Voices from the Dark Years (2 page)

Since befriending a French
assistant
from Normandy while at school in Canterbury, I had known that RAF strategic bombing raids killed thousands of innocent French civilians during the war and destroyed entire towns, but it was not until after meeting the bomb-aimer that this book took shape as an account of the occupation of France, not as seen from London and Washington, but as
lived
by the French people.

President John Francis Kennedy observed that the great enemy of the truth is very often ‘not the lie ... but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic’. Due to the way the media were used for propaganda purposes in wartime, two contradictory myths became the accepted bases for the history of the occupation. In France, people said that Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had fought ‘to the last drop of French blood’ before running away in 1940. Conversely, standing alone against German-dominated Europe, Britain fortified itself with the counter-myth that the French army had cracked and run because our erstwhile allies lacked moral fibre.

‘It would never happen here,’ people boasted, forgetting how Britain’s cleverest and most privileged sons voted by 275 to 153 at the Oxford Union in 1933 that ‘this House would not fight for King and Country’. So it could well have ‘happened here’, but for the 20 miles of water between a largely unprepared Britain and her abandoned Continental allies.

Similarly, it is easy to pretend that the British would never have collaborated if conquered, yet London in the 1930s saw street fighting between fascists and communists and window-smashing of Jewish-owned shops. Long into the Second World War many Britons of all social strata were both anti-Semitic and either supported Hitler or wanted an accommodation with him.

On screen and in print, the German occupation of France is polarised as a period when the French people united against its alien occupiers and a handful of traitors working for them. The truth is that about 1 per cent of the population was actively pro-German and about the same proportion was committed to resistance before 1944. Finding work, food and heating, tilling one’s fields or running a business, or simply trying to keep a family together, were so time-consuming in that era of shortages, fear and repression that most French people could do little about the occupation except take François Mauriac’s advice: ‘Have eyes that see nothing.’

The largest single organised faction of the essentially urban resistance was the French Communist Party (PCF). Yet, controlled from Moscow by the Comintern, it
hampered
the French war effort for the first twenty months of the war in line with the non-aggression pact signed between USSR and Germany in August 1939 as a prelude to the two signatories carving up Poland. Similarly, in Britain the communist
Daily Worker
was banned for its defeatist stance.

When Hitler ignored the pact and invaded USSR in June 1941, the PCF leadership was instructed by Moscow to launch a campaign of assassination of German personnel and thereby provoke retaliation by the execution of hostages. On 13 August, two communist activists hacked a German soldier to death with bayonet and chopper. Eight days later, 22-year-old Pierre Georges, who styled himself ‘Colonel Fabien’, gunned down an inoffensive Kriegsmarine sub-lieutenant in a Metro station on his way to work at a naval clothing store.

A deadly cycle of assassination and reprisal was launched. This had nothing to do with French interests. Moscow’s aim was to tie down in a restive France many thousands of German troops who could otherwise have been sent to the eastern front. The Comintern always played a long game, and the second aim of its strategy was to divide and confuse the French people, leading to a power vacuum at the end of the war, in which the tightly-disciplined PCF could take over the government by political means or armed uprising.

The Maquis was altogether different, being initially composed of autonomous bands of young Frenchmen who took to the hills and forests to escape conscription for labour service in Germany. As a neighbour of mine recalled, ‘What could we do when young men with guns knocked on the door at night, demanding clothes and food against handwritten receipts they said would be redeemed by General de Gaulle after the Liberation?’

Despite lengthy negotiations and extensive bribery by de Gaulle’s emissary Jean Moulin, charged with uniting the mutually hostile factions of the Resistance into one integrated command structure, internecine conflict between the various political groups continued. Only after the Liberation were the myths of concerted heroic resistance to the invader invented to unify a divided nation.

Charles de Gaulle has rightly become the symbol of resistance to the German occupation of his country, but when it began he was just a substantive colonel, stranded with a handful of companions in a country whose language he did not speak very well and whose policies he often rightly mistrusted. To most of his compatriots, he was a runaway correctly condemned
in absentia
by a court martial to a traitor’s death.

Thousands of French servicemen in Britain after Dunkirk rejected de Gaulle’s appeal and chose to return home even when this lay in the Occupied Zone. Their legitimate head of state, Marshal Philippe Pétain, was a First World War hero and a popular and respected political figure of the inter-war years. Many of his original policies were laudable, if naïve – and yet the cruelty of his regime has become legendary. ‘I hate lies,’ he said just after the Armistice to a population disillusioned with its leaders. ‘I think of those who are suffering, of those who do not know where tomorrow’s food is to come from, of the children who will not hear this year the church bell of their own village.’

How could the man who said that go on to cause the death of so many of his citizens, including men who had lost their sight and limbs to win the same medals that decorated his own uniform? The marshal was old and too tired to stay on course when manipulated by more devious colleagues. Yet what perverted his policies above all else was the absolute power with which his fellow-politicians voted to invest him. When the National Assembly killed the Third Republic at Vichy, making Pétain a dictator, one solitary voice cried out,
‘Vive la République, quand même!’

Politics makes strange bedfellows, but no pair more disparate than Pétain and Philippe Laval have been harnessed together by its exigencies. Prime Minister Laval seems to epitomise the schemer avid for power who cares not whence it comes. A socialist deputy and lawyer who made his reputation successfully defending left-wing activists against the interests of the 200 families said to own France, he avoided military service 1914–18 and slipped around the semi-circular Chamber of Deputies to sit with the Conservatives, causing one enemy to comment that such a 180-degree turn was to be expected from a man whose name read the same from left or right. The energy with which Laval promoted the worst excesses of the Vichy regime earned him death by firing squad. Few mourned his passing, yet he argued to the last that he had acted throughout the occupation as a pacifist and patriot.

