The liberation of Oyonnax on 11 November 1943 was a mere thirty-minute event, but it was a symbolic, even historic gesture.
This small town, sixty miles from Lyons, lies in the south of the Ain province whose inhabitants and terrain proved over the next nine months to be ideal for Maquis life and operations. The town’s ‘liberation’ was in fact just a parade, organised in the utmost secrecy by Major Romans-Petit, the leader of the Maquis in the Ain, and probably one of the best Maquis leaders in France. A First World War hero, he had come from Paris in December 1942 determined to fight the occupation. During that first year about one thousand men had joined him in the hills. Virtually unarmed, with very little food and inadequate shelter, their only strategic asset in the summer of 1943 was the rugged countryside in which they lived and the potential support of the inhabitants. The Maquis, he felt, needed a show of force, a demonstration that they were more than law-breaking hillbillies. With the town sealed off and communications cut, his men were drawn up in the town square, ready to perform an act they had been rehearsing for some weeks in the hills.
Dressed in his captain’s uniform, with white gloves and wearing all his decorations, Petit shouted at the top of his voice, ‘Maquis de l’Ain, follow my command.’ According to Petit, the small but rapidly growing crowd of curious sightseers looked on with, ‘… complete amazement, followed by delirious happiness. Men, women and children shouted, “Long live the Maquis, long live France!”’ At the war memorial, Petit laid a wreath with the message, ‘From tomorrow’s victors, to those of 1914–18.’ Emotional scenes followed a rousing performance of La Marseillaise, and with everyone in tears, Petit returned with his motley army to the hills to start the campaign against the occupation.
In September 1943, Richard Heslop, now code-named ‘Xavier’, had been sent by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, the head of SOE’s French section, on a reconnaissance mission to the area. In his briefing, Buckmaster told Heslop, ‘We need to know everything there is to know. This is an important area, and when we invade Europe your groups will have a major job to disrupt communications and delay German troop movements.’ Heslop’s mission was to assess the Maquis throughout the whole of south-east France. Depending on his recommendations, the Allies would decide whether or not to devote special attention to the area. ‘If you recommend that we go ahead,’ said Buckmaster, ‘then you will be in charge of all the Resistance in the provinces.’ Over fourteen days, Heslop covered the four provinces over which Barbie ruled. As if on a Cook’s tour, he was efficiently picked up and deposited in a seemingly endless review of Maquis camps, men on parade and caches of hidden arms. ‘What saddened me most,’ he wrote, ‘was the low morale of the men who had been hiding for months in the Maquis camps. They were depressed.’
The first area Heslop saw was the beautiful mountains of the Haute-Savoie. Fine for holidays, he concluded, but too dangerous for guerrilla warfare where Maquis groups could easily be trapped. The next stop, the Ain, attracted him most. The countryside was an ideal mixture of rolling hills, valleys, plenty of woods and hiding places, but also lush pastures suitable for parachute drops and landings. The Ain ‘was real guerrilla country’. Most important of all, Heslop was convinced that he and Petit could work together.
Within forty-eight hours of delivering a favourable report to London, Heslop was flying back towards Lyons with an American radio operator, Paul Johnson, an ex-OSS agent. Their network, code-named MARKSMAN, was set to revenge Barbie’s destruction of the other SOE operations in late 1942. Filled with enthusiasm, Heslop immediately began the routine but vital hunt for landing zones, places to store supplies, the selection of safe houses, particularly for Johnson to use for his transmissions, and, with Petit, the appointing of group leaders. But he also needed a quick boost for morale. The remedy was an RAF drop. As the parachutes floated earthwards in a series of drops during October, the young Maquis began to shrug off their feeling of desperate isolation and enthusiastically started training sessions for their campaign against the Germans.
The news of increased guerrilla activity in the Ain did not take long to reach Gestapo headquarters in Lyons. Reports from collaborators in Oyonnax had mentioned that the Maquis were carrying newly-supplied British guns. Daily, vital rail traffic was being disrupted as Maquis groups blew up lines in remote country areas. Even the special trains which had been built to clear the lines of explosive charges had been hit. With monotonous regularity, the Maquis were looting supply trains and carrying off consignments of food, which they now used to sustain their increasing numbers. Maquis groups had scored major hits, destroying the power station at Le Creusot and a major ball-bearing factory at Annecy. Wehrmacht patrols driving through country districts were being attacked and, on occasion, even completely wiped out.
