Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (4 page)

Just occasionally, Klaus Barbie seems to have been cheated of a victim. Arrested with Jean Moulin was Raymond Aubrac, whose Jewish wife Lucie was also a member of the PCF. The mother of a young child by Raymond, she devised a plan to rescue her husband, based on a huge gamble: that his false identity as ‘Claude Ermulin’ had not been broken under torture. Two days after the arrests, she arrived asking to see Barbie at the Ecole de Santé Militaire. Smartly dressed and visibly pregnant, she called herself Ghislaine de Barbantine. Most French people avoided the sadistic Gestapo officer and his colleagues like the plague, so Barbie was intrigued and agreed to see her. He was smartly dressed, she afterwards recalled, in a light summer suit and pink shirt, and had an attractive woman with him, as usual – he enjoyed fondling a woman while watching his victims being tortured.

Lucie’s first request to see ‘Ermulin’ was rejected, but she returned on 21 October and succeeded in meeting Barbie again by dint of bribes to French staff working for the Gestapo. When he asked what she wanted, Lucie cried hysterically that she was ashamed to be carrying a child by a criminal like ‘Ermulin’ and wanted to tell him just what she thought of him. As she had astutely deduced, the idea of a wronged woman tongue-lashing a tortured detainee so appealed to Barbie’s perverted sense of humour that he sent for prisoner ‘Ermulin’ to be brought to the Ecole de Santé Militaire.

Apparently unmoved by his pitiful state after four months in the Gestapo cells of Montluc prison, Lucie raved at ‘Ermulin’ that whatever was happening served him right as far as she was concerned, but she needed a name for her child and expected him to ‘do the decent thing’ and marry her. ‘Ermulin’ was hardly in a condition to marry anyone. The whole point of the dangerous pantomime was to have him brought to the medical school for the confrontation. As the police van was returning him and Barbie’s other victims of the day to Montluc prison after interrogation, two cars closed in on it and automatic fire from silenced weapons killed the men in the driver’s cab and mowed down the guards who jumped out, save one who escaped. The prisoners were unharmed in the attack. By risking her own life, Lucie Aubrac had saved that of her husband.
¹⁰

Was that the truth? Accused of being the traitor who betrayed Jean Moulin and the others in Dr Dugoujon’s house on 27 May 1943, René Hardy was tried by a civil court in 1947 and a military tribunal in 1950, but narrowly escaped conviction on both occasions for lack of proof. When Barbie was eventually extradited from Bolivia in 1983, he was held in Montluc prison at Lyon, where so many of his victims had suffered atrociously. Throughout his detention, he repeatedly threatened to ‘tell the truth’ about some scandals of the Resistance. The following year Maître Jacques Vergès, Barbie’s lawyer, claimed that Raymond Aubrac was a double agent, working for Barbie.

On 11 May 1987 Barbie’s first trial for crimes against humanity – the only possible charge still legally valid after so many years – opened in Lyon. After two months of hearings, he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. In October a second trial opened, with Vergès determined to discredit the Resistance by proving his allegation of 1984 that its great heroine Lucie Aubrac was a liar and that her husband was the traitor who had betrayed Moulin, having agreed, when arrested in March 1943, to act as Barbie’s secret informer within the Resistance. According to Barbie’s testimony, he had personally arranged Raymond Aubrac’s seemingly miraculous rescue by his wife in return for this collaboration. On 25 September 1991 Barbie died, still unrepentant for his actions during the occupation of France, and the investigation was officially closed.

Two days after his death, a sixty-three-page document called
Le testament de Klaus Barbie
, but allegedly written by Vergès, circulated in French media circles. It included this allegation. Vergès, a shadowy Francophobe French-Thai-Algerian figure, who professed to be both a communist and a Muslim, was a personal friend of the insane Cambodian dictator Pol Pot and was best known to the general public for his high-profile cases defending extremely unpopular clients like the assassin Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, nicknamed ‘the Jackal’.

