On the morning of 19 August, about sixty-five résistants of the communist Francs Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) disrupted Neuilly’s complacency. They captured two German soldiers in a café, dragged them to the town hall and raised the French flag to proclaim the liberation. Barricading themselves inside with the municipality’s staff, the partisans wrapped cloths saying Vivre libre ou mourir (Live free or die) around their arms. They did not wait long for the Germans. A truck carrying a Wehrmacht officer and six soldiers roared up to the entrance. The officer ordered the partisans to surrender. The FTP’s local commander, 65-year-old André Caillette, responded, ‘Surrender yourself. This is the army of Liberation.’ Shooting erupted. When it ended, all seven Germans lay dead. They were quickly replaced by a larger detachment with three tanks. Machine guns blasted, and tank shells pierced the building. In the midst of the combat, someone telephoned the town hall with the joyous news that the Americans had just liberated the cathedral city of Chartres. The partisans stopped firing long enough to sing La Marseillaise, quickly joined by residents of the surrounding houses. For three more hours, fighting could be heard at the American Hospital and in the rest of Neuilly. The résistants lost a dozen men. Another forty fighters and town hall employees were wounded. Most of the survivors escaped through a sewer that led from the town hall basement. Those left behind were taken to Mont Valerian prison, notorious for its executions of more than 4,000 French hostages and résistants.
The Germans erected a large Stüztpunkt on Neuilly’s avenue de Madrid to guard access to the town hall, the Kommandatur and the American Hospital. The bunker was ‘a fortress capable of withstanding a siege,’ René de Chambrun wrote, based on his father’s reminiscences: ‘This strongpoint was under the command of a fanatic officer, Major Goetz, who had ordered his tanks to fire on the town hall.’ Major Goetz’s unit was not under Colonel Bernhuber’s command. It reported directly to General von Choltitz.
The German wounded needed emergency treatment. For the first time during the occupation, the Germans requested admission to the American Hospital. ‘It is impossible for me to evacuate about forty of our wounded from the Kommandatur,’ Colonel Bernhuber said to General de Chambrun. ‘Would you be able to receive them?’ Aldebert agreed at once, and the German casualties were brought in on stretchers. Because the hospital’s rooms were full, the Germans had to be lodged in the corridors. Otherwise, the staff cared for them just as they did for the French. René de Chambrun wrote, ‘Strange spectacle that, in this corner of American earth, my father achieved a miracle: sleeping side by side were French and German soldiers, seriously ill Americans and English, bourgeois Parisians and railway workers from the suburbs who had been wounded in the bombardments of the train yards.’ The French and German soldiers were not quite side by side. General de Chambrun had taken the precaution of installing the soldiers in separate wings, Germans in the east, French in the west. It turned out to be a wise decision. While on her regular rounds, Elisabeth Comte uncovered rifles and bullets under the Germans’ stretchers and pillows. She went at once to General de Chambrun: ‘General, the Germans have arms and ammunition.’ The general informed Colonel Bernhuber, who, once again, behaved correctly. He ordered his men to turn over their arms to Otto Gresser, the hospital superintendent. Their cache included thirty grenades and 2,000 rounds of ammunition that Gresser stowed away.
Having recaptured the town hall, Germans patrolled the darkened streets of Neuilly. Apart from an occasional sniper shot at a passing Panzer, the suburb went quiet. Neuilly for the moment was pacified, but the uprising was spreading to the rest of Paris.
The Paris police, who in accord with Vichy policy had collaborated with German authority for four years, followed the example of the Neuilly résistants later that day. They suddenly declared a strike and barricaded themselves in the Prefecture of Police. That was the cue for thousands of Parisians to set up makeshift roadblocks, snipe at German troops and attack German positions. It was a dangerous gamble. Left to themselves, the résistants could not hold out long against the Wehrmacht.