Knab had to face the unpleasant fact that the Ain was fast becoming bandit country, damaging not only the Wehrmacht’s morale and prestige, but also endangering German security. He wanted to retaliate immediately. General Pflaum, commander of the 157th Reserve Division, agreed. With continuous rumours of Allied plans to land in the south of France, his operational priority was to guard the vital supply line to Germany and the Reich’s border with Switzerland. Pflaum’s immediate problem was that most of the troops in the area were reservists and garrison troops unsuited for fast operations. To Knab’s irritation, Pflaum had first, as a matter of routine, to consult his corps headquarters; the Gestapo had little patience.
On 6 December, in the small town of Nantua, just ten miles south of Oyonnax, an unpopular married couple who dealt on the black market and were known collaborators, were seized by the local Resistance, stripped naked, daubed with Swastikas and made to walk through the streets. Knab was determined on immediate reprisals. Eight days later, a special train carrying 500 German soldiers drew up without warning at the station and within an hour had sealed off the town. Throughout the day, they aggressively searched every house, arresting 120 men who were deported to concentration camps. Posters, signed by Knab, announced that the arrests were a punishment and a warning to anyone else who tried to besmirch the reputation of the German forces. At the end of the operation, it seemed to the Gestapo to be a good opportunity to teach another town the same lesson. A group of officers, with some milice, drove up to Oyonnax and arrested the deputy mayor, the former mayor and an industrialist. Their bodies were left on the roadside outside the town. The town had paid the price for its temporary liberation.
Christmas in 1943 was not celebrated by Gestapo officers in Lyons with quite the same merriment as it had been the previous year. Germany’s military position had deteriorated. The Wehrmacht, defeated in North Africa, was facing its grimmest test in Russia and Italy. Hedwig Ondra remembers that there was a stiff, formal staff party with Christmas decorations, but that afterwards she and a group of friends cooked for themselves some Austrian and German specialities and sat together talking about home. Barbie and the senior officers enjoyed the temporary seasonal truce with a feisty raucous celebration during which enormous amounts of food and wine were consumed. Nothing, however, could disguise the serious deterioration in German security.
Heslop and Petit had spent Christmas touring Maquis camps, eating excellent food which had been stolen from German convoys, satisfying themselves that morale amongst the considerably swollen ranks of the Maquis had improved. Thanks to Heslop, the Maquis were now well-armed, fed, and clothed, while their dependents were being supported with money sent from London. But these improved conditions did not conceal the very real dangers they faced. The Gestapo had captured ‘Brun’, one of the saboteurs at Le Creusot; he had been slowly tortured, and his naked body was left on the town hall steps as a warning. It was one of the more painful consequences of their gruelling war – that success provoked more atrocities.
On 9 January, two German soldiers were shot dead at the station in Lyons. According to Barbie, he was accosted by an army lieutenant demanding immediate reprisals to contain the fury of his troops. ‘I told him not to worry. I had a good idea. I arranged for some cells doors [at the Ecole de Santé] to be left open the following night when there was certain to be an air-raid alarm and sirens. Sure enough they went off, and the idiots in the cells thought they could escape. They came up the stairs, right into the machine-gun post I’d set up. We killed twenty-one of them.’ (A post-war investigation reported that twenty-two were killed.) Barbie’s justification was perversely self-serving:
We were in the right, because they shouldn’t have shot our soldiers in the back. It was against all the laws. We never thought that we would have to put up with such atrocities. But it had all started in Russia. That’s how I got into all this. But there, it was the women whom we really feared. If you fell into their hands … if you saw what they’d done to one’s comrades, then you really became hard. There was nothing else but to do the same.
But as intelligence agents both Knab and Barbie realised that, regardless of individual ‘successes’, the Gestapo’s resources were too limited to fight what had become a small army. Anticipating that the threat to German forces would grow, Barbie sought new allies or at best reinforcements. The choice was very limited. The local milice were given more responsibilities and even more power. Milice courts had been established throughout France in January, but in Lyons the ‘trials’ rarely lasted more than a few minutes; the conclusion was always the same. It was unusual for victims of the milice to be given a trial at all. On the same day as Barbie staged the prison escape, Joseph Lecussan, the regional milice chief, personally arrested eighty-year-old Victor Basch, the national president of the League of Human Rights, and his wife. He shot them the following day, sticking on Basch’s corpse a placard: ‘Terror against terror – the Jew always pays.’ The murders would have been of no concern for the Gestapo, but they alienated the milice even further from the French and diminished their value for the Germans.
