Avenue of Spies

by Alex Kershaw

  Speidel suddenly realized that Choltitz was not being serious. He had no intention of being remembered by history as the destroyer of Paris.

  Speidel sighed with relief.

  “Ah! General, how fortunate we are that you are in Paris!”

  The next day, August 23, several of Helmut Knochen’s men returned to Paris on a reconnaissance mission. The Allies were now almost at the gates of the city in the west. The situation was so tense that Knochen’s agents feared being lynched as they carefully approached the Port de Vincennes, in the eastern outskirts, but then dared go no farther and quickly retreated to a village outside the city.

  There was even worse news for Knochen from Berlin. In Vittel, as he monitored events in Paris from afar, he received a communication from Heinrich Himmler, supreme head of the SS, a man whose father had like Knochen’s been a strict bourgeois schoolmaster. Himmler was furious. He wanted to know why Knochen had let himself be arrested on July 20, the night of the attempted coup against Hitler. Knochen was a coward, a traitor. Worse followed: Knochen was informed that he was being stripped of his rank and would be posted to the Eastern Front as a private in a frontline antitank unit. It was a swift and utterly unexpected fall from grace. So long as Knochen had stayed in Paris, he had played a useful role. Having departed, it was obvious his superiors no longer had much use for him. The man who had so ably protected Knochen in the past, Reinhard Heydrich, was long gone.

  Himmler may also have become aware of some of Knochen’s off-the-record activities in Paris, including his use of a private army of criminals such as Henri Lafont. According to one intelligence report, Lafont had somehow survived the last few months of German occupation because he had been able, of all things, to turn the tables on his master and actually blackmail Knochen. He had then exerted a “special influence” over Knochen because of an incident in late 1943, around the same time that Lafont had been forming a Brigade Nord Africaine, which consisted of Arabs from North Africa who were to fight “terrorists”—the resistance—in central and southern France. Knochen had ordered Lafont to murder a French aristocrat, the Duke of Ayen, but Knochen was unaware that the duke’s wife had approached no less than Himmler himself and pleaded with him to intervene. Knochen had sent the duke to his death in Bergen-Belsen anyway. Lafont had then been quick to warn Knochen that in case he had any ideas about also getting rid of Lafont himself, he had better think twice: Lafont would make sure Himmler knew what Knochen had done with the Duke of Ayen, whom Himmler had wanted to be spared.

  Knochen had indeed fallen far. He was now to be dispatched to the Armageddon in the East, to confront the Red Army, which since June 22 had surged west, destroying three German armies—the greatest defeat for the Germans of the war. Most of the western Soviet Union had been freed. The Red Army was fighting toward Berlin itself, having reached Poland. German losses in the East, not to mention Normandy, had been staggering that summer: more than half a million men dead or wounded—higher than the losses at Verdun in 1916, where Knochen’s father had fought and been injured. Now it would be Knochen’s turn to see actual frontline combat. He knew he would be lucky to come back alive. Indeed, serving on an antitank crew on the Eastern Front, which would undoubtedly make Knochen’s father proud, was tantamount to signing his own death warrant.

  —

  AT DAWN, the bells had started to ring out across Paris. The sun seemed to rise in a rush. There was not a cloud in the sky. Parisians looked at their watches, counting down the last minutes of living by Berlin time. Women pulled out their best dresses; others retrieved handcrafted tricolors and bottles hidden from the Boche. It was August 25, the feast of Saint Louis, patron saint of France. The Allies could not have chosen a better time to arrive.

  Around five thousand German troops remained in central Paris, manning key strongpoints, but far too few in number to hold up the Allies for long. More than five hundred Parisians had died in recent days in street fighting that had forced the Germans to retreat into bunkers and other fortifications at the heart of the city. At the Hôtel Meurice, General von Choltitz now waited anxiously to surrender to uniformed representatives of the Allies—not the resistance, who might deliver swift justice.

  At nine o’clock, French troops passed through the Porte d’Orléans. Minutes later a dense crowd swarmed around the first Frenchmen to have fought their way into the city, waving bouquets of flowers. Women climbed aboard jeeps and kissed their liberators passionately.