Rising early again on 20 August, Clara de Chambrun noticed more changes to her ‘respectable-looking quarter’. The area around the Luxembourg Gardens had been invaded by ‘many persons of extremely rough appearance in the streets; dark-browed youths with sleeveless undershirts, a considerable portion of Algerians from the Parisian outskirts, and a large sprinkling from red Spain. They were not in the least warlike, merely camp followers and wartime profiteers to whom the strike of the Parisian police, ordered the night before, presented a favorable position for taking anything that came handy.’ She observed events from a balcony that might be struck by machine-gun fire at any moment. A German Panzer patrolling the streets suddenly found itself face to face with a woman in a scarlet skirt, who was pedalling her bicycle directly towards it. Clara had seen the woman before: ‘I recognized her as one of the communist functionaries at our neighboring branch post office and high placed in the C.G.T. [Confédération Générale du Travail]. On coming level with the tank she leaped from her wheel, fished from her very décolleté bosom a small pistol on a chain, fired two or three shots into the tires of the tank, which being solid were not damaged, then scuttled around the corner on her bike and found shelter inside the porte-cochère of number 4 rue Guynemer. ’ The woman escaped, but Clara’s house did not.
German machine gunners on the terrace in the Luxembourg Gardens reacted by spraying fire at the buildings opposite. Clara’s house took bullets from ground to roof, shattering every window in between. While she and a few guests crouched on the floor, the fusillade smashed up her home. When the shooting stopped, Clara saw what looked like smoke, but turned out to be plaster dust, rising from her library shelves. One bullet ‘had traversed six volumes and remained so deeply buried in the wall behind that we never have been able to find it’.
Outside, the tank continued its patrol, and an officer ordered French workmen to demolish a roadblock. They ripped it down, and he told the crowd, ‘Anyone can take the wood.’ It took only a few minutes for people to grab all the firewood they could carry, leaving a pile of sand where the barricade had been.
Clara had promised ‘the children’, René and Josée, to protect their apartment in the Place du Palais Bourbon, ‘to see whether all was going well, to inquire if their domestic needed anything and if a high morale was being maintained’. That meant walking a couple of miles each way, past one German Stützpunkt, strongpoint, after another and through the Resistance barricades that had been erected all over Paris. To impress guards sporting French tricolour scarves and Gaullist Crosses of Lorraine at the roadblocks, Clara wore the ribbons and medals that she had been awarded over the years: ‘a jewel-studded cross of the Legion of Honor and the palmes académiques offered me by the town of Fez’. She also wore a social work medal and ‘the blueribboned insignia of the Society of Colonial Dames’. She pinned them to her breast in a distinguished row, like a general: ‘I must say they looked very smart on a black Creed tailor-made suit.’ She marched from the rue de Vaugirard to the boulevard Raspail without hindrance, but at the rue de Grenelle a crowd of armed youngsters stopped her. Imperiously, she told their leader, ‘My young friend, here it is I who command.’ Undoubtedly stunned by the 70-year-old countess’s hauteur, he let her through. Soon, though, Clara found herself in the midst of a fire-fight, with bullets coming ‘more or less from every direction’. She made it to René and Josée’s house, where Elie Ruel, the cook, assured her that all was well. She walked back, ‘arrived safely at home not having been asked even to “show cause” at the three barricades made principally of kitchen chairs and tables’. Young résistants facing Wehrmacht tanks were too prudent to confront a determined American matron in a Creed tailor-made suit with a chest full of medals.
FORTY-NINE
Tout Mourir
THE NAZIS HAD SENT TOQUETTE JACKSON from Moulins to Romainville, near Paris, on 2 August. At Romainville, the Germans were holding 550 female political p
risoners. Toquette was one of three American citizens in the camp. The others were Lucienne Dixon, originally French and married to an American engineer, and Virginia d’Albert-Lake. Born Virginia Roush in Dayton, Ohio, in 1909, she spent her childhood in St Petersburg, Florida. She married a Frenchman and moved to Paris in 1937. In 1943, she and her husband joined the Comet Resistance network, which had the twin distinctions of facilitating more Allied escapes and surviving longer than any other network. She had been arrested by the Feldgendarmerie in June, just after D-Day, while escorting South African airmen through the countryside. The Germans interrogated her at Fresnes prison in Paris and moved her to Romainville with most of the other women political prisoners. The Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling was frantically attempting to obtain the release of all the women, as well as that of Jewish prisoners at Drancy, from General Dietrich von Choltitz. Von Choltitz and the regular army exerted little influence with the SS and Gestapo, especially after the failed 20 July plot.
