Gestapo (24 page)

“I arrive in Brussels to attend a meeting of the academy. The first thing the President says to me is:

“ ‘Have you heard what has happened? Two of our colleagues were arrested yesterday in the street. Their families are in a terrible state. Nobody knows where they are.'

“I go home in the evening and we are stopped on the way three times, once to search for terrorists, who are said to have fled, the other times to see if our papers
are in order. At last I get home without anything serious having happened to me.

“I might say here that only at nine o'clock in the evening can we give a sigh of relief, when we turn the knob of our radio set and listen to that reassuring voice which we hear every evening, the voice of Fighting France. ‘Today is the one hundred and eighty-ninth day of the struggle of the French people for their liberation,' or the voice of Victor Delabley, that noble figure of the Belgian Radio in London, who always finished up by saying, ‘Courage, we will get them yet, the Boches!' That was the only thing that enabled us to breathe and go to sleep at night.”

It is very quiet and unsensational, and Professor van der Essen was not hurt. And yet so many aspects of Gestapo rule are there, just below the placid surface. The knock at the door, which is not the milkman; the son being packed off into hiding at a moment's notice; the round-up of ex-soldiers to be sent to concentration camps or forced labor; the seizing of hostages—the old man and the young girl, for shooting in case of need; the arrest of university dons in broad daylight in the streets of Brussels and their disappearance into Night and Fog; the listening to the nine o'clock news from London—but in French, not English—because the English intonation would be noticeable in itself, and listening to the English wireless meant arrest.

Professor van der Essen was not an innocent. He knew what was going on. He was not an active resister, but it was only luck that saved him; the luck of not being a Jew that saved him from almost certain death; the luck of not being picked up as a hostage that saved him from probable shooting, certain imprisonment. ‘When hostages were taken it was nearly always university professors, doctors, lawyers, men of letters.” This was a settled policy. It was laid down for the whole of occupied Europe that hostages, to be shot if a German was killed, often in the proportion of one hundred to one, were to be people who were well known in their districts, well liked, and certain to be widely missed.

And behind these actions were the men who, on the other side of Europe, were slaughtering millions in conditions
of inconceivable “barbarism and calling their slaughter a delousing action.

It was in France, after the total occupation, and at a time when the Resistance had become serious, that the local commanders of the Gestapo and the S.D. showed that they were made of the same stuff as the Globocniks, the Kruegers, the Mildners, and the rest. And, as in the East, they found they could always call on the Waffen S.S. and nearly always on the Wehrmacht. In the closing stages of the war, when the Germans were on the run, the Gestapo could not begin to cope with the militant Resistance, and then the Waffen S.S. as at Oradour-sur-Glâne, carried out by themselves the sort of actions which they had so often practiced in the East.

But earlier the Security Police and the S.D. were able to manage fairly well on their own. They maintained a constant pressure of terror, which might strike at any time. Professor van der Essen was extremely lucky:

“Professors from Louvain were sent to Buchenwald, to Dora, to Neuengamme, to Gross-Rosen, and perhaps to other places too. I must add that it was not only professors from Louvain who were deported, but also intellectuals who played an important rôle in the life of the country. I can give you immediate proof. At Louvain, on the occasion of the reopening ceremony of the university this year, as Secretary General of the University, I read out the list of those who had died during the war. The list included three hundred and forty-eight names, if I remember rightly. Perhaps some thirty of these names were those of soldiers who died during the Battles of the Scheldt and the Lys in 1940, all the others were victims of the Gestapo, or had died in camps in Germany, especially in the camps of Gross-Rosen and Neuengamme.”

At Nuremberg the French Prosecution gave a list of figures, which was an anonymous roll of honor. The figures referred to the number of hostages taken from the civilian population and shot by the Germans in revenge for attacks on the occupation forces. And yet the list is not quite anonymous, because the figures break down into regions. And some of the many memorials scattered along the
tourist roads of France commemorate the names behind these figures. Here they are, region by region:

The total is twenty-nine thousand, six hundred and sixty. Notices of the executions would be put up on posters, or published in the Press. Here is one such notice taken from
Le Phare
of October 21st, 1941:

“Cowardly criminals in the pay of England and of Moscow killed, with shots in the back, the
Feldkom-mandant
of Nantes on the morning of October 20th, 1941. So far the assassins have not been apprehended.

“As expiation for this crime I have ordered that fifty hostages be shot initially. Because of the gravity of the crime, fifty more hostages will be shot if the guilty have not been arrested between now and October 23rd midnight.”

Most of the executed hostages in this case, as in many others, were known Communists, and they were chosen from a list furnished by the Vichy Minister of the Interior, Peucheu, who was to be tried and hanged by his countrymen after the war. What went on at these shootings is described by the Abbé Moyon, who was a witness of a part of the consequences of the Nantes affair:

“It was a beautiful autumn day. The temperature was particularly mild. There had been lovely sunshine since morning. Everyone in town was going about his usual business. There was great animation in the town, for it was Wednesday, which was market day. The population knew from the newspapers and from the information it had received from Nantes that a senior officer had been killed in a street in Nantes, but refused to believe that such savage and extensive reprisals would be applied
[it was still only 1941]. At Choisel Camp the German authorities had, for some days, put into special quarters a certain number of young men who were to serve as hostages in case of special difficulties. It was from among these men that those who were to be shot on this evening of October 22nd were chosen.

