her youngest sister, twenty-year-old Isabelle, had been arrested with her after they had been betrayed to the Gestapo in 1942. None of these women talked about their roles or actions with each other: they knew the Gestapo was more than likely to have planted spies at Romainville, and no one could ever be fully trusted, so they avoided all conversation that could incriminate anyone.
The day that Szabo arrived, these women had been told to gather in the courtyard and to get their bags packed. Then they were ordered to unpack and then pack again. Some of their fellow prisoners were understandably on edge, dreading the hour when they would finally be deported to Nazi Germany, but others were surprisingly buoyant and sang to keep their spirits up, as if their voices alone could speed the Allied advance so they could be freed.
As the women sang, an overweight sixty-one-year-old Swedish diplomat with a weak heart was doing all he could to save them. Raoul Nordling had been born in Paris, had attended the same school as Phillip Jackson, and, as Sweden’s most senior diplomat in Paris, was working closely with the Red Cross to obtain the release of prisoners like Toquette and her friends in Romainville. Four days earlier, on August 6, he had visited Fresnes prison. The sight of so many brave men and women about to be deported affected him profoundly, and he was determined, with the help of contacts in German intelligence, to free them or at least prevent them from being sent to Germany.
At some point that day, August 10, 1944, Nordling met with two men who had agreed to help him in his quest to save the thousands crowding Romainville and Fresnes. One of the men was a veteran Abwehr agent who went by the name of Emil “Bobby” Bender, around fifty years old, fluent in several languages, always to be seen wearing tailored suits, close-shaven, with a youthful air despite his almost white hair. Bender was a good friend of the head of the Abwehr in Paris, a Lieutenant Colonel Arnold Garthe, based at the Hôtel Lutetia on the Boulevard Raspail. Thanks to such connections, Bender had acquired several identities, all of which were supported by superbly forged documentation, and moved freely around Paris in military and diplomatic circles. The only place Bender dared not venture was Avenue Foch, having had several “disagreeable” run-ins with Knochen’s men at number 72 who believed the Abwehr had been fatally compromised and infiltrated by double agents, among them Bobby Bender.
Nordling’s other contact that day was the Goélette agent Erich Posch-Pastor von Camperfeld, who was now also working for British intelligence, in all likelihood MI6, and still maintained excellent connections with senior German staff officers in Paris. “You met him everywhere,” Nordling recalled, “among the most powerful Germans and the French high society.” An Austrian colleague, Fritz Molden, recalled that Camperfeld, who insisted on being called Rickey, was a flamboyant and proud Austrian who sometimes would “place around his neck a green ribbon with a gorgeous Tyrolese eagle, which the lords and yeomen of the Tyrol were wont to wear on ceremonial occasions.” In spring 1943, Camperfeld had helped Nordling secure the release of a French friend who had been arrested by the Gestapo. He had done so with the assistance of Bobby Bender. These days the pair was arranging for Nordling to meet various German officials who might be able to help in his quest to save political prisoners still in Paris.
It was also that day, August 10, 1944, that Toquette had a surprise visitor at Romainville, thanks to the intervention of the Swiss Consul in Paris who had somehow discovered that Toquette, who had dual American and Swiss nationality, was in Gestapo custody. Her sister, Tat, was escorted inside the fort and taken to a room where she found Toquette. Tat showed Toquette the letter that Phillip had written to her from Moulins. It must have been an intensely emotional experience, for Tat began to cry. Toquette told her to stop. Tat asked what had happened to Sumner and Phillip, and Toquette said she did not know. Tat would later recall her sister being “full of courage” as they parted.
That evening the women of Romainville sang once more.
—
IT WAS the eve of the Feast of Assumption, August 14, 1944. In Normandy, the fighting that had raged since June 6 was reaching a decisive stage at the Falaise Pocket, where the remnants of two of Hitler’s finest armies, the Seventh Army and the Fifth Panzer Army, were about to be surrounded and then destroyed. This would finally open the way to Paris for the Allies.
Tomorrow would be a significant day in the Christian calendar: the commemoration of the death of Mary and her assumption into heaven, before her body could begin to decompose. It would mark the Blessed Virgin’s passing into eternal life.
That evening, as the muffled boom of Allied guns grew even louder in the distance, Toquette and the other women gathered in Romainville’s central courtyard. Some picked a few wildflowers growing amid the trampled grass and placed them on a makeshift altar, which would be the centerpiece for their celebration of the Assumption.
