The Second World War (82 page)

The German military occupation since 1940 had been comparatively correct, but the move towards total war and the Communist assassinations of German officers and soldiers meant that the SS started to take control. In May 1942, Heydrich travelled to Paris to install Gruppenführer Carl-Albrecht Oberg as chief of SS and police. Hitler had treated France better than most conquered nations, for the practical reason that if it policed
itself in the German interest it saved the Wehrmacht a large occupation force. Yet Pétain’s hope of uniting his badly bruised country under the authority of his État Français could not be maintained for long.

Defeat had exacerbated the irreconcilable divisions in French society. Even the pre-war right split in different directions. A very small minority, shamed by the defeat, wanted to resist German domination. Fascist Germanophiles, on the other hand, despised Pétain, feeling that his cautious collaboration was insufficient. Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français, Marcel Déat’s Rassemblement National Populaire and Eugène Deloncle’s Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire supported the idea of the Nazis’ New Order in Europe in the belief that France could become a great power again alongside the Third Reich. They were even more deluded than the old marshal, since the Germans never took them seriously for a moment. They were, at best, the Nazi equivalent of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’.

Infighting between the zealots of the extreme right was matched by the rivalries on the German side. Otto Abetz, the francophile ambassador in Paris, was generally derided by leading Nazis, especially Göring. The SS and the military were frequently at loggerheads, and Paris attracted a plethora of German headquarters and administrative offices, all following their own policies. The centre of occupied Paris was forested with their signposts symbolically pointing in all directions.

SS Gruppenführer Oberg was, however, extremely satisfied with the assistance he received from Vichy’s police. The Third Reich lacked manpower at that stage of the war on the eastern front, and Oberg had fewer than 3,000 German police for the whole of occupied France. René Bousquet, the secretary-general of police appointed by Pierre Laval, was an energetic young administrator, not a right-wing ideologue. Like the young
technocrates
who were quietly reorganizing and strengthening Vichy’s system of government, Bousquet believed strongly that the État Français should keep control of security matters if it were to have any meaning at all. And if that meant exceeding his powers when it came to rounding up foreign Jews for deportation, then he was prepared to ignore Pétain’s instructions that French police should not be involved.

On 16 July 1942, a total of 9,000 Parisian police under the orders of Bousquet launched dawn raids to seize ‘stateless’ Jews in Paris. Some 28,000, including 3,000 children who had not been asked for by the Germans, were held in the stadium of the Vélodrome d’Hiver and at a transit camp at Drancy on the outskirts of Paris before being sent on to death camps in the east. Further round-ups followed in the unoccupied zone in the south. Oberg was more than satisfied with Bousquet’s efforts, even if Eichmann was still disappointed.

The arrival of an American army in the Mediterranean, and the clear
indication that the Axis would be defeated, encouraged a rapid growth in the resistance. The German takeover of the unoccupied zone and the assassination of Darlan at the end of 1942 also had a major effect. At the end of January 1943, the Vichy regime, in an attempt to tighten its grip, established the Milice Française, a paramilitary force led by Joseph Darnand. The Milice attracted a mixture of extreme right-wing ideologues and anti-semites, arch-reactionaries often from the impoverished provincial nobility, naive country boys attracted by the power of guns, and criminal opportunists lured by the promise of looting the houses of those whom they arrested.

The creation of the Milice reignited the latent civil war between ‘les deux Frances’ which had existed since the revolution of 1789. On one side were the Catholic right-wingers who loathed freemasons, the left and the Republic, which they called ‘la gueuse’, or ‘the slut’. On the other stood republicans and anti-clericals who had voted for the Popular Front in 1936. Yet many French under the occupation defied generalization. There were even
bien pensant
left-wingers who denounced Jews, and black marketeers who saved them, not always for a price.

Operation Anton, the German occupation of southern and eastern France, also prompted many who had half-heartedly supported Pétain to change sides. The only senior officer in the 100,000-strong Army of the Armistice to oppose the German army was General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, a flamboyant leader who was flown out by the Allies and later became the commander of the French First Army. Many other officers went into hiding and joined a new movement, the ORA, or Organisation de Résistance de l’Armée. Reluctant to support de Gaulle, they acknowledged only General Giraud at first.

