Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (25 page)

Two days later a German column coming from Clermont-Ferrand and suffering severe losses en route managed to penetrate into the town, despite all the efforts of the FFI present. Both the Prefect and I were compromised because we had been working with the FFI. At 1500hrs on 19 August the Germans took over the Prefecture. In the course of a long interrogation, I explained that the inhabitants had fled the town, not because they were guilty, but from fear of reprisals. The Germans agreed not to blow up the MAT factory and another factory, nor to set fire to the unoccupied houses or houses of people on a list that the Gestapo had with them. The Germans then withdrew peacefully and the FFI re-took control of the town.
¹⁶

Although the rule was for civil servants who had served under Vichy to be automatically dismissed after the liberation, Maurice Roche was allowed to continue in office and received promotion because of the services he rendered to the Resistance and his vigorous negotiations with the Germans.
¹⁷

Today’s tourists arriving in Tulle by the
route nationale
from Brive see a neatly kept garden of remembrance beside the road just outside the town limits. It marks the site of the two mass graves. At the war crimes trial that opened in Bordeaux on 4 July 1951, Wulf and Hoff claimed to have ‘no recollection’ of the executions in Tulle. Sentenced to ten years and life respectively, they were freed the following year. Paula Geissler was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for not having saved the life of an employee of the MAT factory when she could have done so with no risk to herself. Curiously, some years after her release, she appeared briefly in Tulle with a small group of German tourists, but wisely did not stay long. Lammerding was sentenced to death
in absentia
, but was never extradited from the British zone of Germany. He even initiated a suite for defamation against the German magazine
Die Tat
which accused him in 1965 of murdering hostages in France. Lieutenant Schmald was not brought to trial, having been shot by the Maquis in August 1944, muttering, ‘
Ich hatte Befehl
’.
It was the classic alibi, heard so many times in the war crimes courts, meaning: ‘I was ordered to do it.’
¹⁸

Notes

1
Article by G. Beaubatie in
Arkheia
, Nos 17–8, Montauban, pp. 50–5.

2
Some sources put the estimate as high as 700 men, but this may be a confusion caused by including the GMR and Milice.

3
Interviews included with report of Maurice Roche at
www.malgre-nous.eu/IMG/pdf/doc89.pdf
.

4
According to some accounts, these were smoke or tear gas grenades, left there by the GMR.

5
Nossiter, A.,
France and the Nazis
, London, Methuen, 2001, p. 250.

6
Now the Hotel Mercure.

7
Beaubatie, pp. 50–5.

8
Report of Adjudant-Chef Conchonnet, quoted in
L’Express
, 6 October 2005.

9
Arkheia
magazine, Nos 17–8, 2006, p. 58.

10
Ibid., p. 57.

11
Ibid., pp. 58–9 and Nossiter, A.,
The Algeria Hotel
, London, Methuen, 2001, pp. 231–51.

12
Arkheia
magazine, Nos 17–8, 2006, p. 58.

13
Roche report.

14
ibid.

15
Arkheia
magazine, Nos 17–8, p. 59.

16
Roche report.

17
Letter from the Minister of the Interior dated 27 June 1954.

18
Nossiter,
Algeria Hotel
, pp. 272–3.

THE WORST ATROCITY OF ALL

On 16 May 1944, in Algiers, General de Gaulle handed to Jacques Soustelle, Secretary General of the Comité d’Action en France, a directive setting out what he saw as the role of the Maquis in the liberation of the country. This document made it clear that armed civilians could only be supportive of the Allied invasion and that for them to rise up independently would be militarily a gross error. When the Allied High Command was given sight of this modest document, its reaction was negative. Basing his reasoning on the professional soldier’s traditional mistrust of armed civilians, General Eisenhower considered it badly thought out and far too ambitious.

These reservations failed to reach the men on the ground, who took de Gaulle’s directive as a cue for launching their own war. In central France Emile Colaudon,
nom de guerre
‘Colonel Gaspard’, had a record of daring sabotage, having severely damaged a steelworks, a German radio transmitter, a liquid oxygen plant and 150 high-tension pylons. With his friend Henry Ingrand – also a member of Frenay’s COMBAT movement – he decided on 29 April 1944 to turn three wild areas of the Massif Central area of central France into redoubts where Allied paras could be landed to lead the several thousand
maquisards
of the area in ‘an invasion from within’. The most favourable of these was Mount Mouchet, a massif
reaching 4,500ft in places.

In this ill-thought-out plan they were fatally encouraged by SOE agent Maurice Southgate, whose cover name was Hector. Many of SOE’s records mysteriously and conveniently vanished in a fire after the war, but enough is known of Southgate’s activities to piece his story together. He had grown up in Paris, married a Frenchwoman and founded a company designing and making luxury furniture. In 1942, bored with his so far uninspiring career in uniform, he met in London an old pal who had just returned from France. This decided him immediately to volunteer for service with SOE. Since he was an army officer and was to be transferred to the RAF for his SOE work, there was some delay before his training could start. He spent this time living with his mother in London, one day wearing his army uniform and the next, his RAF uniform, causing a neighbour to say to his mother, ‘You know, I’ve never seen both your sons go out together’.