  “Vive de Gaulle!” they cried. “Vive Leclerc!”

  Others shouted over and over again, “Merci, merci, merci!”

  For many, it was the most joyous day of their lives. All the bottled-up emotions of the last few years flooded out. No one was ashamed to weep.

  It was around 11:00 a.m. when troops with Lieutenant Colonel Paul de Langlade’s spearhead from the 2nd Armored Division rolled in tanks, followed by jeeps, past the Lycée Janson de Sailly, Phillip Jackson’s old school, and then north along the Rue de la Pompe, where Friedrich Berger had committed his many crimes, to the Avenue Foch.

  Crowds all along the route swarmed around the tanks, marked with the Cross of Lorraine. Children clung to the Shermans’ cannons as young women in summer dresses draped themselves around beaming young Frenchmen, their cheeks soon checkered with bright lipstick. There were none of Knochen’s men standing guard outside numbers 84 and 72. There was no resistance as the Shermans trundled toward the Place de l’Étoile on the 1,525th day of German occupation.

  At the Étoile a group of Germans were soon taken prisoner. One of them threw a grenade at his captors. Soldiers took cover around the Arc de Triomphe and then the German prisoners were machine-gunned to death in retaliation. Their bodies lay in the open, beneath the hot sun, as far in the distance, down the Champs-Élysées, French soldiers and Americans from the 4th Division fired on German holdouts around the Place de la Concorde.

  In the Place du Palais Bourbon, just across the Seine, there was also heavy firing. A French officer waved his men forward as he headed past René de Chambrun’s home at number 6 and then liberators entered the Chambre des Députés, the seat of French democracy before 1940.

  At his headquarters almost a thousand miles away, in Rastenburg, Hitler received an urgent report.

  The Allies are in the heart of Paris, attacking strongpoints with artillery and infantry.

  Hitler turned on General Alfred Jodl. He had demanded that Paris be defended to the very last bullet. The jewel of the Third Reich, which he had visited that glorious, unforgettable sultry June morning in 1940 more than four years ago, was being stolen from him. Beyond Paris lay the Third Reich. Berlin would be the last prize.

  “Jodl!” shouted Hitler. “Brennt Paris? Is Paris burning? Jodl! I want to know—is Paris burning? Is Paris burning right now, Jodl?”

  Jodl had no answer.

  Back in Paris, a fireman called Captain Lucien Sarniguet was soon racing up the 1,750 steps of the Eiffel Tower. He had last made the climb on June 13, 1940, to lower the flag from the top of the tower. Two other men were now trying to beat him to the honor of putting the tricolor in its rightful place once more. Almost at the summit, Sarniguet passed his competitors, heart racing, pulled out a flag and then raised it on a flagpole. It was made from three old bedsheets. But no one in the joyous city below cared. After 1,532 days, the tricolor was back where it belonged.

  Shortly after noon, a carbine-toting Ernest Hemingway and colleagues arrived at the Arc de Triomphe. A French captain invited “Papa” to get a better view of the liberation from the monument’s roof, which provided a splendid vista. “One saw the golden dome of the Invalides,” recalled one of Papa’s men, “the green roof of the Madeleine, Sacré-Coeur….Tanks were firing in various streets. Part of the Arc was under fire from snipers. A shell from a German 88 nicked one of its sides.”

  Hemingway and his party took cover, popped the corks on several bottles of champagne, and then drove at high speed down an almost deserted Champs-Élysées. The
y carried on through joyous throngs in the Place de l’Opéra and on to the Hôtel Ritz, where the manager welcomed Papa and his merry band—a group of perhaps a dozen—at the entrance. When asked if they required anything other than lodging, Hemingway’s party promptly ordered fifty martini cocktails.

  A mile away, Lieutenant Henri Karcher of the 2nd Armored Division entered the Hôtel Meurice armed with a submachine gun, accompanied by three men. He spied a massive portrait of Hitler, opened fire and riddled the Führer with bullets.

  A German officer appeared. His hands were in the air. Karcher leapt over to him.

  “Everybody, one by one, hands up and arms thrown away!”

  The German shouted an order and others dropped their weapons.

  “Where,” asked Karcher, “is your general?”