In April 1997 the Lyonnais reporter Gérard Chauvy published
Aubrac, Lyon 1943
repeating the accusations against Lucie and Raymond Aubrac, who sued for slander and demanded the withdrawal of the book. The Aubrac couple assembled a number of eyewitnesses to the events of 1943, including the man who organised the raid on the prison van, all of whom testified that Chauvy had never bothered to interview them. The tribunal imposed fines of 60,000F on him and 100,000F on the publisher. Their appeal being rejected, the fines were raised to a global sum of 400,000F.

Lucie Aubrac wrote several books about the Resistance and naturally did everything to refute Barbie’s story, but some people in France choose to believe Barbie rather than credit her with the rescue of her husband. Which account is the truth? After the liberation, de Gaulle’s priority was to restore the shattered morale of the French nation, so many heroes and heroines were created to bolster ‘the legend of the Resistance’. Lucie Aubrac was one. It is hard to credit the account of a sadistic torturer and murderer like Barbie, as manipulated by the Francophobe Vergès, but was he telling the truth or simply attempting to besmirch the record of real French heroes and heroines?

The Resistance numbered many women in its ranks. Some, like Aubrac, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who ran the Gaullist HERISSON network, the feminist Bertie Albrecht and Danielle Casanova, who died in Auschwitz, are famous. There were also thousands of other women who played their parts, exploiting the advantages of their sex. This became increasingly important as time passed and controls tightened up in both zones, since women per se
were not perceived as being dangerous by the predominantly male German security forces. Women’s potential for resistance activity was likewise underestimated by the Vichy Milice, whose members had grown up in the ultra-chauvinist pre-war Third Republic, under which women had no rights to sign contracts, own property, vote or hold public office – rights that would not be granted to Frenchwomen until after the liberation.

Notes

1
US casualties amended by the Statistical Services Center, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 7 November 1957, as quoted in
Encyclopaedia Britannica
2002 Deluxe CD-Rom edition.

2
Diamond, H.,
Women and the Second World War in France
, London, Longman, 1999, p. 60.

3
Lazare, L.,
La Résistance Juive en France
, Paris, Stock, 1987, p. 105.

4
Guillemin, H.,
Parcours
, Paris, Seuil, 1989, p. 400.

5
Doenitz, K.,
Memoirs
, London, Cassell, 2000, p. 409.

6
Pryce-Jones, D.,
Paris in the Third Reich
, London, Collins, 1981, p. 120 (abridged).

7
Lagarrigue, M., article in
Arkheia
,
No. 17–8, Montauban, p. 11.

8
Amouroux, H.,
La Vie des Français sous l’Occupation
, Paris, Fayard, 1961, Vol. 2, p. 58.

9
Also spelled
Natzweiler
in German.

10
Paris, E.,
Unhealed Wounds
, New York, Grove Press, 1985, pp. 98–9.

PUTTING THE DIRT IN ‘DIRTY WAR’

The concept of SOE stems from the very first days after the invasion of France in May 1940, when the Chiefs of Staff minuted the British War Cabinet that, should the French army and Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force be defeated, Germany might in turn be brought down in the long run by economic pressure and a campaign of industrial unrest in the conquered territories. This was followed by Anthony Eden, then War Minister, forwarding a proposal for an organisation to train agents and execute irregular warfare in German-occupied Europe with special emphasis on France, where any re-invasion of the Continent was almost bound to take place.

The new prime minister, Winston Churchill, was delighted and decided that the enterprise should be independent of the three services. The new organisation was, in the words of Hugh Dalton, Minister for Economic Warfare, to be free of:

… the British Civil Service [and] the British military machine. [It must] coordinate, inspire, control and assist the nationals of the oppressed countries, who must themselves be the direct participants. We need absolute secrecy, a certain fanatical enthusiasm, willingness to work with people of different nationalities, and complete political reliability. Some of these qualities are to be found in some military officers and, if such men are available, they should undoubtedly be used. But the organisation should, in my view, be entirely independent of the War Office machine.
¹

As indeed it was, except for borrowing of training personnel for instruction in unarmed combat, wireless transmissions and use of weapons – and for use of RAF aircraft to drop supplies and land and recover agents from the field. SOE was tasked, in the prime minister’s words, ‘to set Europe ablaze’. His private nickname for it was ‘the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’. Within certain limits, it did set parts of Europe ablaze, at the cost of burning also many innocent people, including citizens in the occupied countries who thought they were working with London to liberate their homelands, but were in fact being used as pawns, sacrificed in games of which they were unaware.

