Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 (18 page)

Yet in spite of the Occupation's muscle, terrorist attacks targeting railways, electric power lines, communications, and industrial plants continued and mounted. By one count they averaged about 3,600 in all of France during the first three months of 1944, then spiked to over 4,000 in April.
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Although the center of Paris was relatively quiet, trouble was lapping up on all sides. A reported 300 arms and munitions depots had been raided (with the French blaming the pillage on the Occupation's “systematic refusal of all requests” to equip their police), thereby putting countless weapons into circulation. Correspondingly, personal assaults on police and the Milice increased, with 130 deaths among them recorded in the twelve months before April 1944.
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Sabotage likewise spread, especially on the railroads, as indicated by the growing number of arrests of both bureaucratic personnel and
cheminots
. An average of 129 arrests a month was reported for May to September 1943 and 194 a month from that October to February 1944. The French National Railway Company (SNCF) had long been under suspicion by the Sipo-SD, which since April 1943 maintained lists of state railway officials who were to be immediately arrested in case of an Allied landing. In addition, orders were in place that strikes by railway workers should be “relentlessly suppressed.”
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But no matter what its methods, the Occupation was helpless to halt the deterioration of French administration, even in its highest places. In mid-May 1944, fourteen prefects were arrested by the Gestapo; a week later, forty prefects were appointed to fill vacancies. And for the purge, there was no end in view.
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In the meantime, after November 1942 the hostage issue dissipated but did not entirely disappear. Statistics in early 1943 indicated a perceptible decline in the number of persons arbitrarily arrested and executed in retaliation for attacks on German military personnel. Ironically, it was Otto von Stülpnagel's view that finally prevailed: rather than the massive shooting of French hostages
pour l’exemple
, it would be far better to deport suspected terrorists or funnel them through the military court system. The real difference was not that the killing of civilians decreased but that it henceforth became largely hidden from public sight.
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This change in policy was adopted by the Sipo-SD in Paris and approved by the RSHA in Berlin. The shift in emphasis was embellished by Heinrich Himmler with six pages of new instructions about modes of execution. Some of these were familiar: a rifle squad should consist of at least six men firing from a distance of five paces. More original were explicit details about hanging, which was to be carried out by fellow prisoners rewarded with an allocation of three cigarettes per victim. Corpses, Himmler further specified, should be delivered to either a crematorium or the anatomy class of a university clinic. If neither was possible, they might be buried in a Jewish cemetery or in the section of other cemeteries usually reserved for suicides.
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Initially, of course, there was confusion in distinguishing between hostages and those convicted of alleged crimes. Yet some of the former, executed in late 1943, could be positively identified: eighty-eight on 11 August, forty-six on 21 September, and fifty on 2 December. For those unfortunates, the customary procedures were observed. They were gathered and escorted to Mont Valérien, where the death sentences were carried out followed by cremation at Père Lachaise. Subsequent investigations have confirmed that the total number of hostages shot at Mont Valérien was not 4,500, as announced by a plaque on display there, but precisely 1,007.
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Important as it is to gain a sense of magnitude, other statistics are unfortunately less secure. The Occupation's armed forces in France were dispersed after November 1942 into more than fifty regions, each under a
Feldkommandant
who presided over a military tribunal capable of pronouncing and executing death sentences. Reports of these proceedings were then sent to the Hotel Majestic in Paris, where the MBF staff collated the results and forwarded them to Berlin. It was not an exact science. What of the Frenchman, after his conviction, who was killed while attempting to escape? Or the one who died of tuberculosis before he could be executed? Furthermore, many such records were deliberately scattered or destroyed in mid-1944 as Paris was being evacuated. Still, some statistics conveyed by one reporting channel, via the Paris Embassy to the Berlin Foreign Office, have been preserved, and other fragments remain. A meticulous scholar has calculated that from the Armistice of 1940 to the beginning of June 1942, German courts in the Occupied Zone issued death sentences to 655 persons, of whom 434 were executed.
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If these numbers may be accepted as a baseline to that point, the picture thereafter is decidedly murkier because the extant documentation is always incomplete and sometimes contradictory. Only one thing is certain: without access to these records at the time, no one in France could possibly have realized the full extent of what was occurring in all of those widely distributed military tribunals.