  General Dietrich von Choltitz was a floor above, seated at a table, his pistol placed nearby. Just nineteen fateful days before, he had been sent by the Führer to turn Paris into a fortress and then destroy it. He was proud that he had not done so.

  A corporal appeared at the door. “Sie kommen, Herr General.”

  As Karcher entered, Choltitz got to his feet.

  “Lieutenant Henri Karcher of the Army of General de Gaulle.”

  “General von Choltitz, commander of Gross Paris.”

  Was Choltitz ready to surrender to the Allies?

  “Ja.”

  “Then you are my prisoner.”

  “Ja.”

  On the Avenue Foch, groups of euphoric and vengeful Parisians from less affluent neighborhoods entered numbers 72 and 84 and started to explore Knochen’s former residences. The offices, as captured hauntingly on film by a young photographer called Henri Cartier-Bresson, still looked surprisingly elegant given that Knochen and his colleagues had made sure to send all the best furniture and paintings east, ahead of the Allies, to the Reich.

  Later that afternoon, Charles de Gaulle stepped onto the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville before an ecstatic crowd and made the best speech of his life. “Paris!” he cried. “Paris outraged. Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!”

  By evening most of the Germans left in Paris had surrendered. As darkness fell and the sound of gunfire faded into the distance, the City of Light was again lit up for the first time in four years, and the tricolor and the Stars and Stripes were raised side by side over the Eiffel Tower. Parisians sang “La Marseillaise” from windows throughout the city. “[It] was like a champagne dream,” remembered one war correspondent. In the words of an ecstatic young American private called Irwin Shaw, “it was the day the war should have ended.” By contrast, at 11, Avenue Foch, home of the Jacksons, there was only silence. By the time the Allies had liberated their neighborhood, they were at the heart of the Third Reich, struggling to survive, paying the price for having dared to defy Hitler.

  —

  THE JACKSONS had not been forgotten amid the heady euphoria of liberation. As soon as Sumner had been arrested, his colleagues and General de Chambrun tried to find out what had happened to him. According to one source, the general contacted the Red Cross in order to trace Sumner. Asking the Germans for help was no longer possible. Like many of those who had been close to Laval, the general and his son René de Chambrun could no longer pull strings. They could not save the Jacksons no matter how much they might have wanted to.

  Sumner's and Toquette’s relatives had also done their best to help. Toquette’s family had pressured the Swiss embassy and along with Sumner’s relatives had contacted the State Department in Washington. The day that Paris was freed, the U.S. secretary of state, Cordell Hull, sent a telegram to the Swiss authorities in Geneva: “Telegraph exact location Moulin [sic] and request Swiss to report urgently latest known whereabouts of Jackson family.” Three days later Hull learned that the Jacksons had in all likelihood been deported to Nazi Germany.

  A fortnight later, on September 6, 1944, a story in the Waldoboro Press Herald, near Sumner’s hometown in Maine, gave a few further details. It was reported that “scores of Waldoboro residents, especially brother, Daniel Jackson, were keenly interested in [an] Associated Press dispatch from Paris telling of the efforts to trace Dr. Sumner Waldron Jackson, noted surgeon, Spruce Head native and Bowdoin graduate who had disappeared after he and his wife were interned on the grounds that he and his wife had harbored American fliers…” But there was no other source for either Sumner’s relatives in the United States or Toquette’s in Switzerland. All they knew for certain was that the Jacksons had disappeared like millions of other Europeans into the vast gulag of Nazi death and work camps: an unimaginable world of Nacht und Nebel—night and fog.

  —

  THE KNOCKING local jail. Its entrance reminded Clara of a famous picture from the French Revolution: The Last Victims of the Terror. Anxious hours followed. Through the de Chambruns’ maid, news of the general and Clara’s whereabouts had reached Miss Elisabeth Comte, the head nurse at the American Hospital. Comte quickly contacted the American embassy. But an official there was unmoved and could see no reason to help out. Comte stressed that “gangsters” had seized the de Chambruns.

  “Gangsters or not,” the official replied, “the French are free to do what they please.”

