Voices from the Dark Years (54 page)

In the afternoon of 27 July bullets sprayed the Red Cross flag at the entrance. Three German prisoners released as spokesmen explained that they had been correctly treated during their captivity and that there were women and wounded in the cave. It was a waste of breath. Eighteen wounded were immediately shot lying on their stretchers, and twelve more killed the next day. Ferrier and a civilian doctor were taken to Grenoble and shot with the chaplain Yves Moreau. Six female nurses were deported. Only Ganimède managed to escape after being interrogated by the Gestapo.
¹³

In Paris, Édith Piaf was now earning 20,000 francs for just one appearance – a white collar worker’s annual salary – of which little remained at the end of each week. The little woman in a black dress who had begin by singing to theatre queues and the patrons of terrace cafés, turning tricks on occasion, spent her earnings like water on husbands, lovers, fellow artists, song-writers and a host of hangers-on. On 22 July she was due to sing at the prestige classical music venue La Salle Pleyel, but got stage fright when shown the concert platform, large enough for a full symphony orchestra. Conquering her nerves, she went on to give the performance of her life.

For the mass of Parisians, life was somewhat more gloomy. Between 27 July and 30 August, such was the disruption of the food supplies that butter was rationed at 80g per person and milk tankers coming into the capital had
LAIT
painted on the roofs in the hope that they would not be attacked by Allied aircraft. The press hinted that women and children should leave before things got worse, but there could be no mass exodus as there had been in 1940 because few people had private transport and the only trains were controlled by the Germans.
¹⁴
On 28 July Laval scurried to Abetz insisting that
Je Suis Partout
be banned after critic Alain Laubreaux wrote, ‘Napoleon said of Talleyrand, his foreign secretary, that he was shit in a silk stocking. Now we have only the silk stocking.’

On 31 July, Aloïs Brunner’s last mass deportation from Drancy included 300-plus children taken from orphanages run by UGIF and 115 wives of French POWs held in Germany, most of whom survived incarceration at Bergen-Belsen. On 1 August, what remained of the artworks in the Jeu de Paume were packed in 148 cases, loaded into five freight cars, whose numbers were noted by the indefatigable Rose Valland and passed to SNCF
résistants
. They, in turn, made sure the cars were shunted hither and thither in the Paris suburbs until overtaken by Leclerc’s advance units. With no further justification for staying in Paris, the art looters were scrabbling for priority jobs back home, to avoid being given forty-eight hours’ notice to report to the Russian front.
¹⁵
Ordered to leave Vichy and take refuge east of the Rhine, Pétain refused. On 6 August he wrote to Laval:

On separate occasions I have discussed with you reports of the Milice’s actions in the hope that improvement would result. I must stress the deplorable effect on the population, which might understand arrests carried out by the Germans themselves but can never condone the fact of Frenchmen delivering their own compatriots to the Gestapo and working in collaboration with them.

When shown the letter, Darnand – to whom the marshal should have addressed it – replied to Pétain:

In the course of these four years, I have received compliments and congratulations from you. You encouraged me. And today, because the Americans stand at the gates of Paris, you start to tell me that I shall be a blot on the history of France? It is something that might have been thought of earlier.
¹⁶

On 9 August, with British and Canadian forces launching a new offensive south of Caen, Laval reached Paris in the evening. At his trial, he protested three priorities on that day: ensuring the capital’s food supply in his capacity as one of the mayors of greater Paris; persuading the Germans to neither defend nor destroy the city; and the restoration of parliamentary democracy by calling a National Assembly. Édouard Herriot, 72-year-old former president of the Chamber of Deputies, was confined as a hostage in a nursing home, due to poor health. Laval negotiated his release on 12 August, hoping that he would head a new government, but Herriot asserted that under the Third Republic constitution only Jules Jeanneney, former President of the Senate, could call a national assembly. Jeanneney, however, was in Grenoble. Herriot’s subsequent re-arrest by the Gestapo infuriated Abetz and Laval, who tried to persuade Herriot to flee with him to Switzerland, only to receive the reply, ‘Switzerland is too expensive, and I have no money!’ Had it not been tragic, it would have been comical. Herriot understated the situation when he called it ‘infinitely confused’ as he was driven away by the Gestapo to a secure sanatorium near Potsdam.
¹⁷

From this moment, there was no doubt about the eventual fate of the self-made millionaire-politician from Auvergne, but Laval went down fighting. He summoned the eighty other mayors of Greater Paris and persuaded them all to sign a pledge of support for him as president of their collective and as head of the government.
¹⁸
Also in Paris was Darlan’s deputy Admiral Auphan, entrusted by Pétain with one of the most useless pieces of paper ever signed by a head of state: his authority to invest his executive powers in ‘a college of notables’, should he be unable to exercise them. Finding such a group at this time being impossible, Auphan handed the paper to de Gaulle after the Liberation, who regarded it as null and void.