Barbie’s alternative ally was the Wehrmacht. After weeks of discussions, Pflaum agreed to launch the first ‘search and destroy’ mission against the Maquis in France. The plan was to encircle the large area south of Nantua, between St Martin-du-Frêne, Artemare and Ambérieu, and launch a pincer attack starting in the hills around Brénod, sweeping down to the plains on the southernmost part of the Ain, nearest Lyons. No one would be allowed to leave their parish or village; there would be a curfew between 8.00 p.m. and 6.00 a.m.; no one was to be allowed to use a car or bicycle; all trains would be stopped and telephone lines cut. With the area sealed off and all movement frozen, thousands of German troops were to be deployed to comb through the villages and countryside hunting for the Maquis. The Gestapo’s mission was to exploit the disruption caused by the Wehrmacht and ferret out the whereabouts of the Maquis, using their traditional methods. The prize was the capture of the Maquis’ command staff.
On 5 February, as the German forces were manoeuvring into position, Heslop, Johnson and ‘Colonel Chabot’ (Henri Girousse), the temporary commander of the Ain, with other members of the Maquis command group, were slowly trudging their way through exceptionally deep snow in very hilly terrain towards Brénod. Heslop was expecting more RAF drops. Soon after settling into a remote farmhouse at Le Mollard, overlooking Brénod, a messenger brought the news that German soldiers had just occupied the town. Heslop and ‘Chabot’ decided to wait rather than rush off. Walking through deep snow was not only very difficult, but also left a very noticeable trail for the Germans to follow. For the moment, there seemed to be very little need for concern. It was only during the day, as the sound of gunfire from German troops attacking a Maquis camp on a nearby wooded hill intensified, that news about the scale of the German operation trickled through. At nightfall, Johnson heard from London that there would be a drop that night. Heslop felt that he had little alternative but to organise the reception party while Johnson remained in the farmhouse. The next day, the German attack on Camp Michel intensified. Several hundred German soldiers had gradually worked their way through snow drifts and were wearing the Maquis defenders down. Marius and Julien Roche, two brothers working with the command staff, watched from a hill as fourteen German trucks and artillery arrived in Brénod. As they watched, a Messerschmitt flew overhead firing its guns. Back in the farmhouse, Johnson had already seen a column of German soldiers marching up from the town towards the farmhouse. Within minutes, the house was empty and twenty-four people were trudging south-west towards another remote farmhouse, La Ferme de la Montagne at l’Abergement de Varey, known locally as ‘le petit Abergement’. For three days they trudged through the deep snow, with little food and under constant fear of being caught by a German patrol. Unknown to them, they were walking straight into the very area that Barbie had selected for his personal attention. He had translated the ‘search and destroy’ mission into a scorched-earth operation.
Barbie already knew that ‘Chabot’ was in the area. On the first day of the operation, he had sent ‘Gueule Tordue’ to interrogate ‘Chabot’s’ family; but the family was already in hiding and ‘Chabot’s’ father-in-law convincingly pleaded ignorance. Nevertheless, for Barbie, the hunt was on. His first victims on 6 February were in the pretty village of St Rambert-en-Bugey, at the south-westernmost tip of the operational area. Fifteen people were arrested and one Jew killed outright for resisting arrest.
He then set off for Evosges, another small but undistinguished village about ten kilometres away. Travelling behind him were five army trucks carrying about 100 Wehrmacht soldiers, and also several black Citroën cars carrying five collaborators including Lucien Guesdon and Robert ‘Pierre’ Moog. Inside his own car was Erich Bartelmus, one of the most sadistic torturers in the Lyons Gestapo. Driving along the twisting, narrow, snow-covered roads, it would have taken Barbie about an hour before he turned the final bend and saw the grey stone house of Jean Carrel, a roadmender, at the entrance of the village. Until Barbie’s arrival, the 150 villagers of Evosges had hardly been aware of the war. Throughout the sixteen months of occupation, they had continued their farming isolated from politics, only troubled by shortages and the price of their produce. Except for those few who had seen the rare German convoy speed down the main route national between Bourg and Belley, the majority of the villagers had not even seen a German soldier.
