Voices from the Dark Years (26 page)

Accused of being part-Jewish, star entertainer Sacha Guitry protested publicly that his name was not a corruption of Gutman. Perhaps as compensation for his hurt feelings, Abetz made sure he not only had the all-important sticker for his windscreen, but also some petrol coupons from time to time and a special allocation of coal for heating – two favours that would be held against Guitry after the Liberation, when it was assumed that he had done something underhand to merit them. He was also among those privileged to receive graciously couched invitations on embassy stationery from Frau Suzanne Abetz: ‘Ambassador Abetz and his wife invite you to lunch …’ It was always luncheon, to avoid problems of getting home after dinner before the curfew. After lunch, her favourite excursion was to a fashion show, for the business of
haute couture
continued to function despite textile requisitioning, thanks largely to new artificial fabrics invented in Germany.

For the less well connected, in the absence of taxis, ancient
fiacres
pulled by bony old hacks reappeared on the streets and
cyclo-taxis
, pedalled by men and women, also plied for hire on the former taxi ranks. When it rained, the ‘driver’ had only a cape for protection, but the trailer compartments – some closed-in and more comfortable than a motorcycle sidecar – might hold as many as three adult passengers. Some people, who before the occupation would not have walked more than a few paces, took a pride in ignoring these expedients and walking everywhere.

On 28 January the Gestapo claimed its first major success in Paris by arresting nineteen members of a network based in the Musée de l’Homme. Linguist Boris Vildé had returned to Paris after escaping from a POW camp and sounded out several colleagues including anthropologist Anatole Lewitsky and librarian Yvonne Oddon. They in turn contacted three socialist lawyers – André Weil-Curriel, Maurice Nordmann and Albert Jubineau – with a view to setting up escape routes for people at risk for racial or political reasons to get to Britain via Spain. A contact in the US embassy was also fed military information destined for London. The third activity of the group was duplicating digests of BBC broadcasts and foreign press reports in an attempt to counteract the flood of German propaganda. Their sentences were to be exemplary.

Those with a nose for business sniff every wind. The shortage of conventional motor fuel impelled the Société Imbert to buy a franchise for production of German
gazogène
generators. Mounted behind vehicles or towed on trailers, the wood-fuelled
gazogène
produced a weak, combustible gas that allowed a car or truck with an adapted carburettor to travel at medium speed on the flat and pant its way up any incline. Buses and other commercial vehicles in the major cities were converted to run on town gas. As in wartime Britain, the drivers had to refill the enormous collapsible reservoirs on their roofs at special ‘gas stations’.

The business community rapidly came to terms with its new super-client. Starting February 1941, increasing numbers of senior executives went on state-sponsored trips to glean know-how and technology from their counterparts in Germany that would serve France well after the war – especially in the use of artificial substitutes for natural products in short supply. On 17 March the Paris Stock Exchange reopened and saw a continuous upward trend in share prices over the next two years. Boards of management took advantage of Vichy’s fixed low interest rates to refinance loans and take out new ones. To these advantages would be added the Charte du Travail on 4 October 1941 – a charter of labour that banned strikes and made free trade unions illegal.

On 18 May a new chief was elected by the leaders of the Compagnons. Guillaume de Tournemire had been the youngest cavalry officer in the army and a hero of the colonial war in the Rif Mountains of Morocco. Affirming his personal loyalty to Pétain, he made it clear to Darlan that the Compagnons were not a Hitler Youth clone. Formally installed as Chief Compagnon on 25 August, Tournemire afterwards undertook a tour of inspection covering 9,000km, quietly spreading the word that the Compagnons were ‘a fighting force’.

Although the PCF would later claim to have been at the forefront of the anti-German struggle from the very beginning, its first tracts were spuriously back-dated to 2 July 1940 and signed by the party’s second-in-command Jacques Duclos in the absence of Maurice Thorez, who was safely ensconced in Moscow for the duration.
¹²
They were, in any event, simply ranting accusations of British and French politicians blamed for causing and losing ‘the imperialist war’, according to the Comintern line into which the party was locked until Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941, when Charles Tillon, who became head of FTP, estimated at no more than fifty the number of communists in greater Paris capable of using a weapon.

In July 1940 Antoine Avinin had started in Lyon what would become the left-wing
franc-tireur
Resistance movement. In Marseille, Captain Henri Frenay, founder of Combat and protagonist of the Mouvement de Libération Nationale, betrayed a certain ambivalence by writing a full year after the Armistice, in May 1941:

May Marshal Pétain give us the benefit of his authority and unequalled prestige for a long time. We are totally devoted to the work of the Marshal.
¹³
We believe de Gaulle’s movement is wrong. One defends a country better by staying in it than leaving it. Many undesirable elements are clustered around de Gaulle. In short, the MLN has no links with Gaullism and takes no orders from London.
¹⁴

If the home-grown Resistance was slow in getting off the ground, this early in the occupation few agents from London were active in France. Considering that accounts by agents began to appear soon after the end of hostilities in Europe, it is surprising that no two authorities agree a figure for how many were sent, how many caught or killed at the time of capture, or died under torture and in concentration and death camps afterwards. Part of the confusion is due to the reluctance of successive British governments to admit the scale of losses. Another reason why figures are hard to find is the internecine squabbling and betrayals of one service by the others. British Intelligence – Colonel Buckmaster’s Section F in Special Operations Executive (SOE) and Section RF in de Gaulle’s Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA) – often defied elementary security by sharing the same RAF flights to infiltrate and exfiltrate their agents, but each organisation had its own networks and agendas.