Section F of SOE, with responsibility for espionage and sabotage in France, was headed from September 1941 by Maurice Buckmaster, an Old Etonian who had been employed pre-war as a manager for the Ford Motor Company in France. His permanent staff numbered no more than seven, based in a flat in Orchard Court, off Portman Square in London’s West End. Buckmaster’s chief assistant was Nicholas Bodington, a pre-war Paris correspondent for the
Daily Express
, thought to have moonlighted there for British Intelligence. During that time, he met an extrovert French air force pilot named Henri Déricourt, who made friends wherever he flew, including in Nazi Germany. In charge of welfare and ‘prepping’ agents for their missions was an astonishingly cool and competent civilian, Ms Vera Atkins, who hid her exotic Romanian-Jewish origins under her very English manners. Recruitment and supervision of training was the responsibility of Major Selwyn Jepson, who used the alias ‘Mr Potter’ when interviewing prospective agents in English and French, of which his knowledge was so good that he could tell in what region of France they had picked up the language.

All this had to be done without the prospective agents knowing for what or by whom they were being interviewed. As one of them afterwards recalled:

I met [Jepson] in a bare office at the Northumberland Hotel and we talked together in French for three-quarters of an hour. He didn’t say anything at all about the actual set-up and at the end he said, ‘All right, I think we’ve got a job for you. You start your training on 1 August.’ And that was it. I still had no idea what I was actually signing up for.
²

The training course was so tough that a failure rate of twelve out of a course of fifteen recruits was not unusual. It included field craft such as recognising when one was being followed and techniques of losing a tail, and the use not only of British weapons but also of American and enemy small arms, which had to be stripped down and reassembled in the dark by feel alone. Target shooting was made more difficult by taking place at the end of an exhausting obstacle course. The course ended with parachute training at Ringway airport near Manchester.

In 1942 Buckmaster decided to set up a totally new network to be run by Francis Anthony Suttill, a 33-year-old lawyer qualified in both Britain and France. He may have been a good lawyer but, like Delestraint and Moulin, lacked the paranoia necessary for clandestine work in an occupied country. Déricourt afterwards summed up Suttill as ‘more suited to be an officer in a gung-ho cavalry regiment than for clandestine warfare’. In retrospect, that may have been a powerful reason for selecting Suttill.

He christened the new network PROSPER, after a fifth-century theologian named Prosper of Aquitaine. On 24 September 1942 PROSPER’s courier Andrée Borrel was parachuted into France in preparation for Suttill’s arrival. In the early hours of 2 October 1942 a signal flashed from a field near Vendôme, midway between Orleans and Le Mans, was spotted by the pilot of an RAF Hudson whose passenger was Francis Suttill. Once on the ground, Suttill immediately set about recruiting agents throughout northern France with very poor security until several thousand people were involved directly or indirectly, many of them knowing the identities of far too many other members of the network.

At Norfolk House in St James’s Square in London was the office of Chief of Staff to the (yet to be appointed) Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC). This was also the umbrella beneath which several shadowy sub-organisations lurked – in particular, the London Controlling Section run by Colonel John Bevan, among whose creative brains was Wing Commander Dennis Wheatley, later to be a world-famous author. Bevan’s predecessor, Colonel Oliver Stanley, had resigned rather than deliberately misinform Resistance agents regarding the Dieppe raid. This was done with a view to letting them be caught in order to reveal under torture their false information so as to convince Hitler that the disastrous raid which cost 906 deaths in the invasion force and saw 2,195 men taken prisoner was a prelude to a full-scale invasion. Bevan, in civilian life a stockbroker, was made of sterner stuff.