Aged
30
when he was sent into France on 25 January 1943, Southgate set up the STATIONER network, having been warned in London not to have anything to do with the various political movements of the Resistance. He was an energetic agent, who thought big, which is why he got on so well with Colaudon when they met. In one ambitious operation that failed, the management of the Peugeot factory in Clermont-Ferrand refused to permit Southgate to carry out a limited sabotage operation, as a result of which 500 aircraft bombed the premises on 17 March, doing great damage but also causing nineteen deaths, injuring twenty-six people and damaging 100 homes.

On the night of 9 April 1944, some pre-war friends of Southgate in Clermont-Ferrand, whose home he used as a safe house, were arrested. That should have been a cue to change all other safe houses, identities and codes. Southgate despatched his wife Josette to London on a Lysander flight, so that she could not be used by the Gestapo to bring pressure on him. By this time his activities were so well known to the Gestapo that there was a price of 1 million francs on his head. At a meeting with Colaudon in Montluçon on 15 April 1944 he undertook to arrange airdrops of light weapons and anti-tank bazookas, and to bring in an Allied mission to train the young
maquisards
who had never handled a weapon of war.

On 29 April, Southgate was joined by the Freelance mission, consisting of Captain John Hind Farmer, Captain Denis Rake and another stunningly beautiful female SOE agent called Nancy Wake, whose previous life read like a novel. Her wartime exploits in France are supposed to have inspired the plot of the 2001 film
Charlotte Gray
, in which the lead part was played by Cate Blanchett
.
Born in New Zealand, Nancy was brought up in Sydney, Australia, as one of six siblings in an unhappy home, which she left at age
16
to work as a trainee nurse until being given £200 by an aunt. Buying a ticket to New York, she worked there for a while until talking herself into a job as London correspondent for the
Chicago Tribune.

Life in Europe of the 1930s was all she had hoped it would be: all-night parties, love affairs and more travel. At the beginning of the phoney war she fell in love with and married Henri Fiocca, a rich businessman, living with him in style near Marseille until her impulsively anti-German activities resulted in a price on her head. She escaped via Spain, but Fiocca was captured, tortured and killed. Back in Britain, Nancy proved to be the kind of woman SOE was looking for: disciplined, motivated, calm in a crisis and courageous. So successful was she in escaping all the traps set for her that the French
collabos
working with the Gestapo nicknamed her
la souris blanche
– the white mouse.

Southgate was overburdened from his heavy schedule of supervising drops and receiving and despatching agents for SOE, as well as running STATIONER. It is likely that sheer exhaustion lessened his natural caution when he travelled on 1 May to Montluçon, where his radio operator was working in a safe house they had been using for some time in the Rue de Rimard. Someone had sent an anonymous letter to the Gestapo denouncing an STO no-show supposedly hiding in that house. The no-show was Southgate’s radio op. About 1500hrs a black Citroën
traction avant
, familiar from so many Resistance films, arrived at the address, where the Gestapo were able not only to arrest the radio operator, but also to lay hands on all the messages sent and received for the previous five days, both in clear and in code. It was the sort of present of which cryptanalysts dream. Despite several people trying to reach Southgate and warn him that the safe house was anything but safe, he walked into the trap at around 1600hrs. At first locked up in Montluçon, Southgate was transferred to the Gestapo HQ in Paris at Avenue Hoche where his captors addressed him by his cover name, ‘Hector’, blowing any cover story he might have invented.

Southgate was one of the lucky ones, if one may use the word ‘lucky’ in the context of a concentration camp. Sent to Buchenwald, he survived by using his skills as an upholsterer to work there as a tailor, and was one of four SOE agents still alive when the camp was liberated in April 1945.

Meanwhile, Colaudon continued his plan to raise the local Maquis sympathisers living apparently normal lives at home. These
sédentaires
were ordered on 8 May to present themselves for registration to participate in the coming struggle to liberate France. There was a note of menace in Colaudon’s threat that men not reporting would be ‘deleted from the ranks of the FFI’. Another arms drop on 10 May convinced him that London and/or Algiers knew what he was up to and was continuing to back him.

A final decision was made on 15 May that Mount Mouchet made the best possible place in the region to create a redoubt. Ten days later an even more explicit summons was issued:

By order of General De Gaulle, all able-bodied men aged between eighteen and forty-five are summoned to serve as volunteers [sic] in the ranks of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur under the orders of General Koenig. They are to report at La Bastide in the commune of Venteuges, there to be inducted into the Lafayette battalion of 91st Infantry Regt and should bring with them provisions for forty-eight hours and be wearing solid boots.

The announcement was, of course, made without the knowledge or consent of de Gaulle, Koenig or 91st Infantry Regiment. The ‘Lafayette Battalion’ did not exist. Yet several thousand men flocked ‘to the colours’, some evidently not without misgivings. Historian René Crozet relates the story of one village priest who advised several young men:

I know you feel that you must join the Maquis. This may be an honourable thing, but you have not thought through what may happen to your families. I beg you to do nothing. I hear things from the [French] Gestapo and [I can tell you that] the German security police know what is going on. Stop before it is too late!
¹

Various arms drops provided a total of 3,000 rifles and pistols, 3,500 grenades and 150 Stens, but no heavy weapons. Since many of Colaudon’s
maquisards
came from the towns, they had no idea how to behave with the peasants and farmers of Mount Mouchet who were their often unwilling hosts. In one typical crime frequently repeated, hungry young men from towns and cities would requisition for slaughter at gunpoint one of a peasant’s pair of oxen, unaware that the owner needed both to pull his plough.