They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France

by Charles Glass

  The Germans fled east from Auch in two columns along the Bayonne-Toulouse highway. Damaged bridges and roads slowed their momentum, and they trudged ahead into increasingly hostile territory. Local fighters erected a makeshift barricade to block them on the outskirts of L’Isle-Jourdain at a bridge over the River Save. The Wehrmacht convoy paused to determine the size of the maquis force on the opposite bank. Camilo’s Spaniards went behind the Germans to block reinforcements from Montauban. The rival forces faced each other across the river without firing a shot. The sun went down and at nine o’clock Parisot gave the order to attack. The defenders held their ground. Battle raged through the night, neither side gaining ground.

  Shortly after sunrise on August 20, Captain Parisot slung a rifle over his back and walked toward the German line. Speaking German, he called on his opponents to surrender. A German colonel shouted, “Nein!” Parisot returned to his men. The Germans used the momentary cease-fire to move troops into a meadow beside the railroad tracks, threatening to turn the French line. Parisot sent an urgent message to George in Auch asking for additional fighters. George dispatched two companies, about six hundred men. While awaiting their arrival, Parisot’s machine gunners in a water tower and the steeple of Saint Bernard’s Church rained heavy fire on the Germans below. The two companies that George sent reached the front, and the opposing forces fought into a second night.

  At daybreak, forty-eight hours into the combat, the shooting stopped. Nine Frenchmen lay dead. The Germans raised the white flag. Parisot took 192 Germans, including two colonels, prisoner. George’s account of L’Isle-Jourdain noted, “We captured several lorries, also petrol and other stores.” Four German officers escaped, only to stumble on a Resistance checkpoint. They unholstered their revolvers, yelled, “Heil, Hitler!” and shot themselves.

  George’s report to London on Parisot’s victories at Estang, Aire-sur-l’Adour, and L’Isle-Jourdain ended with fulsome praise for his friend: “By his continual gallantry, devotion to duty and leadership of his men, the Bataillon became a terror to the German forces in the region.” George celebrated the triumph at a sumptuous banquet with Parisot, Cormeau, and forty Armagnac comrades. While they drank before dinner, maquisards led three German soldiers they had just captured into the room. Captain Gabriel Termignon, who said he spoke German, questioned them in front of everyone. The prisoners were slow to answer. George, who believed the prisoners had trouble understanding Termignon’s ungrammatical German, described the encounter:

  Termignon lost his temper and started striking them and also taking their belongings from them and offering them to the ordinary troops who were round about. After a bit I could not stand it any longer. I was in British uniform in the rank of Major [colonel] and I got up and went over to him and in front of everybody told him that that was not the way to treat prisoners of war who were soldiers and were under orders whatever they had done. I said the proper way was to hand them over to the Gendarmerie who were charged with looking after the prisoners.

  George later said that Termignon had suffered at German hands in Toulouse’s Saint-Michel Prison, from which he had just escaped, and was “naturally overwrought.”

  The Battle of L’Isle-Jourdain was the last in the Gers, where George Starr had set up shop in November 1942. The entire department was now liberated.

  The Forces Française de l’Intérieur acknowledged Captain Parisot’s accomplishments by promoting him to colonel, an honor he declined. “I have only the stripes I wear,” he declared. The FFI chief in the Gers appealed to Jeanne Parisot: “I am writing to your husband to give him an order to wear colonel’s stripes. He cannot command 2,000 men as a captain!” Parisot remained a captain and went on commanding.

  In the Haute-Garonne department, isolated German units were retreating into Toulouse. FFI brigades filled the void in each town they abandoned. On August 18, Colonel Hod Fuller’s Jedburghs with Philippe de Gunzbourg’s maquisards captured Tarbes. Fuller sent a message to his Algiers headquarters: “What a spectacle, our maquis has liberated Tarbes and Lubon. The Germans are fleeing to Spain. I have a German general [Major General Leo Mayr] and his general staff prisoners.”

