Voices from the Dark Years (56 page)

Most of the women were shorn, the majority because they had gone with German soldiers. Whilst this was regarded as permissible business activity for prostitutes, those girls and women guilty of falling in love with a German were universally punished, while wives of POWs absent in Germany who had had a German boyfriend risked prosecution as well. In the crowd screaming at and spitting on its victims, 18-year-old Madeleine Martin was so carried away by the general excitement that when a neighbour accused a woman of having denounced her husband, who had been deported to Germany, Madeleine took the scissors she was holding and continued hacking off her victim’s hair until she was completely bald. Now Madeleine says, ‘What a terrible thing it was to do! But at the time, I just wanted to hurt someone to make up for all the fear and unhappiness.’
⁶

A former Abwehr major extrapolated from his own experience to estimate the number of anonymous denunciations made during the occupation at 30 million.
⁷
Most of the letters were never opened because there would not have been time. Judging by the handwriting and spelling of those that were, the majority had been written by the poor and underprivileged to get even with those above them in society or enjoying some advantage they lacked. Specific motives varied from the desire to be rid of an inconvenient wife, a violent husband or a business competitor to family feuds and the hostility of the steward at Château St-Roch towards Renée and her family, whose arrival threatened to expose his illicit selling of estate produce on the black market. In turn, many of those betrayed delivered others to the Gestapo to save their own skins. A high proportion of the anonymous letters came from women seizing the power of life and death over spouses and neighbours. When those denounced were male, one might argue that in a country that denied women the vote or any other participation in public affairs, the writers were collectively teaching a lesson to the men who had voted for Pétain in the casino at Vichy.

What is strange, is not that the
collabos
should have been summarily punished at the Liberation, but that the violence usually died down after the crowd had had its understandable moment of triumph. A few men were lynched, many beaten up, others later put on trial, but after the humiliation of the women in Auch there was no escalation of violence, although the new police commissioner in Moissac noted the possibility of a later ‘personal settling of accounts by those to whom the official punishment did not seem severe enough’.
⁸
With much weaponry and explosives hidden away after the cessation of hostilities, it was inevitable that a number of
collabos
saw their shops or houses dynamited. In the worst reported incident, ‘ten masked persons went to the home in Moissac of two women recently released from imprisonment [for collaboration], shaved their heads and attempted to rape the younger one’.
⁹

The liberation of Moissac took place the day after that of Auch. When an FTP Maquis formation joined up with the Corps Franc Pommiès to infiltrate the town and clear it of Germans, heavy machine-gun and mortar fire greeted them from the Carmelite monastery on a hill dominating the town. Three civilians who strayed into the streets were accidentally killed and two others shot by a German firing squad. That night the Germans were trigger happy, understandably seeing ‘terrorists’ everywhere, but before daybreak the sound of firing died away as the enemy withdrew, dumping in the canal large quantities of arms and ammunition and leaving all their personal baggage behind to be looted by the locals.

The FFI ordered the gendarmes to stop the looting and tried to maintain some control over the jubilant population because there were still many German troops in the area. Proving the point, that afternoon they took prisoner 150 bewildered young non-German conscripts left behind without orders or transport. Church bells were ringing far and near and the spirit of revenge was unleashed. Eighty-three alleged
collabos
were arrested and despatched to the concentration camp at Septfonds, now used to intern those who had sent others there during the dark years. At 1 per cent of the population, this was about the national average – and interestingly mirrored the proportion that had been in the Resistance for any length of time.

It being a Sunday, Marie-Rose Dupont was with her son at home when a black Citroën with four men carrying rifles and wearing FFI armbands arrived and ordered her to get into the car. Neither then nor at any time later was she accused of anything, nor did anyone mention Willi. One of the men in the car was Albert Dumas, whose family were clients of the salon; the others she knew by sight. They drove her to the
collège
, now vacated by the Germans, which the FFI had made their temporary headquarters, and locked her up in a classroom with twenty or thirty other men and women. Unable to look at the others, she huddled in a corner with her eyes closed, praying to the Virgin Mary to let her return to her son. Two days later all the detainees were driven by the FFI to the gendarmerie in Lauzerte, 22km to the north. Since there were far too many prisoners for the cells to hold, they were locked in an office where they had to sleep on the floor, suffering frequent verbal abuse from anyone who felt like dropping in, but not otherwise maltreated.

In Paris, although German forces returned fire in self-defence, Von Choltitz refused to order reprisals against the FFI. Swedish consul-general in Paris since 1905, Raoul Nordling had heard that in the retreat from Caen 200 prisoners had been shot because there was no transport to evacuate them, and was concerned for the fate of the 4,213 prisoners held by the Germans in Paris prisons. He arranged a bizarre deal with Von Choltitz, by which all the prisoners were to be released in return for the release of five Germans per head. Von Choltitz knew perfectly well that the FFI had nothing like this many prisoners, but wanted the agreement to look good in Berlin.

A piece of paper was one thing, but Nordling was a man of action, who hurried to Fresnes, Cherche-Midi and Drancy to oversee the release of prisoners there. He arrived at Romainville in the nick of time, for the Russian SS guards were drunk and already planning a massacre before leaving. At Compiègne, he just missed a train of prisoners pulling out east-bound, but was able to have it stopped before the German border. Returning to Von Choltitz on Sunday 20 August after a thunderstorm so violent that many Parisians thought the city was being shelled or bombed, Nordling negotiated a general truce, during which the last Stabshelferinnen ‘grey mice’ were evacuated after selling their bicycles and stores of tinned food in a buyers’ market.