There are two accounts of what occurred as Barbie’s car stopped outside Carrel’s house: the one Guesdon gave in July 1945, and that of Georges Brun, a villager whose family have lived in Evosges since 1650. The accounts are identical. Before Barbie’s arrival, the village had already been surrounded by troops to prevent any escapes. Leading the way, Barbie burst into Carrel’s house and found him in bed. Outside, there was some shouting. Someone had opened the barn door and found it stacked with bags of flour, bearing an official swastika sign. These had been stolen by the Maquis. Dragging Carrel undressed down the stairs and out of the house, Barbie personally shot the twenty-eight-year-old man without any questions asked. Georges Brun, then aged fifteen, heard the shot as he and some other villagers were being herded along the main street towards Carrel’s house by German soldiers. All of them were ordered to stand in front of the body. Everything had happened so quickly that Brun, like the others, was totally bewildered.
Brun’s twenty-one-year-old brother Julien was one of the few who tried to escape with his lifelong friend, Jean Jiet. Both of them had been avoiding the STO and knew the consequences of arrest. At first they hid in a barn, but the owner, fearing reprisals if they were caught, screamed at them to leave. Running off into the fields they lay in the snow until they decided to make a bolt, but were immediately spotted. They were captured, beaten, and dragged back to the village.
Leaving the terrified group at Carrel’s house, Barbie walked thirty yards to the soldiers guarding Julien Brun. Without any preliminaries, he asked Julien to lead him to the nearby Maquis camp. According to Guesdon, Julien ‘categorically refused’. According to Georges, Julien just did not know the way. The result, testified Guesdon in 1945, was that ‘Barbie shot him immediately’.
Georges Brun heard the shots but remained mystified. An hour later, he was released and walked slowly back to his house. ‘When I saw him there, I became mad. You can imagine how I felt. I was only fifteen and there was my brother’s body. My friends had to lock me up because I was determined on vengeance with the gun I had hidden.’
After searching the village, Barbie left at about five in the afternoon. The two bodies were brought in and most of the young men said goodbye to their families and went into the hills. Georges Brun stayed to console his father. ‘We just didn’t think that they would come back.’
Early the following morning, soldiers again surrounded the village. Barbie felt cheated. The operation was three days old and he had not discovered any positive leads to the Maquis. Boiling with frustration, he resorted to senseless violence. Within minutes of arriving, he had arrested the mayor, Jean-Marie Jaquemet and ordered him to stand on the street with his family. A peremptory command, and Jaquemet’s house was set ablaze. While the Germans were momentarily distracted by the flames, Jaquemet told his wife and two daughters to escape. Seconds later, he was shot in the stomach. Seeing the soldiers pull back the bolts to shoot him again, the wounded mayor covered his face with his hands. The bullets blew his fingers off and he fell to the ground. His family, running across the fields, heard the final coup de grâce fired into his head. For Barbie, it was just the beginning.
Evosges was ransacked and pillaged. Eight more houses and the village’s six cars were burnt. Among the new arrests were Georges Brun’s cousin, André Madiglier, and Astride Brun, both of whom had given food to the Maquis. They were taken to Barbie, who was still standing by Jaquemet’s body and burning house. He gave the order and they were shot. Barbie then drove out of Evosges, no doubt forgetting at once both its name and its tragedy. Georges Brun still suffers today. ‘They would not allow us to bury the bodies for eight days. We had not expected them to be so cruel. We had not imagined they could do anything like this.’ The tragedy is compounded for Georges because he has no sons and with his death the Brun family, who have farmed in Evosges for over three hundred years, will disappear, except from the village graveyard.
Barbie’s next stop was Nivollet-Montgriffon, three miles northwest of Evosges. By then he had successfully extracted some accurate information, perhaps from the three young maquisards whose bullet-riddled bodies were found in the hills outside Evosges when the snow melted. After a house-to-house search the town’s deputy mayor, Marius Chavant, a member of the Maquis, was arrested at midnight in his house. He was shot fifty yards from his home for refusing to reveal where his son and the other young men from the village had escaped to. Four other bodies, including the village cheesemaker’s, were also found when the snow melted.
