Voices from the Dark Years (60 page)

N
OTES

  
1.
  D. Lormier,
La Poche de la Rochelle
(Saintes : Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 2003), p. 29.

  
2.
  Some sources say 20 October.

  
3.
  Thornton,
The Liberation of Paris
, p. 122.

  
4.
  D. Lormier,
La Poche de Royan
(Saintes : Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 2002), p. 21.

  
5.
  Some sources give forty-six German dead.

  
6.
  P. Lelaurain,
Le Musée de la Poche de Royan
(Le Gâ: Vauclin, 1996), p. 19.

  
7.
  For more detail, see Lormier,
La Poche de Royan
.

  
8.
  For a comprehensive account of the situation in Le Havre and other northern towns, see D. Boyd,
Normandy in the Time of Darkness
(Hersham: Ian Allan, 2013).

26

A
FTER
THE
W
AR
WAS
O
VER
…

Otto
Abetz
was sentenced by a French court to twenty years’ imprisonment in 1949, but released in 1954. He died in a car accident in May 1958.

Ernst
Achenbach
successfully practised law in Germany post-war. Retained by IG Farben and claiming amnesty for alleged war criminals, he would have probably represented his country at the European Commission, but for evidence of his wartime activities assembled by German lawyer Beata Klarsfeld.

Klaus
Barbie
was employed post-war by US Intelligence and allowed to escape to Bolivia under the name of Klaus Altmann. In 1971 a Munich court ruled it impossible to
prove
he knew what happened to his deported victims. After an attempt to kidnap him failed, persistent campaigning by the Klarsfelds resulted in his extradition to France in 1983 to go on trial for crimes against humanity. During the 1987 trial Barbie showed no emotion, even when confronted with witnesses he had sadistically tortured over long periods, and whose relatives he had killed to make them talk. Condemned in July 1987 to life imprisonment, he died of cancer on 25 September 1991.

Paul Baudouin
left politics in 1941 to work for La Banque d’Indochine. Condemned in March 1945 to five years’ hard labour for his role in the Armistice, he was released in January 1948 to return to his banking activities.

Karl
Bömelburg
left France with Pétain in 1945 and disappeared completely.

Pierre
Bonny’s
bolt-hole betrayed by his rival Joseph Joanovici, he was condemned and shot at Montrouge on 27 December 1944.

René
Bousquet
was tried in 1949. Scores of high functionaries and dignitaries including bishops and archbishops testified to his pre-war civic record and his non-collaborationist attitude during the occupation. Even the president of the Jewish community of Châlons, who had spent the war in Switzerland, said he had ‘heard nothing against’ Bousquet, while admitting that all the Jews left in Châlons had been deported, of whom only one survived. Acquitted, his Légion d’Honneur returned to him, Bousquet flourished as adviser and later secretary general of the Banque d’Indochine, also serving as director of UTA airline and standing unsuccessfully as an anti-Gaullist candidate for the Marne
département.

In 1977 French lawyer Serge Klarsfeld published documents proving Bousquet’s active participation in the genocide of French and foreign Jews. Accused of crimes against humanity, 84-year-old Bousquet was assassinated by a mentally unstable writer on 8 June 1993 just before the scheduled start of the trial. Whether this was coincidence or conspiracy is unproven, but the death did prevent a trial in which he might have said embarrassing things.

Francis
Bout de l’An
was never prosecuted and died of natural causes at his home in Italy in 1977.

Aloïs
Brunner
was rescued by the Vatican ratline and given asylum in Damascus, protected by Syrian security services until ‘outed’ by the Klarsfelds in 1982. French demands for his extradition in 1989 were refused, but Brunner was condemned in his absence to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity on 2 March 2001.

Lazare Cabrero
was charged with murdering Grumbach with intent to rob. His defence was corroborated by Madame Courdil, who said that a French colonel, conveniently deceased, ordered the
passeurs
to kill refugees who could not keep up, in case they were found by the patrols and forced to divulge details of the escape network. On 29 May 1953 Cabrero was acquitted.
¹

Collaborators
executed without trial during
L’Épuration
– the purge after the Liberation – were conservatively numbered at 105,000 between the Liberation of Paris and February 1945 by Adrien Tixier, a post-war Minister of Justice.
²
Some 300,000 other persons were accused of various crimes, of which 124,613 received prison sentences and 6,763 were sentenced to death by military tribunals. Approximately the same number was condemned in civil courts, 767 being executed. Fifty thousand others were stripped of civic rights, but most of the tens of thousands of civil servants dismissed or suspended for collaboration were eventually reinstated and recovered their pension rights.

Theo
Danneker
hanged himself in prison in 1945.

Joseph
Darnand
enlisted the rump of the Milice at Sigmaringen in the SS Division Charlemagne, escaped to Italy with the help of priests, but was extradited and shot on 10 October 1945.