On 11 August 1944, in what should have been the ultimate insanity, Klaus Barbie packed 650 prisoners into his last deportation train to leave Lyon’s Gare Perrache. With the rail network disrupted by strategic bombing and Resistance sabotage, the nightmare of the transportation was to last even longer than for previous shipments. The filthy cattle trucks become stinking ovens in the summer heat as the train was repeatedly rerouted and shunted into sidings while priority traffic was allowed to pass. The journey was made even longer by a diversion to off-load the
résistants
at Natzwiller camp, the Jewish prisoners being bound for a destination further east. On 10 August all the communist-organised railway workers had been called out on strike. Two days later, all civilian rail communications between Paris and the outside world were cut, the unions demanding a pay increase, better food distribution and the release of their comrades arrested by the Milice. Despite a feeble bleat about their ‘selfish attitude’ from Vichy, the strike was maintained.
¹⁹

On 13 August, with Allied armoured spearheads only hours away from Drancy, Aloïs Brunner assembled his last victims for deportation. At this stage in the retreat, collective insanity is the only reason that can be advanced for him being allocated a locomotive and forty-eight freight wagons from a railway system in severe crisis, where priority should have gone to evacuating German wounded and moving vital military resources. Unimpressed by Brunner’s SS uniform or his mania for killing Jews at such a time, a sane Wehrmacht colonel requisitioned the train at gunpoint for his men and equipment, leaving Brunner stranded – an action that saved 1,416 of the 1,467 prisoners.

In Paris that day the Resistance learned that the Germans had commenced disarming French police in St-Denis, St-Ouen and Asnières. ‘Colonel’ Rol, the PCF Resistance boss and de Gaulle’s Paris representative Alexandre Parodi jointly instructed senior police officers to bring their men out on strike, to cease maintaining order for the enemy, and to stop arresting
résistants.
On no account were they to allow themselves to be disarmed. Police who did not obey the instruction were to be considered ‘traitors and collaborators’.
²⁰

N
OTES

  
1.
  Thornton,
The Liberation of Paris
, p. 111.

  
2.
  Bédarida,
Les
Catholiques dans la Guerre
, p. 113.

  
3.
  Boulet, ‘Histoire de Moissac’, p. 152.

  
4.
  Ibid.

  
5.
  Full report by A. Feytis, ‘Fusillée dans sa Robe de Mariée’ in
Sud Ouest
, 30 September 2004, pp. 1–11.

  
6.
  Quoted by L. Chabrun et al.,
L’Express
, 10 October 2005.

  
7.
  Ibid.

  
8.
  Amouroux
La Vie
, Vol. 1, pp. 357–62.

  
9.
  See A. Kemp,
The Secret Hunters
(London: Coronet, 1988), pp. 776–8 and R. Kramer,
Flames in the Field
(London: Michael Joseph, 1995), pp. 115–27 and plates. See also documentation at Natzwiller.

10.
  D’Anvers,
Baboushka Remembers
, pp. 234–5.

11.
  Thornton,
The Liberation of Paris
, p. 127.

12.
  Ibid.

13.
  Amouroux,
La Vie
, Vol. 2, pp. 82–4.

14.
  Thornton,
The Liberation of Paris
, p. 118.

15.
  Nicholas,
The Rape of Europa
, p. 292.

16.
  Pryce-Jones,
Paris in the Third Reich
, p. 187.

17.
  He was liberated there by Russian troops in April 1945.

18.
  Laval,
Unpublished Diary
, facsimile copy in Appendix VI.

19.
  Thornton,
The Liberation of Paris
, pp. 132–3.

20.
  Ibid., pp. 134–5.

23

‘H
ELL
IS
THE
O
THER
P
EOPLE
’

On the night of 14 August 1944 a fleet of 396 Dakotas took off from Italian airfields to drop 5,000 US paratroops over southern France. In the second stage of Operation Anvil, after a violent naval and air bombardment of the German defences, 25,000 French metropolitan, French colonial and US soldiers landed between Toulon and Cannes after dawn from an invasion fleet of 2,000 transports and landing craft escorted by some 300 warships. On the same day, the Police Nationale went on strike to ingratiate itself with the increasingly active FFI. In Toulon and Fréjus gendarmes were told to go home and stay there until the fighting was over; in Hyères most of their colleagues lay low on their own initiative until the conflict had passed through. In many places FFI fighters occupied police and gendarmerie stations
manu militari
, refusing to hand them back.
¹

The confidence engendered by news of the landings in the south sometimes went too far. Six young
maquisards
in the little Girondine village of Landerrouat attached a French flag to a black Citroën car and drove through the village in triumph – only to be greeted by German machine gun fire. Rapidly hitting reverse gear, the driver headed out of the village. Two of his passengers jumped out and legged it across the fields. Their four comrades, the Germans from Landerrouat in close pursuit, drove straight into another column of Germans coming the other way and ended what was to have been the morning of triumph dead on the road for their relatives to find.