The German guard, named Kratz, was large and ugly. He spotted the women and loped across the courtyard toward them, nodding slowly, as if to some slow beat, shaking a large bunch of keys.
Kratz looked directly at the women.
“No Mass tomorrow morning, no Mass.”
The women knew that the abbot of Lilas was supposed to celebrate Mass in Romainville the next morning. If there was to be no Mass, that could mean only one thing: they were headed for Germany tomorrow.
They looked afraid.
Kratz was delighted.
Here was the embodiment of Nazism, utterly unevolved, sociopathic, sadistic, taking perverse pleasure in women’s terror. He reminded one of the women of an orangutan, with his huge hands and frame. When not patrolling the courtyard, he worked in the kitchens and, it was thought, as a torturer for one of Helmut Knochen’s men.
He looked so very happy.
“No Mass,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “Everyone will go on the transport to Germany….All to die….All to die.”
He belly-laughed.
The Allies were only twenty miles away. And they were to leave tomorrow?
“Do you mock us?” said Maisie Renault. “The Allies are at Rambouillet.”
Kratz came to a sudden halt and clasped his hands. He looked at the women. He knew what awaited them in Germany. He began to laugh, louder than before. For a few more seconds he stood and stared hard at the women before ambling away, jangling his keys like some Dark Ages jailer.
“All to die….All to die.”
Toquette and the other women returned to their barracks and began to sing once more. Few slept at all well that night. The following morning, August 15, 1944, they waited in their dormitory. They had been told they would be taken to the rail yards in city buses, but the buses were late. While they waited, they sang once more, their voices filled with intense emotion.
The morning was sunny and already hot when they heard the call to leave. Toquette and the other women who had become like sisters to her—Maisie Renault, Lucienne Dixon, and Virginia d’Albert-Lake—wanted to make sure they were not separated during the journey to Germany. It was crucial to be together. Older women stayed close to younger ones. Toquette, the eldest in the group, was right beside Maisie Renault, Maisie’s younger sister, Isabelle, and Lucienne Dixon, and several other Frenchwomen.
They sang while they waited for the buses. It was a way to keep their spirits up. Then someone said they had to be quiet.
There was a narrow window. One of the women in Toquette’s barracks looked through it and could see people walking on a hillside adjoining the fort.
The woman called out, “Hello over there! Listen to me.”
The people walking stopped to listen.
“All the prisoners of Romainville are leaving,” called the woman in a clear, strong voice. “Warn the Maquis [the resistance]. Stop the train. Do you hear? Stop the train.”
There was a woman among the walkers outside. She waved a white handke
rchief. She had heard. Perhaps she would act on her information.
In the barracks, it was quiet once more.
So this was it.
All to die. All to die.
A thin young woman, a Hungarian, leaned against a bunk for support. She could stand the silence no longer.
Her voice was beautiful as she began to sing the Ave Maria. It was August 15, after all, a holy day, the Feast of the Assumption, the day the Virgin Mary had gone to heaven. Other women prayed quietly to the Virgin Mary. It was as if they were sharing their fears with her.
The Hungarian woman continued to sing:
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of our death.
Amen.
Many of the women were close to tears.
Others remained outwardly calm. They refused to feel sorry for themselves.
Nothing will prevent the certain advance of the Allies in the future, thought Maisie Renault. Nothing will prevent the Germans from being conquered.
The women started to sing again. Then they heard the sound of buses’ engines.
Kratz was back. His massive hands shook his bunch of keys.
Toquette and her friends left the barracks and climbed aboard the buses. They were soon being taken through the prison, formerly a fort. There was an exceptional view of Paris, parched and dusty, stretching toward the hazy horizon to the southeast. The women crossed the city, passing through familiar streets, faces pressed to the buses’ windows, looking at women just like them waiting in food lines, about to be liberated. The buses stopped a few miles to the north of Romainville and the women realized they were at a freight station called Pantin. Before them was a train with cattle cars. They were escorted onto the quai aux bestiaux—the livestock platform. There were guttural cries, the sound of boots, shouting. Germans. Then Toquette was boarding a boxcar. The floor was covered in dirt. There was no straw. She was crammed next to her friends among ninety-two women, the number allotted to each cattle car. Then the door was closed.
