Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (21 page)

On 30 July a signal from General Koenig was passed from man to man in the Maquis groups spread out in the forests:

THE RESISTANCE FORCES IN THE VERCORS HAVE RENDERED GREAT SERVICE TO THE ONGOING BATTLE OF FRANCE BY TYING DOWN LARGE GERMAN FORCES.

Was this any consolation for the men still on the plateau? The diary of one of these hunted groups tells the story of the privations they endured:

31 July – Corn flour brought back by a patrol cooked in bad water in a washing boiler. Those who managed to eat the mess are ill.

1 August – Several comrades poisoned by eating leaves. A little milk taken from an abandoned cow.

2 August – Found several chickens, cooked on a spit in the forest.

10 August – Have been eating raw carrots found in a field, also some apples we found.

11 August – We stripped a cherry tree.

Hearing that many corpses lay unburied after the Germans had left the plateau, a sometime chief scout of France named Maurice Rouchy headed for Vassieux with a team of volunteers from the youth leaders’ school near Die, of which he was the director. His notes made on the spot give a grim immediacy to the scene:

Several kilometres before arriving at the village the smell of decomposing corpses made it hard to breathe. The farms we passed had all been looted and burned. Everywhere lay the bloated carcases of animals. Many others had been tied up in their barns before the farm was set alight. It was a terrible sight. The first human corpse was of a farmer machine-gunned and left in a drinking trough. A couple in their seventies were lying together, the man’s arm around his wife, as though to protect her. Further on, the bodies of several youngsters lay where they had been shot in the entrance to a farm. The smell grew even worse 500 metres from the pile of ruins that had been the village. An old woman of maybe ninety lay on her back with her arms out, as if on a cross, seeming to forbid us to enter Vassieux. The odour of death was by now so terrible that we could only approach by soaking handkerchiefs in lavender eau de cologne and using them as masks. Bodies lay everywhere, killed by bursts from sub-machine guns. We found them in the streets, in the ruins, in the cellars. Everywhere was death.
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Photographs included in the published version of Picirella’s diary bear out this list of atrocities: dead bodies were dismembered and rearranged as obscene sculptures; heads had the eyes gouged out and the top of the skull sliced off to allow the brains to fall out.

Rouchy’s volunteers prepared to spend the night in one of the least damaged buildings. It was a night made hideous by the stench of putrefaction and the howling of starving dogs gorging on the corpses all around. Counting the next morning, they reached a toll of sixty-six in the village alone, many of whom had been sexually mutilated before death. Others had been bludgeoned to death, with their skulls smashed in by rifle butts. The bodies of two children were found under a rock, where General Pflaum’s men had thrown a hand grenade, killing them and injuring another girl. A woman of 70 had left her hiding place to plead for their lives and been gunned down. The wounded girl was the daughter of the Mayor of Vassieux, who seized a moment when the soldiers’ attention was elsewhere to get her and his wife into a nearby cave. The barking of their dog gave them away to the Germans, who returned to shoot him dead in front of his wife and child.

Bodies were discovered of men hanged upside down, so that they died slowly of congestive heart failure. Some had been suspended like this with their heads in an ants’ nest; others in pairs so that each man’s long agony was an additional torture for the other, as shown by the trenches gouged in the ground by the frenzied banging of their heads as they tried to kill themselves. One man’s body was found thrown on a manure heap after the head had been hacked off with an axe lying nearby. Hands had large nails driven through them.

Men had been shot down in groups while their wives were forced at gunpoint to watch. Seven bodies were found burned to carbon in a pigsty into which the Germans had thrown a phosphorous grenade. A group of fifteen youths had been killed by having their skulls bashed in, some after their eyes were gouged out. A young woman – the first of many who had suffered the same fate – was found in the open lying on a mattress soiled by the gang rape she had suffered before being shot. More bodies were found of men who had been hanged after their eyes were gouged out and tongues cut off for sheer sadistic pleasure. Rouchy’s list of horrors went on and on:

Each day we discovered in the woods around Vassieux corpses of young and old, some shot down from behind after being used as ‘mules’ or porters carrying the loot away for the Germans. In the immediate vicinity of Vassieux we buried 148 bodies. Every day brought new discoveries of single bodies or groups of victims. As for the animals that could not be driven off, and had been shot on the spot to deny the survivors food, they numbered hundreds.
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At St Agnan several
maquisards
trying to pass as civilians were executed. A
milicien
with local knowledge betrayed the teacher of the little school at Chabotte, in whose cellars weapons had been stored. The 35-year-old mother of a little girl, she was taken out of the village at gunpoint and shot after refusing to say who had placed the arms there. Houses that were alleged to have sheltered ‘terrorists’ were blown up or burned down. In larger villages, the Germans arrested all the young men and trucked them into prison in Grenoble. Their ultimate destination was to have been concentration camps in Germany, but communications by rail were continually being disrupted by the Resistance, so some were fortunate.

But not all. After two German soldiers were assassinated in Grenoble on 14 August, twenty of the youngsters were driven to a waste ground and there executed in groups of four, so that the later groups had to watch their predecessors being killed before taking their place. After the coup de grâce had been given to those still breathing, the soldiers returned to barracks. This was done in full view of horrified passers-by.