Even if scantly informed, Vichy officials were understandably anxious about the mounting toll of French citizens. Again, their first estimates were well higher than the verifiable count of executions. According to the Direction des Services de l’Armistice (DSA) in the Hotel Thermal, besides more than 550 hostages killed by the Germans before the end of 1942, military courts had sent about 950 persons to their death, a total (it was said) of exactly 1,736.
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While these figures do not correspond with other sources, they do suggest two valid conclusions: first, that the number of those silently condemned by German military tribunals during the Occupation greatly exceeded the hostage victims, whose fate had caused so much public emotion; and, second, that the effectiveness of French attempts to mitigate death sentences steadily diminished. In evidence one may cite DSA estimates that in all, 365 death sentences had been announced during 1940 and 1941, stirring 207 separate interventions by the French government and obtaining 145 commutations. Those figures for 1942 were, respectively, 1,015, 308, and only 55.
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Matters grew worse. As the Occupation wore on, the Vichy regime, at the urging of Darnand, created its own system of courts-martial. Thereupon, Heinrich von Stülpnagel promptly ordered German courts not to be outdone by their French counterparts. They should instead strive to promote swift sentencing and execution of prisoners—often, as it turned out, without any prior notification to the French. As a consequence, requests for clemency became infrequent and ineffective.
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Of all the German military tribunals, that of Paris was by far the most active, with prisoners being routinely condemned in 1943 at a rate of two or three a week. In the event that the Gestapo succeeded in exposing a gang, as many as thirty death sentences might be pronounced in a single day. Probably the single court of the Commandant of Greater Paris accounted for a third or more of executions in France. Its daily or weekly reports established the relative frequency of the crimes with which prisoners were charged. Most prominent among them were espionage, abetting the enemy, possession of arms, and guerrilla activity. Obviously, these categories were not mutually exclusive, since an individual might be found simultaneously guilty of all four.
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Examining the same raw data of reports, it is possible to confirm that 54 prisoners were executed in Paris after sentencing by German military tribunals between 23 October 1943 and 1 February 1944, and, as the pace quickened, another 84 in the fortnight from 30 March to 15 April 1944. In different terms, on average, nearly 150 (a minimum verifiable number) faced a firing squad or the gallows in Greater Paris during each of the first four months of 1944.
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Needless to emphasize, great caution is required here. One unfortunate statistical complication was created by the appearance in the French countryside of the
maquis
, an open and armed resistance force. It is virtually impossible to separate persons captured or killed in this essentially military struggle from those picked up and tried for other reasons, including various acts of sabotage, under the German police and court structure. One memo from the Majestic's military staff, for instance, listed 50 “terrorists” killed, 22 wounded, and 768 apprehended. Unclear was how many of these, if any, were among the also reported 123 death sentences handed down by military tribunals during November and December 1943.
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As is so often the case in modern and contemporary history, the investigator's headache is not too few data but too many. In this instance, the evidence that can be assembled comes mainly from three sources. The first, perhaps the least reliable yet nonetheless indicative, comprised the statistics adopted by the French government, which are best conveyed in a box score drafted in Vichy to illustrate the extent of German police action during the entire Occupation up to the end of February 1944.

Source: “Statistique Générale,” 27 February 1944, AN Paris, AJ
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, 329.

There is one glaring anomaly in these figures: a greater number of executions than death sentences in the later stages of the Occupation. If so, it could be explained only by an increasing tendency of the Germans to execute prisoners without trial, just as uncounted numbers of persons were at the same time being deported without notification to their family or news being made available as to their whereabouts. This troubling practice dates back to a December 1941 decree known as
Nacht und Nebel
(Night and Fog) that was directly inspired by Hitler.
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It is apparent, in any event, that by far the most executions occurred in the former Occupied Zone, the least in the Italian Zone. The most intense period for executions through military tribunals was in 1942 and early 1943, when Paris was the epicenter of the Occupation, before attention of German authorities became distracted by the guerrilla war centered mostly in the South and in the Alps. Statistics released by the Hotel Majestic claimed that French losses during the Occupation's struggle against the
maquis
in the first three months of 1944 reached about 800 dead and over 6,500 captured.
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In addition, French officials compiled a composite record concerning the fate of French hostages from the Armistice to the beginning of 1944.

Source: “Statistique Générale” 27 February 1944, AN Paris, AJ
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, 329.

Waiving the question of exactitude, these numbers confirm that the execution of hostages by the military administration was most frequent in the Occupied Zone until November 1942 and that their number decreased markedly thereafter. Instead, deportations became more common. Thus, the locale but not the outcome was changed for most individuals sentenced by military tribunals, even when they were not Jews, who were condemned to a nearly certain death and for whom a separate reckoning is necessary.
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The other two statistical sources were provided by German Occupation authorities: one from Heinrich von Stülpnagel's headquarters in the Majestic and a second from Otto Abetz's Embassy. Both ultimately depended on the reports of field officers stationed throughout France as well as the Commandant of Greater Paris. According to the MBF, 267 death sentences were executed in January and February 1944, plus another 153 in March. Although Embassy records are more erratic, one may count a minimum of 160 executions in the period from 21 January to 29 March 1944 and 190 from that time until 25 April. Obviously, a discrepancy is created by incongruent chronologies: one record omits the first three weeks of January, whereas the other extends through most of April. There is consequently no way to choose between the totals of 420 and 350, and the generalization must do that in early 1944 at least 100 French civilians, probably far more, fell each month before German firing squads or on the gallows. Sobering enough, this estimate does not include those killed in distant pockets of resistance such as the Vercors or the Jews deported to Auschwitz.
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