  The New York Times trumpeted the FFI’s conquests under the headline FFI MASTERS OF PYRENEES:

  The entire Pyrenees region of southwestern France from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean is now in the hands or under the control of the FFI. . . . All the German forces just north of the Spanish border have withdrawn north towards Germany and the FFI immediately took possession, appointing new civil administrators.

  Toulouse, the Germans’ last and largest bastion in the region, was next. Conquering the city entailed risks to the attackers, the civilians, and the fabric of the city the FFI hoped to liberate. They proceeded with caution. Early on August 19, maquisard units moving into Toulouse’s suburbs were joyously received by the inhabitants. Inside the city, the Germans were burning documents and setting fire to their headquarters. They packed their provisions and loot, and they abandoned the city. The FFI moved in, capturing the Saint-Michel Prison and liberating more than four hundred political prisoners, including the French writer André Malraux. The maquisards burned German trucks, clashed with the German rear guard, and erected barricades to block departing columns on the roads and rails. The Germans escaped along the main highway toward Carcassonne, pursued by ecstatic maquisards. By morning, the city was free. A dispatch of August 21 to the New York Times informed the American public, “The French Forces of the Interior have captured Toulouse.”

  The French tricolor flew over the city’s monuments, and the maquisards controlled the major governmental buildings. More than thirty thousand Toulousians flooded the place du Capitole to welcome their liberators. Every faction of the Resistance shared the adulation of the newly freed populace. George Starr and Yvonne Cormeau drove into the city with two thousand victorious Gascons and their foreign comrades. A French officer on motorcycle stopped their convoy and asked to speak to the British colonel. Yvonne Cormeau, sitting in George’s old Simca between him and a six-feet-five American Jedburgh officer called Tiny, remembered:

  He stopped the whole column and explained that, as we were at the point of entering the town of Toulouse, he would very much like the colonel who was driving to put a Union Jack on the car to indicate that it was a friendly car, you see. And he brought out of his pocket a Union Jack his wife had made out of parachute material.

  They placed the homemade standard on the car, and Tiny said, “Oh, if only Old Glory was there.” Cormeau pulled the flag patch from his uniform and put it on the car’s windshield. Bearing the improvised colors of Great Britain and the United States, Starr and Cormeau led their comrades into the liberated city. The surviving combatants of Castelnau and Panjas received rapturous applause, kisses, and wine from the people of Toulouse. The rejoicing and drinking went on all night.

  In the morning, the Armagnac Battalion settled into the Niel Barracks. The FFI issued them military uniforms and declared them a regular unit of the French Army. This was not a welcome development to many of the independent fighters. Escholier said one man complained, “Maquisards, my brothers, here we’re in a cage. The maquis is finished: here is our barracks and our splendid new khaki uniforms. The change is complete.” The guerrillas were now soldiers.

  The FFI by this time controlled, as the United Press reported, “more than 50,000 square miles in southern France,” but their war was not over. Within a few days, the Armagnac Battalion deployed to Villefranche-de-Lauragais in pursuit of retreating German units. George Starr did not go with them.

  * * *

  • • •

  On August 6, John Starr’s thirty-sixth birthday, something unexpected happened at 84 avenue Foch. His debrief to SOE recorded:

  On his birthday, source was given presents by the Germans and flowers were placed in his room. In the evening they had a party and the Commandant came up to the cell and brought a bottle of
champagne and a bottle of cognac.

  German officials in Paris, like the British and French in June 1940, were putting their files to the torch. Evacuating the French capital was a logistical headache. Résistants of the last hour attacked German patrols. Railway workers sabotaged trains. The British and American air forces bombed the Germans’ escape route east. There was the additional problem of prisoners, hundreds of whom were summarily executed at Fresnes Prison and in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

  A day after John’s birthday, Colonel Helmut Knochen ordered Major Kieffer to report to his headquarters on avenue Foch. Berlin had made a decision about the British SAS commandos imprisoned at the place des États-Unis. Kieffer recalled that Knochen

  . . . read out to me a teleprint which had just arrived, the contents of which were to the effect that by order of the Führer and Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht the death penalty was to be carried out against the prisoners from the SAS-Commando Operation. Before execution they were to be dressed in civilian clothes. The BDS [Knochen] was held personally responsible for the strictest secrecy.