An eyewitness account of the ‘campaign’ in the Vercors, as seen from the German side, comes from a letter home, written by a wounded soldier identified only as Rudolph X, a farmer’s son in civilian life. It was found, left behind after he was evacuated. In part, it reads:

You couldn’t believe what it is like in the region around Grenoble and Lyon, where a whole division is dealing with these terrorists. The day after I arrived in Grenoble, I was in a convoy of wounded being taken to the hospital in Aix-les-Bains when we were attacked without warning. I was lucky, receiving only another slight wound in the right arm and being left deaf for half an hour from a round that just missed my right ear. During the fighting on the plateau there were some terrible moments. You should have seen us gunning down those people! They got what they deserved. We killed everybody in a partisan hospital, about forty of them, including doctors and nurses. In one village there were two companies of us [Germans] and a company of Russians. Men, women and children were shot down. We were on the move every day from dawn to dusk and left not even a mouse alive where we had been. I was invalided out just after my section had ‘liberated’ three mares and their foals. Dear Father, those mares were a lot better than ours. I was thinking, if only I could have sent them home to you …
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The records of births and deaths kept by the mayors of each village made it easy to calculate the numbers of French dead and deported. German losses are harder to add up, but were in the order of forty-five killed at Vassieux and fifty-five elsewhere on the plateau, with another fifty-six dying later in Grenoble or other hospitals.

General Pflaum was afterwards reported as regretting the excesses of his men, especially the Sipo-SD detachments. Arrested in 1945, he was released for health reasons in 1951 and died in 1959 while due to answer charges before a French court in Lyon.

Notes

1
Rosencher, pp. 269–301.

2
Jenkins, p. 181.

3
Dreyfus, pp. 138–9.

4
Amouroux,
pp. 82–4.

5
Dreyfus, pp. 148–50.

6
Ibid., pp. 152–3.

7
Ibid., pp. 156–9.

8
Ibid., pp. 161–3.

FAILURE IS AN ORPHAN

Pierre Dalloz had returned to Algiers on 20 May but, as a civilian, was unable to make any worthwhile contact until some influential Gaullists arranged an interview for him at SPOC. There, an uncooperative lieutenant colonel denied ever having heard of his reports on the Vercors.

It seemed that some progress was being made when General Antoine Béthouart, the senior Free French officer in North Africa, who would command the French contingent in Anvil, was charged directly by de Gaulle to sort out the mess. In today’s parlance, Béthouart ‘kicked ass’ and was informed that 400 Free French commandos were on standby at nearby Sidi Ferruch and could be dropped into the Vercors to stiffen the defence. The complication was that, equipped with only their standard-issue carbines, they would need forty-eight hours to collect the other necessary weapons and ammunition. The final count of men who could immediately be dropped on the Vercors was three detachments of fifteen paras with eleven heavy machine guns, two 60mm mortars and the ammunition for these. At 1900hrs a message was received, forwarded from London:

REQUEST DROP AT ST MARTIN WHERE WE CAN STILL RECEIVE IT STOP HELP US FAST ENDS

On 1 August a German patrol gunned down five men trying to escape from the plateau. One of them was Dalloz’s friend Jean Prévost. Now that Operation Montagnards was so patently a ghastly failure, everyone involved wanted to dissociate himself from the operation. With Prévost dead, Dalloz was the obvious scapegoat. Depressed by this news and the death of another friend, the aviator and author of
The Little Prince
, Antoine de St-Exupéry – and feeling guilty for the failure and futility of Operation Montagnards – he was summoned to the Algiers office of French counter-espionage, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire. There, a junior officer attempted to browbeat him into some kind of confession that it was all his fault. Extricating himself by mentioning the names of several generals and high officials who had backed him, Dalloz escaped that trap.

When the Germans came for the second time to Villard de Lans, Denise Noaro – a woman with two children whose husband was with the Maquis – took the risk of asking an officer eating looted food in her house whether it was true that there had been an attempt on Hitler’s life. A furious argument then ensued between the Germans present, resulting in an order to bring all radios to the empty Gendarmerie, where they would be confiscated, along with bicycles and any petrol. Left alone with her, one officer who spoke French well told her not to take any notice, so she wrapped her radio in paper and hid it inside a burial vault in the cemetery. Everything precious had already been buried in the garden.

When asked where all the men of the village were, the standard reply was that they were POWs in Germany. When an officer asked how many
maquisards
were on the plateau, Denise replied, ‘As many men as you have’, but was horrified to be told in return that 35,000 troops were surrounding or on the plateau. It became routine for German soldiers to force housewives to open doors – even a cupboard door – in case they had been booby-trapped. With soldiers billeted in every house, it was difficult to sleep. Women were conscripted to prepare and cook food and the few remaining men also forced to work on repairing the bridge on the road to Valchevrière, which the Maquis had blown up.

Denise Noaro’s husband sneaked back into the village after the massacres and was hiding in a large wine cask in the cellar. Hearing that a curfew had been imposed, starting at 2000hrs, she feared that everyone in the village was going to be arrested when a cordon of soldiers was posted around Villard, one armed man every 10m. All the adults packed a suitcase with essentials for themselves and their children. Nobody could eat that evening. Soldiers knocked on every door with a list of all the inhabitants registered at that address. The immediate penalty for not opening up was to see the door kicked in. Every young man they found was arrested and the parents of all absentees were told to ensure they reported to the Gestapo office in the Hotel Splendide the next morning. A few parents did so, and never saw their sons alive again. Their bodies were found after the soldiers left at dawn on the Saturday, lying where they had been shot in the street.
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