Voices from the Dark Years (55 page)

SS officer Alexander de Kreuz was placed in command of a squad sent to the Paris station at Pantin, to remove from a transportation train five men, including de Gaulle’s former military representative in Paris, Colonel André Rondenay. The SS drove their victims outside Paris to Domont and shot them, ordering Feldgendarmerie soldiers to bury the bodies while they returned heroically to the base in rue des Saussaies to drink champagne, as was the custom after SS executions. For most Parisians, even drinking water was in short supply. The Metro no longer worked at all and electricity and gas supplies were totally unpredictable. Like the Milice, gathered in Vichy’s spa buildings with their families and an assortment of livestock they intended to take with them on their flight to the east, the capital’s Doriotists huddled in the PPF HQ on rue des Pyramides with their families, waiting for Wehrmacht transport to rescue them while some party comrades in Gironde rounded up all the Jewish refugees they could find on 5 August by lying in wait outside the free restaurant of Ste-Foy-la-Grande at lunchtime. After driving them across the last remaining bridge over the Dordogne in brilliant sunshine, they gunned them down in a vineyard overlooking the town and returned singing marching songs from the First World War –
Auprès de ma blonde
and
En passant par la Lorraine.

In the Paris embassy, Abetz was obligingly issuing travel documents to anyone who wanted to head for Germany before the Allies arrived. He also took the time to send a telegram to Ribbentrop protesting that Kommandant von Gross Paris General Von Choltitz was acting with disgraceful brutality – this to deter Berlin from replacing him with a hard-line Nazi, who would implement Hitler’s mad plan to detonate explosives placed on the bridges, in Notre Dame and other churches, in the Senate, at Les Invalides and the Opéra.
²
Thanks to Von Choltitz’s genius for procrastination, they were never blown.

Following news that the Americans and French under General de Lattre de Tassigny were moving out from the Operation Anvil bridgehead, Déat, de Brinon, Darnand and Doriot joined the lemming rush to the east. In Lyon, Klaus Barbie lined up sixteen Jews in front of a firing squad at the Fort Montluc in another act of senseless murder. At Drancy, Aloïs Brunner had to content himself with one cattle truck for fifty-one VIP prisoners and a couple of passenger coaches for himself and his staff, attached to a train reserved for an anti-aircraft battery. Transport 79 – the final instalment of Drancy prisoners for the gas chambers – pulled out of Bobigny station Auschwitz-bound at 5.30 p.m. and slowly progressed eastwards along the Seine.

Among Brunner’s prisoners was aircraft constructor Marcel Bloch, arrested under his cover name Dassault.
³
Also in the wagon was a 12-year-old boy and Henri Pohoryles, who had left the
colonie
in Moissac to join the Armée Juive commando that assassinated the Ukrainian Gestapo aides. Shrewd enough to note that in Paris a month after D-Day there were at most 300 Resistance members with arms and the training to use them, he had nevertheless been tricked into bringing the Armée Juive leaders to a false-flag meeting in Paris, where the man he thought was a British agent revealed himself as German Intelligence Officer Karl Rehbein, who put them all under arrest. Surviving to found the Dassault Aviation company, Bloch later recalled his fellow passengers divided in adversity on the journey, the communists huddling at one end of their uncomfortable moving prison to leave a gap between themselves and the VIP ‘rich Jews’, neither group speaking to the other.

On the night of 16 August, curious curfew-breakers noticed a small convoy of trucks heading out of Paris
westwards
. They were no last-minute reinforcements for the front, but an execution squad that cut down thirty-five young Frenchmen with machine pistols in the Bois de Boulogne and left the bodies for passers-by to find under the trees.