Romainville was one of the camps that the Red Cross was permitted to visit, and conditions were better than Toquette had experienced in Vichy and Moulins. Toquette’s sister, Tat, was allowed to enter the camp on 10 August to spend half an hour with her. Toquette was unable to tell her what had become of Sumner and Phillip after their confinement at Moulins, where she last saw them. With each passing day, the women prisoners listened for news of the Allied advance that would set them free. One French résistante, Yvonne Baratte, wrote on 14 August, the eve of the Feast of the Assumption, ‘I am full of hope. They will not have time to take us from here.’ The Abbot of Lilas was scheduled to say Mass for the women in the morning. But a German guard, who reminded prisoner Maisie Renault of an orangutan with ‘his gigantic size, his immense arms and his powerful hands that seemed always to want to crush someone’, woke the women early. He shouted, ‘Nicht Messe … Morgen, Alles transport Deutschland, tous mourir … tous mourir.’ This mixture of German and French meant, ‘No Mass … Morning, all [to be] transported to Germany, all to die … all to die.’ The women were herded onto buses. Virginia d’Albert-Lake slipped some letters to the French driver, who told her,‘Since this morning, I have driven prisoners without stopping from Fresnes and Cherche-Midi to the station at Pantin.’
‘You mean they are evacuating all the prisons in Paris?’
‘Yes,’ the driver answered.
She asked, ‘And the Allies … are they advancing?’
‘Yes. They are at Rambouillet.’
As Toquette Jackson, Virginia d’Albert-Lake and hundreds of other women who had fought hard to liberate France rode in buses through Paris, they knew that the city would soon be free. From the pavements, people who had not resisted looked up, in shame, at the captives. Virginia wrote, ‘They pitied us. As I looked at them, the same thought went round and round in my consciousness: “These people will soon see the liberation of Paris. I’m going to miss the day of which I have dreamed for nearly five years and which was to be the greatest in my life.”’ The Germans took the women to the station at Pantin, where Sylvia Beach and the other American women internees had boarded the train to Vittel in September 1942. This train was not bound for a relatively comfortable mountain resort. Its destination was Germany.
The trains taking the prisoners to Germany were late, so the Germans ordered the women to stand in the hot sun. One of the women, knowing what lay in store for her in Germany, called out to some passers-by, ‘Hello, down there … Listen to me.’ They stopped, and she went on, ‘All the prisoners and the prisoners from Romainville are leaving … Warn the Resistance … Stop the train … You hear me? Stop the train.’ A woman passer-by waved a white handkerchief to signal that she understood. When the trains arrived, the Germans rushed the prisoners, more than 2,000 women and men, into crowded, airless carriages. Amid the wartime confusion, the train moved slowly east towards Nancy. It stopped in a tunnel near Nanteuil-sur-Marne for two hours, while the prisoners in the sealed carriages were nearly asphyxiated. The train could go no further, because the RAF had bombed a bridge a week earlier and the line was impassable. The SS guards marched the deportees out of the train into a field, where they were assembled in military columns. One woman tried to run away, but guards tracked her down and beat her severely.
They walked about five miles through fields to the town of Nanteuil-Saâcy, whose inhabitants called out to the prisoners, ‘Bon courage!’ and ‘Vive la France!’ Strangely, a contingent of Red Cross personnel was waiting at the train station with boiled potatoes and milk for the prisoners. A few hours later, they boarded a goods train. The train trundled slowly east for four days, until it reached the outskirts of Weimar. There, the SS separated the male from female prisoners. The women were taken off the train at Ravensbrück Konzentrationslager, built in 1939 to house slave labour for the Texled textile and leather factory and the Siemens armaments plant. The date was 21 August.