  Comte gave up on the embassy. She soon managed to contact General de Chambrun’s high-ranking brother, Pierre, who in June 1940 had been the only one of eighty French Parliamentarians who voted against the granting of special powers to Philippe Pétain and the creation of the Vichy regime. General de Chambrun’s brother was now influential, given this lone show of integrity, and threatened to end the career of a member of de Gaulle’s cabinet if his brother and Clara were harmed. Sure enough, the de Chambruns soon learned they would be spared. “Our first impression of freedom was conveyed by the sight of the camionnette belonging to the American Hospital,” recalled Clara. “Miss Comte, her charming face beaming with pleasure, was [there] to greet us.”

  They were not out of danger yet, and both wisely decided to keep a low profile and spend as little time in Paris as possible, as did their son René and his wife, Josée, who assumed false identities and hid with rich friends in the country. To Clara it seemed that de Gaulle’s supporters wanted collaborators’ heads to roll across the Place de la Concorde as they had by the thousand in 1794, at the height of the Great Terror. Hundreds of Parisians would be executed, shot on their doorsteps, and gunned down in the streets in the weeks after liberation, and an estimated 10,000 across France would be murdered. By contrast, thanks to their connections, Clara and her husband, General de Chambrun, would pay a small price. Both would soon be quietly eased from their roles at the American Library and the American Hospital, tainted in the eyes of Paris’s American liberators by their close relationship with Pierre Laval. Their only child’s father-in-law had on August 17 been arrested in Paris by Knochen’s men and then escorted, along with the utterly discredited Pétain, to a fortress at the heart of Nazi Germany, where their fates, like those of so many millions, were now dependent on the whims of Adolf Hitler.

  SEVENTEEN

  NIGHT AND FOG

  THE CHILL OF WINTER was already in the air, the nights colder, the dew heavy on the grass each morning. On September 11, 1944, Toquette and the other women in her barrack were led to the shower rooms and made to stand naked once more while being examined by SS guards. All they knew was that they were to be taken to a sub-camp of Ravensbruck somewhere in Nazi Germany, where they would be put to work. Every personal item they may have acquired since arriving at the camp was stripped from them. Then they were issued new clothes: flimsy cotton summer dresses. By candlelight Toquette and others hastily sewed on new prison numbers. Then a siren sounded. The women were marched back to a train at Fürstenberg. They climbed into boxcars, fifty women to each one. A female SS gua
rd and an armed Wehrmacht soldier sat on boxes near a half-open door.

  Three days later, having passed through the shattered outskirts of Berlin, Toquette arrived in Torgau, about 150 miles due south of Ravensbruck. As she and her close friends marched from the train yard to their new barracks, they encountered some French POWs who told them the Allies had reached the German border around Aachen. The women trudged on through open country and finally arrived at a munitions factory where a drunken SS officer gave them a choice. Work in the factory making weapons for the Nazis, under a roof, or return to hard labor outside at Ravensbruck. “Ravensbruck is slow death,” one of the women argued, out of earshot of the SS. “We must avoid going back there, at any price. We have parents and husbands and children in France who need us.”

  Toquette and several of her friends were ordered to form into a work detail. However, they would not spend each day making fuses in the munitions factory. Instead they would work in a kitchen, peeling potatoes for eleven hours each day. They counted themselves extremely fortunate to have been given what amounted to a lifeline, a way to stay alive. It was hand-numbing work but the women could eat as many potatoes as they wanted and would therefore fend off starvation, and they would be together, able to care for each other every hour of every day.

  A week after arriving at Torgau, Toquette somehow managed to smuggle a message out of the camp on a four-by-four-inch piece of paper, hoping it would be passed on to the Red Cross: “Madame Jackson, No 57 855, American, would be grateful if you would write to Touvet Barrelet de Ricou [her brother] to say to him that she is well and has been here for a week after 15 days at Ravensbruck. Tell him simply that the message is from ‘Toquette.’ Many thanks.” The Red Cross received the note and duly sent it to Toquette’s brother with a covering letter: “We have been able to pass a message from Mrs. Jackson to you. [Toquette] is interned at Torgau (Germany)…We advise you not to write to her. The message was transmitted to us in a confidential manner.”