Despite the attempts of Alexandre Parodi to prevent an uprising that would invite wholesale reprisals the truce announced by joint patrols of German soldiers and FFI fighters with loudspeakers was continually broken between 22 and 24 August by communist factions under Rol’s provocative slogan ‘
A chacun son Boche!
’ (‘Let everyone kill his Kraut!’).

The resultant deaths on both sides were militarily purposeless, the Protestant bodies being laid in state at the Oratory and the Catholic ones at Notre Dame des Victoires. At one point during the truce, Parodi and two other Resistance heads were taken prisoner and conducted to the Hôtel Meurice, where Von Choltitz ordered their release and offered to shake hands as a courtesy between officers and gentlemen. They refused.

Until 23 August, Eisenhower planned to out-flank the Germans in Paris without entering the inner city, because he did not want to be burdened with having to feed the population. It was planned for General Omar Bradley to take the city ‘sometime in September’. Credit for changing this plan and advancing the date to prevent the FFI-Wehrmacht conflict escalating dangerously goes largely to Consul General Nordling, who persuaded Von Choltitz to allow him to take a motley delegation, including an otherwise unidentified Monsieur Armoux, said to be ‘head of British Intelligence in Paris’, through the lines. By sheer force of personality, Nordling managed to get his team to General Patton, who flew them to Bradley, who personally cleared an earlier liberation of the capital with Eisenhower. Nordling now sought de Gaulle’s approval, which was not forthcoming: de Gaulle disliked being confronted with a
fait accompli
but for political reasons it was decided to let General Jacques Philippe Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division be the first Allied troops to enter Paris.

While most PCF members obeyed party instructions during the Liberation, the renegade Georges Guingouin was one of only twelve later honoured with the title Compagnon de la Libération for disobeying PCF orders to attack the city of Limoges in July because he judged it pointless to ‘liberate’ the city for a few hours and retreat, calling down reprisals on the population, as had happened at Tulle. When his forces on Mount Gargan, totalling about 20,000 men, found themselves in a pitched battle with Von Jesser’s motorised columns, he managed to extricate them from certain annihilation, suffering ninety-two casualties to the enemy’s 340. His caution was vindicated when, instead of the massacres in Tulle, St-Amand and Oradour, the German commander in Limoges surrendered the garrison bloodlessly to him on 21 August.

Proving that disobeying orders was not a French prerogative, a Kriegsmarine Chief Petty Officer from Dortmund single-handedly saved the major port city of Bordeaux from widespread destruction and many deaths. With the Allies driving east from Normandy and northwards up the Rhône Valley from Provence, there was a danger of them joining and cutting off the retreat of German forces in the west of the country. Lieutenant General Nake of 159th Division had orders to demolish the port of Bordeaux and sink every ship there before withdrawing, as well as to blow every bridge over the Garonne, Dordogne and Isle rivers behind his last troops. Feldwebel Heinz Stahlschmidt, who was in charge of the demolition stores, takes the story from there:

I asked a French docker to put me in contact with the Resistance, and met these guys. They knew who I was and offered me 100,000 francs to destroy the demolition fuses stored in a secure magazine. Without the fuses, the charges were useless. I didn’t want the money. I wanted them to promise me a new identity, so that I could go underground and stay in Bordeaux with my girlfriend when the Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine pulled out. On the night of 22 August I set a charge that blew the magazine sky-high. After that, there was no going back. I didn’t return to Germany until twenty-seven years later, to explain my actions to the family. People there thought I was a traitor, you see.
¹⁰

However, the charges were still in place, so on 23 August in a typically Bordelais business deal wine exporter Louis Eschenauer, who had sold wine worth 10 million francs to the Germans during the occupation,
¹¹
agreed to talk to the German harbour master who, in civilian life, was a Berlin wine importer with whom Eschenauer had done business for years and with whom he lunched each week. His friend Commander Kühnemann agreed that the planned destruction of the port was pointless since Allied use of the Gironde estuary was interdicted by the Royan pocket of resistance. He revealed the contact to his superior, Lieutenant General Nake, who shared this opinion, but was himself ordered to carry out the destruction with what fuses remained. He was then offered a deal by the FFI through Prefect Sabatier and the mayor of Bordeaux: the Resistance agreed not to harass the German withdrawal if the Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine refrained from
any
demolition. Nake himself dictated and had printed the following announcement:

Notice to the population

As supreme commander of German forces in the Bordeaux region, I declare that no destruction will take place in greater Bordeaux, and that the harbour and bridges which are mined will not be destroyed, if the population refrains from all acts of sabotage in greater Bordeaux until the withdrawal from Bordeaux of all German forces.

(signed: Nake, Lt Gen)

On Saturday 26 August the notices were displayed throughout the city. On the reverse of the original was handwritten the second stage of the deal agreed by Kühnemann and Maj Rougès, local commander of the FFI:

It is agreed as follows:

All the German occupation forces must have left the city of Bordeaux by 2400 hrs on Sunday 27 August. The city, the port, port installations and bridges must remain intact. American and Allied troops and the Maquis may only occupy the city from 0001 hrs on 28 August 1944.

(signed) Commandant Rougès / Hafenkommandant Kühnemann.

There was little more to it than that, apart from a few uneasy moments on both sides. On 28 August Bordeaux was liberated bloodlessly only a few hours after the departure of Nake’s last troops. With habitual modesty, all Stahlschmidt said after emerging from hiding to marry his French girlfriend was, ‘It was the best thing I ever did’.
¹²

Estimates based on the liberation of Marseille and Grenoble on 23 August suggest that he saved the lives of 3,000 people – German and French. In the evening of the following day, after Patton’s tankers had pulled off the roads to allow three columns of Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division be first to enter Paris, the lead tanks drove into the suburbs, accepting the surrender of German strongpoints, more often delayed by the delirious welcome of civilians than by enemy action.