Predictably the French Communist Party was deeply suspicious of such late turncoats, part of what they called ‘Vichy à l’envers’, or ‘Vichy back to front’. Other officers and officials escaped to North Africa, where Admiral Darlan’s regime was known as ‘Vichy à la sauce américaine’. When François Mitterrand, a Vichy official who later became a socialist president of the Republic, arrived in Algiers, General de Gaulle regarded him with distrust, not because he had come from Vichy, but because he had arrived on a British aeroplane.

De Gaulle resented any British interference in French affairs, especially SOE’s support for French resistance groups. He wanted all resistance activity to be subordinated to his own BCRA, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action, and was most put out that SOE’s F Section, which was directed by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, had developed almost a hundred independent circuits on French territory.

The Foreign Office had originally instructed F Section to steer clear of
the Free French in London. F Section was keen to do this, partly for reasons of security–the Free French were notoriously lax and their primitive code system was an open book to the Germans–but also because it soon came to see how dangerous political rivalries in France could become. As one senior SOE officer later observed,
the great advantage of SOE remaining above the fray
while controlling the arms supply was its ability to reduce the threat of civil war when liberation finally came.

SOE also set up Section RF, which worked closely with the BCRA, providing weapons and aircraft, and had its offices near the Bureau’s headquarters in Duke Street north of Oxford Street. The head of the BCRA was André Dewavrin, better known by his
nom de guerre
of Colonel Passy. His organization was originally split between the intelligence side and its ‘action service’, which dealt with armed resistance. Passy was alleged, but never proved, to have been a member of the virulently anti-Communist Cagoule, although he certainly had one or two
cagoulards
working for him. The coal cellar in the Duke Street headquarters had been converted into cells where French volunteers suspected of being Vichy spies or Communists were held and interrogated by Capitaine Roger Wybot. Word of torture and suspicious deaths emerged, to the anger and embarrassment of SOE. On 14 January 1943 the security service chief Guy Liddell wrote in his diary, ‘
Personally, I think it is time
that Duke Street was closed down.’

De Gaulle’s determination to unite the resistance under his command strengthened, even though as a lifetime career officer he had little confidence in irregulars. If the resistance in France acknowledged his primacy, then the British and especially the Americans would have to take notice. Apart from networks such as the Confrérie de Notre-Dame, run by Colonel Rémy (the
nom de guerre
of the film director Gilbert Renault), there were few which were naturally Gaullist. But groups such as Combat founded by Henri Frenay gradually acknowledged the need to work together. The Communists, on the other hand, distrusted de Gaulle, whom they presumed would turn into a right-wing military dictator.

In the autumn of 1941 Jean Moulin, who had been the youngest prefect in France in 1940, appeared in London. Moulin, a natural leader, impressed both SOE and de Gaulle, who immediately recognized him as the man to unify the resistance. On New Year’s Day 1942, Moulin returned to France with de Gaulle’s
ordre de mission
appointing him delegate-general. His task was to reorganize as many of the networks as possible into small cells which ran less risk of being infiltrated by agents of the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst (or SD), the SS counter-intelligence service often confused with the Gestapo. The resistance was not to attempt open warfare, but to prepare for the liberation of France by Allied forces.

Moulin, who needed a military man to command what would later
become the Secret Army, recruited General Charles Delestraint. Working tirelessly, Moulin won over the main networks in the unoccupied zone, Combat, Libération and Franc-Tireur (confusingly, not the same as the Communist organization Francs-Tireurs et Partisans). Despite this success, the British government was still determined not to turn F Section over to the Free French.