  Berlin’s decree accorded with Adolf Hitler’s infamous “commando order” of October 18, 1942, that prescribed “all men operating against German troops in so-called Commando raids in Europe or in Africa are to be annihilated to the last man.” Hitler ordered his troops to kill commandos “whether they be soldiers in uniform” or were “giving themselves up as prisoners.” Obedience to the order was a war crime, and Knochen sought to keep it secret. Kieffer recalled Knochen’s insistence that “members of my section who already knew about the case had to be used.” Two of the men he assigned, Haug and Stork, “asked why they in particular had been detailed for the operation.” They were not offered a choice. Nor were the SAS prisoners, whom the SD forced to change into civilian clothing during the night of August 7.

  The operation began before sunrise on the eighth, when guards handcuffed the commandos and drove them to avenue Foch. A driver from the SD motor pool, Fritz Hildemann, arrived in his truck to collect them. “I was not able to see whether they were chained but I saw that sandwiches for them were taken too,” Hildemann said. “I assumed that these men were to collaborate in some way or other in connection with a comb-out operation or at the reception of parachute drops as usual, so I understood from other comrades who had made previous such trips.” The convoy drove northwest out of Paris for over forty miles. Hildemann was ordered to stop north of the town of Noailles, “near a projecting piece of woodland.” A few yards off the road, two of the SD officers walked through the forest toward a nearby cornfield. They returned and told the prisoners, “Get out.” Hildemann wondered about the purpose of the operation: “Since the big column was not very far from us, I thought that perhaps the prisoners were to show us something in the wood which was to help in the comb-out operation.” A second truck with a tarpaulin-covered bed backed into the field.

  Hildemann went into the cornfield and saw the handcuffed prisoners standing in a row. Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Richard Schnurr of Kieffer’s staff read out a long statement in German that began, “In the name of the Führer.” When Alfred von Kapri’s English translation reached “will be shot,” the commandos bolted, dispersing through the cornfield to the woods. Commando Serge Vaculik wrote, “Startled, the Germans did not open fire at once and that was my salvation.” The moment’s hesitation gave Vaculik and Thomas “Ginger” Jones time to run. The Germans fired Sten guns from SOE arms drops at the fleeing prisoners. Vaculik later stated:

  I opened my handcuffs with my watch spring and I ran away down the hill. Some firing occurred. I was not hit. Von KAPRI was carrying an English sten gun. HAUG was carrying an American repeating rifle. The others were carrying automatic pistols. . . . As I ran I did not see any of my comrades. Later I made my way to a French village and afterwards I joined the French Resistance.

  Jones similarly recalled, “I made a run for it. I got 10/15 yards away and I fell. I lost my balance as my hands were handcuffed.” The Germans wounded Jones, who crawled into the brush, where he saw the bodies of four of his comrades. Jones evaded the Germans and, like Vaculik, was not recaptured.

  The Germans killed five commandos, some while they ran, the others as they lay wounded. They buried their bodies in an orchard of the Château de Parisis-Fontaine. If anyone revealed what happened, the cover story would be that they had shot escaping spies in civilian clothes. Hildemann recalled that they had to ask for trucks from a nearby Luftwaffe base to remove the corpses. Too many people outside the SD knew what happened, from the two surviving SAS commandos to the Luftwaffe burial detail, to keep the massacre secret forever.

  Kieffer heard what had occurred that evening:

  I was not present at the departure of the squad or during the execution and I can only state what was reported to me by Schnurr. According to this all the prisoners are said to have escaped after the order for execution was made known to them. One [two] of the SAS men in fact succeeded in escaping. Hauptsturmführer Schnurr was very depressed when he reported to me that the execution had been carried out. From the beginning he as well as Haug and Stork were depressed by this task.