Louis
Darquier de Pellepoix
lived undisturbed in Spain despite a death sentence imposed by a French court in his absence. He disclaimed all responsibility for the
rafle du Vel d’Hiv
, accusing Bousquet of having made all the arrangements, yet famously announced during an interview with
L’Express
in 1978 that ‘at Auschwitz, only fleas were gassed’. He died on 29 August 1980.

Marcel
Déat
escaped from Sigmaringen into Italy with his wife, helped by priests. After spending two years in Genoa awaiting his turn on the Vatican ratline to South America, he moved to Turin in 1947 and died there on 5 January 1955.

Fernand
de Brinon
claimed he had acted to prevent a repeat of the slaughter he had witnessed on battlefields during the First World War. At Sigmaringen, Darnand, Déat and Luchaire wanted to go down fighting with the SS Charlemagne Division, but de Brinon fled. Learning of Pétain’s trial while staying at Innsbruck, he decided to return to France, saying, ‘They will shoot me, but at least I should like the chance to explain myself.’
³
Arrested in Bavaria, he was condemned and shot on 15 April 1947.

Alphonse
de Châteaubriant
left Sigmaringen for Austria in 1945 and lived there under the alias of Dr Alfred Wolf. Condemned to death in his absence on 25 October 1945, he died of natural causes in a Tyrolean monastery in 1951.

Roger Delthil
was first reinstated as mayor of Moissac and a senator after the Liberation, but in the in-fighting between the parties post-Liberation was then divested of his public functions a second time for being one of the senators who voted full powers to Marshal Pétain at the Casino in Vichy.

Jacques
Doriot
died when his car was strafed by Allied aircraft in Germany on 22 February 1945.

Pierre
Drieu la Rochelle
went into hiding at the Liberation and committed suicide in Paris on 15 March 1945.

The
Drancy
guards
got off lightly. Ten were accused, two disappearing while on bail before trial, together with their commanding officer. Despite harrowing evidence of maltreatment of old and sick detainees, five gendarmes who had stolen prisoners’ meagre rations, maltreated the sick, run the black market and escorted deportations were reintegrated into the force. Two men sentenced to two years’ imprisonment were released after one year.

Marie-Rose Dupont
waited twelve months after the shame of being exhibited to the crowd in Moissac before her hair was fully regrown. She was still corresponding with Willi, but never mentioned her public humiliation to him. Leaving Moissac, she found work in a hairdressing salon at Nice. When a male colleague fell in love with her, she told him about Willi and accepted his decision to tear up all her letters and photographs, saying, ‘We’ll pull the curtain on the past. It’s all over and done with.’

After setting up home in Moissac – she to re-open her salon and he as travelling rep. for a hair-products company – it seemed that everyone had forgotten the shearing, until the day she came into the salon and found her 8-year-old son sitting in one of the chairs with a pair of clippers in his hand, totally bald. She never spoke of her humiliation in September 1944 again until interviewed by the author in January 2006.

Rodolphe
Faytout
was sentenced to hard labour for life, but pardoned by President Coty and released in the fifties. Forbidden to return to his home in Gironde, he nevertheless did so and kept a low profile for the rest of his life, treated with disdain but never attacked by his surviving victims or the relatives of those whose deaths he had caused.

Lucienne
Goldfarb
was rewarded for her role as police informer by protection that continued after the Liberation during the years when she ran a highly lucrative brothel known as ‘10-bis’ on rue Débarcadère in the XVII
arrondissement
of Paris – during which time her professional name was Katia la Rouquine (Red-haired Katie). She sprang to fame again at the age of 74 – half a century after the deaths of Manouchian and his twenty-one comrades. Her friend Christine Deviers-Joncour, ex-mistress of Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, gave her 1 million francs in November 1997 ‘to look after my mother and children’ because Deviers-Joncourt expected to be sent to prison for her part in the petroleum bribes scandal that caused Dumas’ fall from power.

Georges Guingouin
was elected mayor of Limoges by its grateful population in 1945, the PCF leadership having done everything possible to undermine his election campaign. Labelled a Titoist deviant, he was expelled from the party in 1952 and thus deprived of its political protection. In the aftermath of the 1953 amnesty for collaboration crimes, many counter-accusations were levelled at former
résistants.
Guingouin was among those arrested for alleged assassination of collaborators during the Liberation. He survived a murder attempt in prison before being released in June 1954. Not until 1998 did PCF leader Robert Hué publicly apologise for the harassment of this renegade communist. Asked for his reaction, Guingouin replied, ‘I’ve reached the age of serenity. It’s a problem for the Party and no longer concerns me.’
⁴

Dr Josef
Hirt,
the collector of Jewish skulls from the Natzwiller gas chamber, is thought to have committed suicide in the Black Forest on 2 June 1945.

Helmut
Knochen
was sentenced to death by a British court in Germany during June 1946 for a massacre of Allied aircrew. Extradited to France, he received a second death sentence, also commuted to life imprisonment. After serving seventeen years, he was released in 1962, returned to work as an insurance agent in Offenbach, married a second time and retired in Baden-Baden to die there on 4 April 2003.