Ironically, American support for Darlan greatly helped de Gaulle come to an agreement with the Communists. The Communists were outraged that the Allies should have supported Darlan, who had been Vichy’s prime minister when their members had been executed as hostages. In January 1943, Fernand Grenier arrived in London as the French Communist Party’s delegate to the Free French. The following month, Pierre Laval, bowing to German pressure for more workers to be sent to the Reich, instituted the Service de Travail Obligatoire. This outright conscription of labour was bitterly resented in France, and prompted tens of thousands of young men to escape to the mountains and forests. Resistance groups were almost overwhelmed by the influx, and although they found it hard to feed them, let alone arm them, the Maquis, as it was called, became a mass movement.

In the spring, Moulin set up the Conseil National de la Résistance and contacted networks in northern France to persuade them to join. But in June a series of disasters began, largely due to bad security. The SD managed to penetrate one group after another. General Delestraint was arrested in the Parisian Métro, and on 21 June Jean Moulin and all the members of the Conseil National de la Résistance were surrounded in a house on the edge of Lyons. Moulin was tortured so badly by SS Hauptsturmführer Klaus Barbie that he died two weeks later, without giving anything away. The British, horrified by all the lapses in security and the spate of arrests which continued, were even more reluctant to confide in the BCRA.

The Gaullists reconstituted the council of the resistance, this time headed by Georges Bidault, an honest but uncharismatic left-of-centre Catholic. Because Bidault lacked Moulin’s clarity and determination, the Communists, who had suffered very few infiltrations of their tight cell system, greatly increased their influence. The Communists, having agreed to associate with the Gaullist Secret Army, hoped to receive large quantities of weapons and money from SOE. They also sought to infiltrate the various resistance committees with their own ‘submarines’, who were secret Communists pretending to have nothing to do with the Party. Their vision of the liberation of France was diametrically different to the Gaullist idea. By the control of committees and the growing strength of their armed groups in the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, they wanted to carry liberation into revolution. They did not know, however, that Stalin had other
priorities and they also underestimated the political skills of the Gaullists.

De Gaulle himself, who had almost been consigned to oblivion by the Darlan deal and the Americans’ promotion of General Giraud, soon turned the tables on his rival. Roosevelt had sent Jean Monnet to advise Giraud, but Monnet, although he had been against de Gaulle, now showed his realism. He worked in the background to smooth a transition of power. On 30 May 1943, de Gaulle landed at Maison Blanche airfield in Algiers, where Giraud welcomed him with a band playing the ‘Marseillaise’. The British and Americans watched from the sidelines. A frenzy of disagreements and rumours of plots, even of kidnappings, soon followed. The scheming prompted General Pierre de Bénouville to observe that ‘
nothing was more like Vichy than Algiers
’.

On 3 June, the Comité Français de Libération National was set up with de Gaulle dictating virtually every aspect of what was clearly a government-in-waiting. De Gaulle, with his remarkable foresight, had also seen the need to make overtures to Stalin, and not just in order to manage the French Communists better. He decided to send a representative to Moscow. The Free French, alone among the western Allies, had already contributed a fighter group to the eastern front. On 1 September 1942, the Groupe de Chasse Normandie had formed up at Baku in Azerbaijan, prior to operational and conversion training on the Yak-7 fighter. Having entered combat on 22 March 1943, the Normandie-Nieman Group, as it became designated, would eventually claim
273 Luftwaffe aircraft destroyed
. De Gaulle calculated that good relations between the Soviet Union and France offered Stalin a wild card in the west, and would improve his own position when dealing with the Anglo-Saxons.

After the conquest of Belgium, Hitler ordered that the Flemings should receive preferential treatment. He had an idea that they might become a form of sub-German annexe to the Reich, in a future reorganization of Europe. A section of Belgian territory south of Aachen, as well as the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, had been incorporated into the Reich.

The need for more manpower on the eastern front prompted Himmler in 1942 to increase the Waffen-SS with units from ‘Germanic’ countries, which included Scandinavians, the Dutch and the Flemish. In addition to the Légion Wallonie, raised by the fascist Léon Degrelle, who saw himself as a future leader of Belgium in the New Order, a Flemish Legion was also incorporated. Altogether some 40,000 Belgians from both communities served in the Waffen-SS, twice as many as the number of Frenchmen who formed the SS Charlemagne Division.