Impatient with the stop-go progress on the severely disrupted railway network, Brunner commandeered a car and continued his personal funk-flight by road, leaving Milice and SS guards in charge of his prisoners. Security relaxed with his departure, after which prisoners were allowed to find drinking and washing water at stops. Twenty-seven of the fifty-one escaped at about 1 a.m. on 21 August; of the twenty-four others, the obviously Orthodox were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz, the 12-year-old boy taken to Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg as one of a battery of children used for medical experiments. Dr Kurt Heissmeyer injected them regularly with tuberculosis bacilli ‘in the interests of science’. Fifteen days before Germany surrendered he gave them all their final injection. Had it been simply to stop them accusing him in an Allied war-crimes court, he could have used something more immediately lethal than tuberculosis. However, when British troops liberated Neuengamme, they found the twenty children hanged – a slow death when the weight of a child’s body has been reduced by malnutrition.

With the police on strike, German loudspeaker vans patrolled the streets of Paris warning that disorder would be dealt with by force. Few civilians ventured onto the streets as the exodus of Germans choked the main thoroughfares with overloaded ambulances, staff cars, trucks and vehicles of all descriptions. Warned by Abetz to leave for Germany voluntarily if he did not want to be taken under arrest, Laval called a last ghost of a cabinet meeting before spending his final night in the Hôtel Matignon. On the morning of 18 August, Abetz formally closed the embassy and promised the concierge he would soon be back, before leaving with an escort of SS officers to pick up Laval and his wife. Also in the cortège was Abetz’s mistress and a certain amount of loot the ambassador had managed to accumulate for his personal use. Laval takes up the story:

About ten o’clock the German Ambassador appeared at the Hôtel Matignon, together with the chief of the German Police. The cars of the Gestapo were lined up before the door. A notice of the order of arrest was served on me. Such were the conditions in which I was forced to leave Paris.
⁴

Were they? Or was he stealing Pétain’s alibi? Informed by Renthe-Fink at 10 p.m. that he would be taken to Germany by force if he did not consent to leave immediately, the marshal played for time. The departure was delayed until 5.30 a.m., then 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. Meanwhile, Ménétrel tried to persuade his master to slink out of a service entrance of the Hôtel du Parc disguised as a workman, but Pétain retorted, ‘Such an escapade is fit neither for my age nor the dignity of my position.’

He spent his last night in Vichy dictating a political testament and a final
Paroles aux Français
before going to bed. At 7 a.m., the Papal Nuncio and Swiss Minister Stücki arrived as requested to witness before history that he was leaving under compulsion. Stücki played the main part, ensuring that the ‘violence’ should be sufficient to show that Pétain had not gone of his own free will and yet provoke no shooting by the marshal’s bodyguard. The farce was played out when Gestapo officer Detering arrived with 200 SD men, who surrounded the hotel and forced open the revolving door, jammed with a couple of chairs. The security gate on the stairs was also forced in front of the guards, who took no action.

Outside the door of the marshal’s suite, Detering knocked politely, but two inner doors had to be forced before he came upon the head of state in shirt and trousers, doing up his shoelaces. Ignoring the intrusion, the marshal finished dressing, took his breakfast and was escorted out of the building at 8.15 a.m., the small crowd of onlookers piping up an unhappy
Marseillaise
in his honour
.
His destination, and Laval’s, was the Hohenzollern fortress town of Sigmaringen between Stuttgart and the Swiss border where, in the ruins of the Reich, some authorities put the number of big and small fry of the Vichy regime who had held out until the final collapse as high as 30,000.

The regime that had started as comic opera ended as a real-life première of Sartre’s stage play
Closed Circuit
⁵
– a metaphor for hell, in which the waiter in a windowless but comfortably furnished hotel room explains to four mystified characters,
‘L’enfer, c’est les autres!’
: hell is the other people, with whom they are locked up for eternity.

Back in the capital that Pétain and Laval would see again only as the setting for their trials ending with death sentences, the Hôtel Majestic was deserted. In the Hôtel Meurice on rue de Rivoli, General Von Choltitz sat calmly chatting to his staff. Having decided not to comply with Hitler’s order to destroy the city, he would have been condemned to death on return to Germany and had nowhere else to go.