“The Curé of Béré was finishing his lunch when M. Moreau, Chief of Choisel Camp, presented himself. In a few words the latter explained to him the object of his visit. Having been delegated by M. Lecornu, the subprefect of Châteaubriant, he had come to inform him that twenty-seven men selected from among the political prisoners at Choisel were going to be executed that afternoon; and he asked Monsieur le Curé to go immediately to attend them. The priest said he was ready to undertake this mission, and he went to the prisoners without delay.

“When the priest appeared to carry out his mission, the subprefect was already with the condemned. He had come to announce the horrible fate which was awaiting them, and he asked them to write letters of farewell to their families without delay. It was under these circumstances that the priest presented himself at the entrance to the quarters.”

That was at Châteaubriant. The same thing was going on in the prison of La Fayette at Nantes itself, where sixteen were to be shot:

“The condemned were all very brave. It was two of the youngest, Gloux and Grolleau, who were students, who constantly encouraged the others, saying that it was better to die in this way than to perish uselessly in an accident.

“At the moment of leaving, the priest, for reasons which were not explained to him, was not authorized to accompany the hostages to the place of execution. He went down the stairs of the prison with them as far as the car. They were chained together in twos. The thirteenth had on handcuffs. Once they were in the truck, Gloux and Grolleau made another gesture of farewell to him, smiling and waving their hands, which were chained together.”

The priest had not been able to go to the place of
execution at Châteaubriant, either. But a French police officer, Roussel, saw the condemned men being driven off, and later, brought back:

“The 22nd of October, 1941, at about three-thirty in the afternoon, I happened to be in the rue du 11 Novembre at Châteaubriant, and I saw coming from Choisel Camp four or five German trucks, I cannot say exactly how many, preceded by an automobile in which was a German officer. Several civilians with handcuffs were in the trucks and were singing patriotic songs, the ‘Marseillaise,' the ‘Chant du Depart,' and so forth. One of the trucks was filled with armed German soldiers.

“I learnt subsequently that these were hostages who had just been fetched from Choisel Camp to be taken to the quary of Sablière on the Soudan Road to be shot in reprisal for the murder at Nantes of the German Colonel Hotz.

“About two hours later these same trucks came back from the quarry and drove into the court of the Châteaubriant, where the bodies of the men who had been shot were deposited in a cellar until coffins could be made.

“Coming back from the quarry the trucks were covered and no noise could be heard, but a trickle of blood escaped from them and left a trail on the road from the quarry to the castle.

“The following day, on October 23rd, the bodies of the men who had been shot were put into coffins without any French persons being present, the entrances to the château having been guarded by German sentinels. The dead were then taken to nine different cemeteries in the surrounding communes, that is, three coffins to each commune. The Germans were careful to choose communes where there was no regular transport service, presumably to avoid the population going
en masse
to the graves of these martyrs.”

Police officer Roussel could not know it, but there was a standing order about this, and for the reasons which he guessed. For the shooting of hostages, as nothing else, bound the population together; and it is without surprise that we read the protest of General Falkenhausen, Military Governor of Belgium, to Keitel, dated September 16th, 1942:

“Enclosed is a list of the shooting of hostages which have taken place until now in my area and the incidents on account of which the shootings took place.

“In a great number of cases, particularly in the most serious, the perpetrators were later apprehended and sentenced.

“The result is undoubtedly very unsatisfactory. The effect is not so much deterrent as destructive of the feeling of the population for right and security; the gulf between the people influenced by Communism and the remainder of the population is being bridged; all circles are becoming filled with a feeling of hatred towards the occupying forces, and effective inciting material is given to enemy propaganda. Thereby military danger and general political reaction of an entirely unwanted nature …”

A similar protest was sent in also to Keitel, by the Commander of the Wehrmacht in Holland. But the shootings went on, sometimes carried out by the Security Police, sometimes by the Wehrmacht, who in the West as in the East were relied on to make up for the numerical weakness of the Gestapo.

From early in 1942, however, the dominating horror of the occupation was the notorious
Nacht und Nebel
Decree. It was thought up by Hitler, promulgated by Keitel, and issued to the Security Police by Himmler in the following form:

“I. The following regulations published by the Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces, dated December 12th, 1941, are being made known herewith.

“(1) The Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces. After lengthy consideration, it is the will of the Fuehrer that the measures taken against those who are guilty of offenses against the Reich or against the occupation forces in occupied areas should be altered. The Fuehrer is of the opinion that in such cases penal servitude or even a hard labor sentence for life will be regarded as a sign of weakness. An effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by taking measures which will leave the family and the population uncertain as to
the fate of the offender. Deportation to Germany serves this purpose.

“The attached directives for the prosecution of offenses correspond with the Fuehrer's conception. They have been examined and approved by him.”

Himmler elaborated on this:

“The decree introduces a fundamental innovation. The Fuehrer and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces orders that offenses committed by civilians in occupied territories … are to be dealt with by the competent military courts in the occupied territories only if: (
a
) the death penalty is pronounced, and (
b
) sentence is pronounced within eight days of the prisoner's arrest.

“Unless both these conditions are fulfilled, the Fuehrer and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces does not anticipate that criminal proceedings within the occupied territories will have the necessary deterrent effect.