As soon as they entered the camp, the prisoners were forced to strip completely. The guards wrapped their clothes in brown paper, as if they would be returned one day. Each woman was forced to undergo a gynaecological examination for contraband, with no gesture towards hygiene. Most of the women, including Toquette Jackson, had their heads shaved. Virginia d’Albert-Lake was one of the lucky few whose hair was left. They were then issued camp uniforms–baggy trousers without belt, a pyjama shirt and a loose robe. Veteran prisoners warned the new arrivals not to drink the water, which was infected with typhoid. It would be better, they said, to drink the foul-tasting but boiled ersatz coffee. Their daily ration, apart from a quarter litre of pseudo-coffee, consisted of a half litre of soup made from swede and beetroot, 30 grams of margarine and a slice of bread. It was insufficient even for women who were not doing manual labour; the diet could not sustain women doing manual labour through twelve-hour days in factories. Ravensbrück was not a death camp, where prisoners were gassed or shot en masse. It was a place where the Third Reich’s enemies were made to die by starvation, overwork and disease. The prisoners from Romainville were sent into quarantine for two weeks, while they pleaded for any news at all from France. Maisie Renault remembered, ‘With a sort of devotion, they repeated, “Soon, France [will be] liberated”.’ Paris was nearly free, thanks in part to women like Toquette Jackson, Virginia d’Albert-Lake and Maisie Renault. They, who had done the most to set Paris free, faced, not liberation, but slavery.
South of Paris at Rambouillet, Charles de Gaulle pondered how ferociously the Germans would crush the uprising and defend Paris from the Allies. His French Second Armoured Division commander, General Jacques Leclerc, was ready that morning of 24 August to invade Paris and save the insurgents. Leclerc’s real name was Philippe François Marie Leclerc, Vicomte de Hautecloque. He had adopted the nom de guerre ‘Leclerc’, when he joined de Gaulle in England in 1940, to protect his wife and six children in France. It did not work for long. The Vichy authorities discovered his identity, seized his chateau and evicted his family. Leclerc had fought in West and North Africa, leading his division of French and African soldiers across the Sahara to connect with the British Eighth Army for the Tunisia campaign, and also in Italy.
As commander of the French Second Armoured Division, whose tanks had just liberated Alençon and Argentan in Normandy with General George Patton’s Third Army, Leclerc had been assigned to lead the first Allied force into the city. It was a tarnished honour. The United States had made certain that Leclerc’s division expelled all its African colonial troops before it left Algeria via England for France. General Walter Bedell-Smith, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, had advised, ‘It is highly desirable that the [French] division should be composed of white personnel, which points to the second armored division, which has only one quarter native troops and is the only French division which could be made 100 per cent white.’ Most French units had large numbers of African troops, but the American racism that had prevented Eugene Bullard from transferring from the French to the American army in the First World War had not van
ished in the Second. The American armed forces segregated their units by race, and they expected the same of the French. De Gaulle was proud of the African soldiers, who had fought honourably for France and suffered bestial treatment as prisoners of the Nazis. Although he saw no reason to exclude them from the liberation of Paris, he acceded to pressure from his stronger ally. Only white soldiers, French and Republican Spaniards, came with Leclerc to liberate Paris.
Clara de Chambrun rose at six o’clock on 24 August. The French police who usually guarded the Palais du Luxembourg were gone, and her sedate quarter had given way to insurrection: ‘This guerrilla warfare was directed against small enemy detachments, isolated trucks and motor cars.’ The skirmishes irritated Clara as much as they did the Germans. At nine o’clock, a friend called to urge her to leave at once. The caller ‘was credibly informed that in an hour the Senate buildings would be blown up and that our whole house was sure to go with it. The same warning came again from another source, but left me unmoved.’ The warnings were genuine.
By the time Clara looked out of her window again, German troops were barricading themselves into the Senate and digging tank trenches in the gardens for Panzers of the Fifth Sicherregiment. The tanks were well positioned to fire on any armed Frenchmen coming their way. General Dietrich von Choltitz was delaying execution of Hitler’s order to destroy Paris. He needed a ceasefire to calm the popular uprising, negotiate with the striking policemen and free his troops to fight the Allies. While he parleyed with the Resistance through Sweden’s courageous consul general, Raoul Nordling, the SS unit at the Palais du Luxembourg argued for the immediate destruction of the palace and a fight to the death against the partisans. On the lawns nearby, German firing squads ordered French prisoners to dig their own graves before executing them. Cornered and fearful, the German army, despite von Choltitz’s caution, became more menacing than at any other time during the four-year occupation.
Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation Page 42