The term ‘collaborator’ came after the Liberation to mean a particular form of treason exemplified by Pétain and Laval. If French citizens, actively pro-German from political conviction, anti-Semitism, or because they thought Hitler was bound to win the war, were definitely
collabos
, what of the companies that made vast profits from the occupation and the great wine chateaux who slaked the German thirst for claret, burgundy and champagne? In Paris and other big cities, luxury commerce thrived and huge, untaxed fortunes were made on the black market while the aged and poor suffered hypothermia and malnutrition, yet many profiteers bought protection from one Resistance group or another and were never accused of any crime.

It was undoubtedly collaboration of the most shameful kind when uniformed Paris policemen rounded up 12,884 people in the summer of 1942 – including 4,051 children who were brutally separated from their mothers and left terrified in a huge sports stadium with no food, water or usable toilets – as a prelude to being herded into cattle trucks, destination Auschwitz. But did Louis Renault, who avoided a probable death sentence after the Liberation by dying from injuries sustained in prison while awaiting trial, have any choice about making vehicles for the Wehrmacht? The alternative was to see his factories dismantled and his workmen sent to Germany.

Lower down the social scale, if the only work available in coastal villages of the Occupied Zone was labouring on the Atlantic Wall, why
should
a man with a wife and children to feed have refused it, even had he been given the choice? In the Free Zone, if the only job a woman could find was as a shorthand-typist or telephone switchboard operator in a Vichy government department, did that make her a collaborator? And what about all the men who wore the many uniforms of Pétain’s regime in the police, gendarmerie, the Army of the Armistice and as
miliciens
?

An estimated 105,000
collabos
were murdered without trial during the Liberation and the purge afterwards. Yet, Vichy civil servant François Mitterand accepted the post of editor of L'Oréal-owned magazine
Votre Beauté
as a first step up the ladder that led to presidency of the Republic 1981–95, when he is said to have actively impeded the investigation of collaborators like wartime Interior Minister René Bousquet and Maurice Papon, who signed the arrest warrants that sent the Jews of Bordeaux to die in cattle trucks and gas chambers.

What can one say of the role played by the Catholic Church? Some priests were active in the German cause, blessing French volunteers who fought for Hitler; others gave their lives gladly in fighting the occupation while the Church hierarchy long turned a blind eye to the excesses of Vichy’s anti-Semitism in keeping with the Vatican line that Nazi Germany was a bulwark for Christianity against the godless hordes in the east.

Researching this book has been the more difficult because military defeat and occupation are regarded as shameful and fighting a powerful oppressor always seems heroic. Yet, was it heroic for communist Maquis chief ‘Kléber’ Chapou to defy the orders of his Résistance superiors on the day after D-Day and order his private army of 400
maquisards
to massacre forty German soldiers in Tulle – and then run away to let SS Division Das Reich hang ninety-nine uninvolved local men next day and despatch another 100 to concentration and extermination camps where most of them died?

It was undoubtedly heroic for French men and women to risk their lives by helping downed Allied airmen because the price they paid, if caught, was imprisonment, torture and death – not only for themselves but also for spouses and children. Was all their suffering militarily justifiable, when weighed against the fact that only
nineteen
of those airmen ever flew again in combat? And what about the many thousands of memorials all over France commemorating young men who died after the Normandy landings in 1944, fighting armoured cars and tanks with Sten guns and ammunition parachuted from RAF aircraft? Did their deaths serve any militarily justifiable purpose, or were they pawns in a cynical British deception operation?

Well over 60 per cent of the French nation then lived in rural areas, so hitherto unpublished accounts of the lives of my neighbours and acquaintances living in the small towns and countryside of south-western France are as valid as better-documented incidents in Paris, Bordeaux and Lyon. Against all the odds, Pierre Mignon – a patriotic farmer from a village 10km from my home – returned from the dead to write a memorial to the comrades whose emaciated corpses he left stacked like firewood in the camps, or who were shot by the roadside during the final lunatic death marches. In the preface to his account of betrayal and torture that took his courageous friends to agonised deaths in Germany, he wrote modestly: ‘I made some notes afterwards, so that my children would know what happened to us.’

Contrary to what the reader might think, those who shared memories with me and lent souvenirs and precious keepsakes for my research were not boasting. Imprisonment, torture and starvation leave a lifelong burden of shame on their victims that makes talking about their suffering extremely difficult. In all the years since her public humiliation during the Liberation, I was the first person to whom Marie-Rose Dupont spoke of that awful Sunday when her head was publicly shaved for the ‘crime’ of falling in love with a man in German uniform.

In France, the four years of the occupation are called
les années sombres
– the dark years – literally because of the shortages of fuel and frequent power cuts, and figuratively because few French people want to talk about them, even seven decades later. Yet, recording the experience of the occupation is vitally important at a time when encyclopedias and school books are being rewritten to present a sanitised view of recent history for students in the currently united Europe. Memorials to those who died during the occupation are sometimes reworded during refurbishment. A bald statement like
fusillés par les Allemands –
shot by the Germans – might offend today’s European partners and thus becomes ambiguously
tués par les Hitlériens
or even more anonymously
tués par l’Occupant.
So when the survivors die in silence, old myths become new truth.