On the façade of the nearby Hôtel de Ville the
tricolore
flag flew again for the first time in fifty months, having been occupied by the FFI after killing the drivers of two broken down Wehrmacht trucks at Levallois in the north-west of the capital and thus acquiring four machine guns, twelve sub-machine guns, 250 pistols and ammunition. The Paris police fortified the Préfecture opposite Notre Dame Cathedral, but all the months of planning for this moment between the various factions of the Resistance in the capital were now revealed as empty talk. When the communists declared a ‘general insurrection’ against the remaining Germans in the city, the Gaullists asked sarcastically what weapons they intended to use.

The entire stockpile amounted to only 600 small arms, until weapons could be taken from German prisoners and casualties. In one early attack a truckload of German grenades was ‘liberated’. When the nervous drivers of two fleeing German trucks collided near Place de Clichy, the loot included nine machine guns, fifteen sub-machine guns and eight Mauser pistols. The Hotchkiss arms factory yielded twenty sub-machine guns. During the next six days a force of about 3,000 men and women – it was afterwards claimed to have been 7,000 or even 20,000 – was armed piecemeal in this way to man the barricades of furniture, sandbags, paving stones and trees, where they captured a few unlucky Germans who had lost their way.

At 7 o’clock on 19 August, 2,000 Paris policemen in civilian clothes assembled on the
parvis
between Notre Dame Cathedral and the Préfecture. Accustomed to receiving orders, they milled around aimlessly with no one in charge. A truck arrived, from which a few automatic weapons and rifles were distributed. A sentry opened the main door of the Préfecture and they poured inside to sing the
Marseillaise
as a
tricolore
flag was hoisted on a flagpole. The PCF’s would-be commander of Paris, ‘Colonel’ Rol, arrived on his bicycle with his homemade uniform in a brown paper parcel, furious that the police had not waited for him. Hastily changing clothes in an office, he emerged with the intention of taking command, but they had other ideas.

In distant Auch, Renée de Monbrison and her children were staying in yet another borrowed home. For days, they had been watching open trucks heading north carrying German wounded. On 19 August the German garrison drove out of the town with orders to regroup further north. One imagines the civilians at moments like this huddled in cellars, awaiting the ceasefire. Reality is so often different. Renée had packed the children off that day to the local swimming pool with a picnic. She heard them come running back to the house yelling, ‘Auch is liberated!’ Her 18-year-old daughter Françoise, who spoke perfect English, jumped into the first Allied jeep to enter the town and kissed a wounded British liaison officer sitting in the rear seat, Captain T.A. Mellows. Colonel Hilaire of the Armée Secrète and an American officer also got a kiss, as did the Polish driver, before Françoise was told to get down and behave herself because they were there to kill Germans, not to be kissed by pretty girls.

Throughout her wanderings, Rénée had kept intact her last packet of tea in the assumption that her liberators would be English and in need of a good cuppa. When she now proudly presented them with her precious gift, the result was laughter all round: tea was one thing they had plenty of. Despite the public relief in Auch that the enemy had gone, Mellows warned the family that the Germans were not far away, having been halted at a barricade on the bridge at Isle-Jourdain, which was manned by local Maquis units. Dusk brought a stalemate, the Germans unable to cross and the Maquis unable to drive them back. After dark, the FFI ‘Armagnac battalion’ arrived and completely surrounded the German positions. At dawn, sporadic firing intensified until the arrival of the Corps Franc Pommiès. Now outnumbered, the scattered German groups surrendered, one by one.

Since that left no armed enemy forces in the
département
of Gers, everyone congratulated themselves on having liberated their part of France without Allied intervention. Groups of musicians were playing in the streets of Auch, people of all ages dancing from sheer joy. For the de Monbrison family, the joy was tinged with sadness at the news that Captain Mellows had been killed in a skirmish only a few kilometres away.

Elation after years of fear combined with a sleepless night to trigger one of those shameful scenes of the Liberation where young women with shaven heads were driven through the streets with babies in their arms by jeering neighbours, most of whom had never lifted a hand in anger for the past four years. The worst excesses of stripping girls naked and painting swastikas in tar on their breasts were avoided in Auch that morning when
miliciens
and other male
collabos
were rounded up and forced to parade around the town with some forty women accused of various crimes.