The best guess is that around 1,600 agents were sent from London into France.
¹⁵
Of these, fifty-two were women. Despite the feeling in the intelligence community that they were liable to change allegiance for emotional reasons and were physically vulnerable when caught, Buckmaster used them especially for the dangerous job of operating clandestine transmitters because he thought them less liable to be suspected than men when moving their bulky sets from one hideout to another. Of the seventeen women who were caught, twelve died – four of them at Natzwiller, a winter sports resort in Alsace that had been converted into a concentration camp.

Even in the
réseaux
set up by SOE, controlled by its agents who also operated the vital radio links with base and gave instruction in sabotage techniques, the couriers, informers, saboteurs and safe-house providers were mostly unvetted French men and women, posing the consequent risk of double agents and betrayal. Many networks collapsed through their own success: the bigger they became, the greater the risk of detection or betrayal.

The chief of de Gaulle’s BCRA
¹⁶
was André Dewavrin, who took the
nom de guerre
of ‘Col Passy’.
¹⁷
One of his first recruits to work in France was Gilbert Renault, a thickset, balding and very dynamic 35-year-old with a prodigious memory, who founded the Confrèrie Notre Dame network under the alias ‘Colonel Rémy’.
¹⁸
Starting in autumn 1940, he regularly crossed the Demarcation Line carrying bulky envelopes of military intelligence collected by his informers in Brittany and along the Atlantic coast, and had no illusions what would happen to him if caught. Once in the Free Zone, Rémy passed this to Louis de La Bardonnie, who lived only 12km from the line at his family château overlooking the Dordogne Valley. With the help of a small group of personal friends, Bardonnie made sure this got to Pau, where it was handed to the guard of a train leaving for Canfranc in Spain. From there, a French customs official took it to Jacques Pigeonneau, the Vichy consul-general in Madrid, who forwarded the vital envelope to London.

While Rémy risked only his own life, Bardonnie and his friends of both sexes had families to worry about. By keeping a transmitter furnished by Rémy, plus weapons and up to 10 million francs in secret funds at a time in his home, which was also being used as a safe house by three different RF agents,
¹⁹
Bardonnie also placed at risk his wife Denyse and their nine children. One of the group was a refugee from Alsace who had lived through the German occupation of the province 1914–18, studied in Germany and worked there for French Intelligence under cover as a journalist. Knowing the enemy well, Paul Armbruster persuaded Bardonnie to go underground using false identities after initiating proceedings for divorce, to protect Denyse and the children. He also assured the Bardonnies that their children would be left alone by the Germans because of their blue eyes and blond hair.

Two other members of Bardonnie’s
réseau
were anti-Pétainist freemasons working as pilots for the port of Bordeaux, who brought the U-boats up the treacherous Gironde estuary into port at the end of each foray and took them out again. To begin with, the information of this traffic they sent to London was considered ‘too good to be true’ and not acted upon. Their great frustration was that the immense U-boat pens being built by the Todt Organisation were never bombed during construction because, once completed in Autumn 1942, they were bombproof. Großadmiral Doenitz considered the failure to destroy the pens along the Atlantic coast while they were still vulnerable one of the greatest mistakes of the RAF bombing campaign.
²⁰
However, Bardonnie’s pilots were eventually able to claim the credit for eleven U-boats destroyed by Allied aircraft, only diverting suspicion from themselves by repeatedly telling their German masters that there must be a mole inside their own port administration!

Even for a man with Rémy’s nerves of steel, each line crossing was an adrenalin trip. One he particularly recalled later took place in the spring of 1941. To avoid identity checks at Castillon station, he had himself driven right up to the line by a doctor with a permit to travel in the frontier area. A farmer named Rambaud living just inside the Occupied Zone was to guide him from there to a neighbour living on the other side of the line. Seeing more activity than usual at the checkpoint, the doctor lost his nerve, set Rémy down on the main road and departed, visibly terrified. Walking the rest of the way, Rémy had hardly sat down to an early supper with Rambaud and his elderly mother when an armed German customs official rode up on his bicycle, his suspicions aroused by the doctor’s behaviour. In basic French, he ordered Rémy to accompany him back to the post.

Rémy was using his genuine identity card, bearing his mother’s address in Brittany. This now in the guard’s pocket, he was then marched off to the control point in the village of Capitourlan, desperately trying to work out what to do with the bulging packet of papers. Where the path ran alongside a sheer drop of several metres into tangled brushwood, Rémy wrapped the papers in his floppy Basque beret, thinking to throw it into the bushes or even to hurl himself down the bank and attempt to escape. Before he screwed up courage to make a bolt for it, the appearance of a second armed customs guard made him realise that if he had run, he would have been gunned down like a rabbit bolting from a sheaf of corn.

At Capitourlan, he contemplated slipping the papers to a girl who smiled at him, but knew many people trying to cross without papers had been betrayed by the villagers in return for a German reward. Waiting in the control post while the French-speaking lieutenant finished his meal, Rémy searched desperately for anywhere to secrete the papers with the two customs men keeping an eye on him. By now, he was soaked with nervous perspiration and fear was making him tremble. His wife and children were waiting for him in Ste-Foy-la-Grande, a mere 18km away in the Free Zone. Would he ever see them again?

‘What were you doing in that farm by the Line?’ was the lieutenant’s first question.

‘Trying to sell Monsieur Rambaud some fire insurance.’ Rémy picked up his ID card and pointed to his declared profession:
Inspecteur d’assurances.

‘
Also
,
Versicherung!
And what company do you work for?’

Wanting to be out of the border post as quickly as possible, Rémy blurted the name of the only German-sounding company he knew: ‘Zürich Assurances.’