Read Voices from the Dark Years Online
Authors: Douglas Boyd
Voices from the Dark Years (40 page)
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The last pretence of Vichy’s autonomy disappeared on 11 November 1942. Not even Laval could hope for a favourable outcome of an eventual peace conference after Hitler tore up the Armistice agreement and his forces drove across the Demarcation Line to occupy the whole of France, save only the Italian pockets in the south-east and Corsica, also occupied by Italy. Support for Pétain dwindled overnight to a diehard 30 per cent, most of whom only continued to believe in him ‘because there was no one else’.
On 12 November the tired old man in the pin-striped suit told Guillaume de Tournemire, ‘I’ve decided that my duty is to stay here. I’m aware that I have lost my prestige, but by doing this I shall protect France from some of the misfortunes she would suffer without me.’ De Tournemire protested his personal loyalty while adding that it would not stop him working against the occupiers. Pétain replied, ‘Do all you can, but be prudent for the sake of your young members. I shall do what I can to help. Good luck!’ Three days later, Pétain received his former
chef de cabinet
Roger de Saivre, who told the marshal that he intended making for North Africa to get back into the fight. Pétain embraced him, saying, ‘If I were your age, I’d do the same. But, as it is, my place is here. Good luck, my son.’
Occupied France after 11 November 1942
With the Allied invasion of North Africa, the OKW had no choice but to secure the southern coast of France from the Spanish border to Italy. The next step was Operation Lilac on 17 November: the disarmament of Vichy’s puny army, one unforeseen consequence of which was that many officers and men decided to act according to their own consciences, forming the disciplined Armée Secrète, separate from the political factions of the Resistance. Based in Pau, Captain André Pommiès had created a network of arms dumps throughout the south-west. Yet, within a week of the invasion many dumps had been betrayed by local informers. So the strategy of Armée Secrète was simple: the Germans could only police one-quarter of French territory directly, leaving the remaining three-quarters to a network of informers,
miliciens
and pro-Vichy functionaries. If the underground army terrorised these
collabos
into changing sides, the Germans could control only where they had a physical presence.
In demobilising 2nd Dragoons at Auch, Colonel Schlesser told each man to keep in touch with comrades and hold himself ready for the call. Some demobilised men slipped away from their homes in darkness; others made gestures of defiance, like Lieutenant Narcisse Geyer, who rode out of 2nd Cuirassiers barracks in Lyon on horseback in full uniform and kept riding until he contacted a Maquis unit in the bleak limestone uplands of the Vercors. In Algeria, Van Hecke posted the 40,000 young men serving in the Chantiers to the army, where they began weapons training immediately, later fighting the Afrika Korps in Tunisia alongside Allied forces and participating in the invasion of Italy in 1943 and France in 1944.
De Saivre was travelling in company with Prince Napoleon and his personal secretary. Officially exiled from France as pretender to the throne, the prince had volunteered for the Foreign Legion in March 1940, only to have the recruiting sergeant reject his Swiss nationality and accuse him of being a French deserter! The three had met up while unsuccessfully trying to find a flight from Geneva to London and were planning to cross the Pyrénées and make their way to Britain. During their journey south from Toulouse in the rear of a butcher’s van, they were nearly caught by a German patrol. Once in the mountains, slowed down by de Saivre suffering agony from his new boots, they were tracked down, arrested and driven to the town of Foix, where the prefect sneered, ‘So you’re Prince Napoleon? Where’s Joan of Arc? And you’re de Saivre, the Marshal’s
chef de cabinet
? Take them away!’ Their next four months were spent in a succession of German prisons.
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By now it was nearly impossible to find a Breton fishing boat on which to sail away to England on a moonless night. Although an estimated 30,000 people escaped over the Pyrénées during the occupation, half of them in 1943,
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they risked among other things betrayal by their guides. On 24 November five men from Paris paid to be taken over the mountains past the Austrian ski and dog patrols. First stop was Henriette Courdil’s hotel at Ussat-les-Bains, where she emptied two dozen books from the suitcase of newspaper editor Jacques Grumbach and told him to carry only essentials in his backpack, which was also full of books. At the last moment an English driver from the Paris branch of Rolls-Royce joined them as they left the hotel with Spanish guides Lazare Cabrero and Valeriano Trallero.
Grumbach was soon exhausted by the weight of his pack. At 1 a.m. in a mountain refuge in which the temperature was -10°c, Cabrero forced him to dump more books. At dawn, Grumbach fell for the hundredth time and broke an ankle. With the others resting higher up, Cabrero returned to Grumbach, shot him with his revolver and took his watch and wallet after hiding the body behind some rocks. Pretending he had not been able to find the laggard, he announced on rejoining the group that they owed him 25,000 francs each if they wanted to be taken the rest of the way. They argued that they had already paid 35,000 francs each. ‘Not to me,’ retorted Cabrero. ‘I don’t get any of that. So make your minds up.’ By scraping together all the money they had with them, the five men raised 40,000 francs, which Cabrero accepted with the addition of a promissory note for 100,000 francs signed by Pierre Dreyfus-Schmidt, the
député
for Belfort. Grumbach’s body was not found for eight years, although Cabrero meantime confessed to Madame Courdil that he had ‘done in the guy with glasses, who could not keep up’.
The marshal’s confusion after the German takeover of the Free Zone is illustrated by his broadcast to the nation a week after giving de Tournemire his blessing and only four days after sending de Saivre and the prince on their way. ‘I have decided to increase the powers of Mr Laval,’ he announced ingenuously. ‘But I remain your guide. You have only one duty: to obey.’ On 13 December, Laval convinced no one when he declared, ‘A German victory will save our civilisation from falling into communism. An American victory would be a triumph for the Jews and Communists.’
The biggest prize the Germans coveted in invading the southern zone was the French Mediterranean Fleet in Toulon harbour, getting their hands on which might have changed the course of the war. At 4.40 a.m. on 27 November the first German troops attacked the naval base. At 5.25 a.m. the doors of the arsenal were blown in by German shells. Immediately, signals were sent by radio and semaphore to scuttle the fleet, and crews abandoned ship with the exception of sabotage teams. The town was rocked by explosions, sending 235,000 tonnes of prime seagoing force to the bottom of the harbour. Some of the cruisers continued to burn for several days. One small surface vessel braved the German minefields to make for the high sea with five submarines. Despite the atrocity of Mers el-Kebir, Admiral Darlan had kept his word to Winston Churchill.
With the Wehrmacht came the German security services. Establishing himself in the luxurious Hôtel Terminus adjacent to Lyon’s main railway station, SS-Obersturmführer Klaus Barbie was a psychopath who enjoyed whipping prisoners, pulling out finger and toe nails, pistol-whipping faces and burning his naked victim’s sensitive body parts with heated pokers. When bored, he interrupted interrogations at which he had been fondling his French mistress and played the piano for her pleasure. This was the man who was recognised by a personal citation from Himmler on 18 September 1943 and the award of the Iron Cross first class with sword on 9 November 1943.
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Forty years later,
résistant
Jean Gay trembled when recalling how he was trussed to a pole unable to move for two consecutive days, suffering severe cramps while repeatedly nearly drowned in alternately scalding and near-freezing water. To add mental agony, Barbie informed him that his two sons had been arrested and were being tortured in cellars below the hotel. Prisoners in the vermin-ridden, unventilated cells of Lyon’s Montluc prison regularly saw their predecessors at Barbie’s interrogations return bleeding, unconscious, with broken limbs and eyes gouged out. To demonstrate his contempt for the
Untermenschen
he was terrorising, Barbie strolled without a bodyguard after interrogations to dine in Lyon’s gourmet restaurants.
With one extraordinary exception, there were only two ways out of this private hell: summoned ‘without baggage’, a prisoner knew he was to be shot; summoned ‘with baggage’, he was en route to a concentration or death camp. Just before Barbie left Lyon, 100 corpses were found floating in the rivers Rhône and Saône, some shot, others beaten to death. It is necessary to recount these obscenities in order to comprehend why many captives confessed before torture even started.
To detect Jews with false papers, the Gestapo paid Ukrainian and White Russian anti-Semites to spot victims in the street and at railway stations – one of their victims was Simone Weil, who survived deportation to become first president of the European parliament. A handful of brave young men calling themselves L’Armée Juive were so successful in assassinating these human sniffer-dogs that the supply of volunteers dried up completely.
Much has rightly been made of the heroism of people who helped downed Allied aircrew. Around the end of November 1942 – the dates are difficult to establish, since all those involved paid with their lives – a politically uncommitted truck driver named Gaston Brogniard picked up a Canadian airman, whose aircraft had been shot down near Le Touquet. Concealing him in the rear of the truck, he took him home, despite knowing the penalties, and asked his friend André Baleuw to procure a false identity card. For greater safety, the unidentified Canadian was then transferred first to the house of a friend, Madame Duquesnoy, and then to another friend, surnamed Illidge, who was the wife of a British POW in a camp near Breslau. Another friend called Roger Snoek made contact with an escape network based in Paris. The dates become clearer after Brogniard and his little group of friends were betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo on 27 December. Interned at Le Touquet’s Hôtel Westminster and in Boulogne prison, they were condemned to death at Loos-lès-Lille on 18 February 1943. Brogniard, Baleuw and Snoek were shot on 20 July 1943. André Lagache and Madame Illidge were deported to Germany on 9 August 1943.
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In Paris, the rich were getting richer and the poor hungrier. On 11 December the sale of the Viau collection at the Hôtel Drouot realised a record total of 47 million francs, including 5 million francs paid by a German purchaser for Cézanne’s
Montagne Sainte-Geneviève.
Among celebrities handing out food to the needy in the street outside was Maurice Chevalier, but Sacha Guitry was too busy. Having block-booked the restaurant Carrère in rue Pierre-Charron for his private New Year party, he wittily listed the menu as ‘Maybe fish. Perhaps roast beef. Probably poulty with sort-of vegetables. Possibly salad. Theoretically dessert. Wines: red, white and blue.’
In the last six months of 1942, the seven gendarmes stationed in the village of Collonges in Rhône-Alpes, 4km from the Swiss frontier, arrested more than fifty people walking along the N206 road or across country and charged them with violating their ‘assignation to a forced residence’. Their victim Szandla G confessed that she had paid 38,000 francs to a guide to take her and her two daughters safely across. ‘I had the impression,’ she told the arresting officers sadly, ‘that our money interested him more than getting us across the border.’ A week later she and one daughter started the long journey to Auschwitz.
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When the same gendarmes interrogated the proprietor of a local workmen’s restaurant, he admitted taking 5,000 francs or more from each refugee he put in touch with a
passeur
, who had to be paid separately. At the end of August, two families hiding above a watch-repair shop were introduced to a young man of 23, who offered to take them across the border. A price was agreed and paid, but he betrayed them at the frontier wire – according to the gendarmerie report ‘because my oath to the SOL made it my duty’.
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