  The SD staff had also to deal with their own prisoners at 84 avenue Foch before they left Paris. They could not permit the Allies to liberate people, especially John Starr, who knew everything about the Funkspiel. Kieffer and Goetz intended to send more false signals to SOE after they left Paris, despite the joking exchange of messages with Buckmaster. Then, recalled the radio department’s Corporal Werner Ruehl, “a telegram had arrived from Berlin instructing us to liquidate all agents held in Paris.” The orders infuriated radio department chief Erich Otto. Ruehl said that Otto “came into the office and slammed some papers on the desk and said ‘This is a Schwenerie [disgrace],’ saying that he would refuse to carry out this order. GOETZ and OTTO were greatly excited and I believe that no agents were shot in Paris at that time.” Kieffer, who had obeyed the order to facilitate the SAS commandos’ murders, did not execute “his” prisoners. Instead, he arranged to send them to Germany.

  He bade farewell to John Starr. Neither man left a record of their parting, but the two enemies had a mutual respect. John felt that Kieffer had behaved correctly throughout his confinement. Kieffer respected John for refusing to betray his comrades and keeping his word not to attempt another escape. Later, Corporal Ruehl told John, “Now that you are going, there’s something I think you ought to know. Kieffer three times received an order to have you shot, and each time he refused to comply with it.” It was too late to thank Kieffer for his life.

  John left Paris under guard on a train bound for Germany. Eight days later, the train stopped outside Saarbrücken. The Neue Bremm concentration camp was too full of Russian, Polish, and other prisoners to admit new arrivals. John and the rest of the detainees waited for four days in sealed wagons with only one tin can for body waste and a scrap of bread each. A new train arrived to take them to Buchenwald. Indicative of the chaos overtaking the Third Reich, Buchenwald was also full. John’s next destination was the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin in Oranienburg. It was at capacity with sixty-five thousand inmates, but it admitted the new prisoners anyway.

  John sat on a bench outdoors amid two thousand other arrivals. A few of the men became so thirsty that they scrambled for foul water from a standpipe that gave them dysentery. After waiting several hours, guards stripped, shaved, and deloused them before distributing them among huts already bursting with starving men. John lodged in Block 49, where an SS guard looked him up and down and pronounced, “You are not so tall for an Englishman.” His reply was, “Yes, and you’re not so fat for a German.” When prison work details were assigned, John found himself with Strafe Kommando, or Punishment Command. The other Strafe Kommando inmates were naval officers, most from Norway, and lived in the Strafe Block. The Norwegians shared their Red Cross food parcels with the British, who were not allowed to receive anything. J
ohn lived in a separate blockhouse, but went out each morning with the Norwegians to test boots made of ersatz leather by marching around and around a stony square of land. The Germans did not permit them to rest during daylight hours, and they walked scores of miles each day without going anywhere.

  John distracted himself from the camp’s savagery by painting the interior walls of his block in a trompe l’oeil of hills, forests, and rivers around a panorama of Nuremberg. Rather than punish him, guards ordered him to paint other huts. The Elysian vision contrasted with the reality of Sachsenhausen’s mud, filth, vermin, lice, work details, and torture. The prisoners’ only hope of an end to the torment came from rumors that the Soviets were advancing from the east and the Western Allies were penetrating Germany from Belgium. If the rumors were true, would any of them live to witness the camp’s liberation?

  FIFTEEN

  “I Said ‘Shit’ to De Gaulle”

  The Resistance was a vital factor in the recovery of the French national spirit.

  MAURICE BUCKMASTER

  In liberated Toulouse, revolutionary fervor reigned. Crowds rounded up collaborators as well as innocents suspected of cooperating with the Germans. Communist partisans seized government buildings and raised the red flag. FFI commander Serge Ravanel suspended the gendarmerie, the national police force that had collaborated with the occupier from the beginning. The gendarmes had also been instrumental in the oppression of the city’s ancient Jewish community and in gathering young men to serve in the forced labor battalions of the STO. Résistants whom the gendarmes had arrested and tortured supported Ravanel. To Charles de Gaulle, however, Ravanel’s action constituted a challenge to his authority. He wrote: