Voices from the Dark Years (53 page)

It was true that she had briefly belonged to the Milice – for social reasons, in the same way that she had also founded a troop of Girl Guides. According to local
résistants
, the real reason the FTP men killed her was that, as a grand-niece of a president of the Republic, her death had more impact on local people than that of lower-class Pétainists.
⁵

It was a summer of atrocities on both sides, some famous, others now forgotten. At St-Genis-Laval, just outside Lyon, German troops revenged themselves on the local population by executing 110 prisoner-hostages, including a boy of 18 and a young girl, all taken from Montluc prison. In groups of six, hands tied behind their backs, they were hustled into a room and machine-gunned. Petrol was poured over the bodies and phosphorus grenades lobbed on top. The wounded, who managed to crawl out with flesh and clothing burning, were machine-gunned in the doorway.

The dilemma of the French forces of law and order was summed up by a gendarmerie captain in Haute-Savoie:

The present situation confronts my men with a delicate moral choice. They can blindly obey orders and expose themselves and their families to certain reprisals from the Maquis, or adopt a passive attitude. As most of them do not have the strength of character to adopt the first option, I believe that the second is the only one acceptable.
⁶

Relative inactivity was not enough for the population; 30 per cent of the captain’s men had to be transferred elsewhere after the Liberation to avoid revenge by relatives of men they had arrested. Another report of the same period criticises a gendarme who ‘betrayed his uniform by consorting with a person of previously good reputation, but who was discovered to be a dangerous terrorist, in the share-out of an illegally slaughtered animal to get food for his family’.
⁷

In the north and west of France, innocent civilians far from the fighting in Normandy continued to be killed by British and American bombs. At St-Nazaire on the Atlantic coast, which had 45,000 inhabitants at the start of the war, 85 per cent of homes and all public buildings had been destroyed. There was no water, electricity or gas and many streets were impassable even on foot. In the Channel port of Le Havre, where sirens sounded 1,060 times between the beginning of the war and D-Day, the Parks and Gardens service recovered 3,000 corpses from the rubble. All had to be identified, transported and buried – often with no time for coffins or prayers at the graveside. When the survivors went to church on Sunday, they found their priest sleeping beneath the altar and eating at a street kitchen after the destruction of the presbytery. Instead of a sermon, he announced from the pulpit the timing of gas and electricity cuts and made appeals for information about the missing.

On 2 July, 500 political prisoners in the French wing of Toulouse prison were handed over to German personnel and locked into freight cars in the main station with planks nailed over every opening – for which SNCF added a supplementary charge to the customary invoice for providing locomotives and cattle trucks of deportation trains. In the midsummer heat, prisoners started dying because the guards allowed then neither food nor water. Braving the guards, some Quakers managed to push a loaf and a can of sardines through the small gaps between the planks to be shared between two men. On the evening of 3 July, the train started a nightmare journey for the men locked in their stinking prisons. With the Toulouse-Brive line cut by sabotage, the train headed for Bordeaux and then back towards Toulouse, turning back again to Bordeaux after being strafed by RAF Mosquitoes. On 5 and 6 July, the guards opened the doors for fifteen minutes to allow men to relieve themselves on the line and bury the dead.

At Angoulême, the Red Cross managed to distribute fruit, bread and water. With the lines impassable northwards, it was back to Bordeaux, where they waited three days, fed by the Red Cross on a cup of noodle soup and some bread. On 12 July, they were herded through the empty streets at 2 a.m. and locked into the looted, vandalised synagogue – for three entire weeks. The Red Cross brought soup each day, except on Sunday when the Germans forbade it, but allowed the prisoners sugar, butter and biscuits instead.

On 10 August they were marched back to the station and locked inside freight cars coupled to a long train, direction Nîmes. During the single fifteen-minute halt that day, they relieved their bowels and bladders by the tracks within sight of two wagon-loads of flea-ridden, equally filthy women prisoners doing the same. On 15 August in Provence they were again a target for Allied fighters. With the train stopped, the guards could take cover beside the track, but the prisoners could only huddle together in the wagons, each hoping that someone else’s body would stop the bullets. In one raid, three died and sixteen were wounded.

Where the line had been cut by sabotage, they were forced to march along the permanent way. On 19 August – the day that St Michel prison was liberated by the Toulouse FFI and the remaining
résistants
there released – they were mobile again, but with neither food nor water. By way of Montélimar and Valence they headed up the Rhône Valley. On 21 August in Chalon-sur-Saône one bucket of water and 2.5kg of bread had to suffice for seventy men. At 10 p.m. on 24 August, with the train making 20km per hour, eleven desperate prisoners hacked through the floor of their wagon and dropped through onto the tracks, two of them losing legs under the wheels. The train continued without them – destination, no one knew where.
⁸

On 6 July four captured women SOE agents – Andrée Borrel, Sonja Olschanezky, Vera Leigh and Diana Rowden – were transferred from Karlsruhe prison to Natzwiller. As
Nacht und Nebel
prisoners, they were to be killed without trace. That evening they were individually taken to the sick bay, told to undress and, told they were being innoculated for typhus, given an injection of phenol by SS Untersturmfrer Dr Werner Röhde or his assistant. Their bodies were immediately thrown into the four-body camp crematorium by Hauptscharführer Peter Schraub. At least one of the women recovered consciousness sufficiently to scar Schraub’s face with her fingernails before being forced in alive and the door slammed after her.
⁹

Georges Mandel served as
député
in the National Assembly (1919–24 and 1928–40, holding posts in four successive governments 1934–36) and as Minister of Colonies from April 1938 to May 1940. Equally opposed to policies of the Left and the pro-German Far Right between the wars, he was also briefly Interior Minister in Reynaud’s short-lived cabinet. Refusing the Armistice, he sailed from Bordeaux aboard the
Massilia
to continue the fight from North Africa
.
Arrested by Vichy officials on disembarking in Morocco and returned to France, he was handed over to the Germans in November 1942. After a stay at the concentration camps of Oranienburg and Buchenwald, he was returned to Paris on 4 July 1944, to be kept as a hostage in the Santé prison. While being ‘transferred to another place of detention’ on the night of 7–8 July, in a joint operation the SD and Darnand’s Milice gunned down Mandel in the forest of Fontainebleau, claiming it was the work of
résistants
in revenge for Henriot’s killing.

On 9 July 12th SS Panzer Division was driven out of Caen by Canadian 3rd Division pushing in from the west and British 1st Division from the north. What remained of the ancient capital of Normandy was a bombed and shelled wasteland but 200km to the east in peaceful Villers-Adam, Madame Robert’s landlady was selling off the surplus fruit and vegetables from her garden to hungry and thirsty German soldiers passing through eastbound, who grew fewer in number until the only ones left were technicians dismantling the underground V1 factory.
¹⁰

In Paris, between 28 July and 2 August, police recorded finding nine bodies shot and left in the streets bearing a card stating, ‘this man shot a German soldier. For this, he has himself been shot.’ Many others had been removed and buried before the police got there.
¹¹
Streets near major German installations were covered by a blizzard of ashes as every paper that could not be removed was incinerated. In working-class districts schoolboys and students were hacking down the lime trees that lined the boulevards and using pickaxes to prise up the cobblestones, piling them into makeshift barricades, ineffectual against tanks.

Anxious to remove from Toulouse twenty children she had hidden in a technical school, Shatta Simon asked 20-year-old Henri Milstein to organise a summer camp for them and other children in remote countryside on the Black Mountain, where the Foreign Legion now does its training. Milstein’s campers eventually numbered 200 children with false papers; however, tragedy gave them a near miss when a Maquis unit ambushed a German patrol nearby, killing four soldiers but allowing one to get away and lead the revenge squad back. Milstein was returning from buying vegetables on a bicycle towing a small trailer when he ran into one of the road blocks. His identity card had been borrowed from an old classmate in Moissac, so the photograph did not resemble him. Even worse, he was using a pre-war military map to find his way around the countryside. For four hours he meditated over his likely fate until a French-speaking officer arrived to interrogate him.

The first question, ‘Why all this food in your trailer?’, was reasonable enough. It could have been destined for the Maquis group who had killed the soldiers.

The second was, ‘Why do you have a military map in your pocket?’

Luckily for Milstein, it seems the officer had been a Scout himself before the movement was banned in Germany after 1933. Initially sceptical of a Scout camp in the middle of a manhunt, he eventually accepted Milstein’s word that he had 200 hungry young mouths awaiting dinner and waved him on his way without even querying the ID card. Not long after the narrow escape on the Black Mountain, Milstein was stopped at a Milice ID check in Toulouse railway station. With no chance of playing the Scout card there, he recalled that the tailor in Moissac whom his sister had married had a client who was a police commissioner in Toulouse. Blurting out that he was visiting the client to take measurements for a new suit, his mind went blank when asked for the commissioner’s name, which he had only heard by chance. In the nick of time it came to him and the papers were thrust back with the ultimate benediction: ‘You can go.’

It was for most French people another grim 14 July. Women queuing halfway round the block for bread in Paris whispered about the criminal-law prisoners in the Santé prison who had mutinied because they were at risk of being shot as hostages, setting fire to their cell blocks in the night. At dawn,
miliciens
from Lycée Louis-le-Grand had crushed the mutiny by summarily shooting twenty-eight prisoners against the prison wall. In Nîmes, gendarmes refused to form a firing squad to execute
résistants
arrested by the Milice. Themselves placed under arrest and imprisoned in Marseille, they were set free a few days before the town was liberated.

After Hitler was nearly killed on 22 July by a bomb planted in a top-level briefing at Rastenburg, anti-Nazi Wehrmacht officers in Paris locked up in Fresnes prison all their SS, SD and Gestapo colleagues, including Gen Oberg and Knochen. When news came through that the Führer was only slightly wounded, Abetz tried to smooth things out by ostentatiously pouring champagne for all in the Hôtel Continental on rue Castiglione and pretended for public consumption that the entire event had been some kind of military exercise.
¹²
Although the French press carried news of the attempt on Hitler’s life next morning, there was no coverage of the arrests in Paris, nor of Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel being ordered to return to Berlin, charged with high treason. On the battlefield of Verdun, he ordered his driver to stop the car and tried to blow out his brains with his service pistol. Managing only to blind himself, he was taken to hospital to recover and stand trial, the suicide attempt being covered up in
Pariser Zeitung
by a fictitious report that he had been attacked by Maquis ‘terrorists’. Von Stülpnagel was among the conspirators who died slowly on 30 August, strangled to death in Berlin-Plötzensee.

With the war now unwinnable for Germany, the strategically useless Luftwaffe was ordered to bomb villages in the sparsely populated Vercors area of eastern France, destroying several of them in reprisal for Maquis activity. Approximately 30,000 ground troops then cordoned off the area where 3,500
maquisards
found themselves in the ultimate nightmare of a pitched battle against vastly superior numbers of trained and regular forces with air superiority. After the landing of 200 glider-borne paras in the heartland of the Maquis, men who had thought the Allies would reach them within days now realised that their only safety lay in flight by night to avoid the daylight strafing. By 23 July the Maquis of Vercors was a spent shadow.

In the defeat of 1940 the French army had abandoned casualties to be cared for by the Wehrmacht, but there was no such recourse now, when they would be shot as terrorists. Gradually compressed into a smaller and smaller area, surgeon-captains Ferrier and Ganimède had forty volunteer stretcher-bearers carry the worst cases over difficult terrain into a cave whose entrance was hidden in scrub. After days of hiding, it was decided that the walking wounded should attempt a breakout with a small escort of medical attendants. More days of waiting followed for those left behind, the noises of battle coming from all directions as their comrades were hunted down. Medical supplies were few, food was running out and the only liquid was moisture seeping through the roof of the cave.