It was 8 February, the middle of the German operation. The disruption throughout the region was enormous but the military results were meagre. Hundreds had been arrested, many of whom would be deported and disappear for ever. Dozens of houses had been burnt and many innocent civilians had been killed in the most brutal circumstances. The cost to the Maquis however, although they were on the run, was so far slight. Heslop, also on the run, was moving west from Corlier towards L’Abergement de Varey, when he heard that the RAF was dropping supplies indiscriminately over the area. Most of it was falling straight into German hands. There was now chaos as well as grief. In an attempt to save at least some of the arms, Heslop began a cross-country march which ended summarily when he fell through a snow drift and cracked his shin.
‘Chabot’, Johnson and the twenty-two others had marched for three days to reach L’Abergement de Varey. As they slid down the final hillside towards the remote farmhouse, they were too exhausted to notice the signs of a sudden evacuation, only twenty-four hours earlier, by another Maquis group who had been denounced. It was past midday and informers had already alerted Barbie.
While ‘Chabot’ cautiously walked around outside the house, the others took off their clothes to dry, and lay exhausted on the floor. Marius Roche and his twin brother Julien, were amongst them:
We were exhausted when we arrived. It was the first and only time that we didn’t set up a guard at once. Even when a peasant woman breathlessly burst in shouting, ‘You’ve got to leave, the Boches are on the way,’ we didn’t take it seriously. It was two hours later that there was the unmistakable noise of Germans and milice driving up the long, tree-lined road, followed by an immediate burst of shooting. I looked at my twin brother, and said ‘Adieu’. We were twenty-two and inseparable.
Just grabbing their clothes and without a chance to dress, everyone ran out of the house. Miraculously, a sudden snow flurry covered the farmhouse, cutting all visibility. Ducking behind the cover of hedges surrounding the house, they hid and waited, unable to move because heavy machine-gun fire was raking the whole area. Only the farmer’s wife, in another house, managed to run. But after twenty yards she was stopped by a German dressed in civilian clothes, who spoke good French: it was Barbie. After a short interrogation he released her, but as she walked away from the gunfire, a German grenade fell nearby, injuring her slightly. The German soldiers had by now pinpointed the maquisards behind the hedges and began lobbing grenades and mortars in their direction. Some of the group, unable to withstand the terrible cold, crept back into the house. The shooting intensified and a maquisard fell wounded near Johnson. As the German fire closed in on their targets, both ‘Chabot’ and Johnson realised that the only hope for survival was to withdraw, leaving those in the house shooting wildly at the Germans. By the time they had reached the woods at the top of the hill, several more retreating maquisards had been wounded; there was no alternative but to leave them in the snow.
It was some days later that the eight survivors and Heslop returned to the farmhouse. Those who were wounded in the rush for the woods had been brutally treated, their faces completely crushed by hobnail boots. The imprint of the hobnails was still visible. Inside the destroyed building were the charred, limbless and unrecognisable bodies of the remainder, including Julien Roche. The owner of the farm had also been killed.
The operation ended four days later. In its wake, the Germans had left a trail of destruction, death and grief. The Maquis had been disrupted but militarily they were undefeated. Within days Heslop had contacted London and a massive re-supply operation began with as many as nine planes simultaneously dropping canisters over the Ain. With new arms came a flood of recruits, spurred on to join the struggle because of the recent atrocities.
Any frustrations Barbie felt because of failures in the countryside were relieved by 7 March, when the Gestapo in Lyons arrested ‘Chatoux’, an important member of the region’s Resistance movement. Interrogated in the Ecole de Santé, quite probably by Barbie, ‘Chatoux’ immediately betrayed his whole underground network. Over the next weeks, 101 Resistance workers, including the regional chief, Albert Chambonnet, were picked up at Barbie’s direction. The movement lost key supporters in the police, medical profession and post office, and many of those responsible for false documents and the distribution of newspapers; a devastating blow to the region’s fight against the Germans and a major coup for the Gestapo.
Gestapo successes against the Resistance were matched by those of the Wehrmacht. During the winter, the RAF had dropped supplies to the Maquis of the Haute-Savoie onto the Plateau des Glières, a high remote mountain table near Annecy. Down in the valleys, the Germans carefully noted where the parachutes were landing and in mid-February began to move thousands of soldiers towards the area. Now well-armed and believing he possessed the tactical advantage, Tom Morel, the Maquis leader, decided that the plateau would make an ideal location for a stand against the Germans. Maquis leaders throughout the region were invited to head for the plateau and join the trial of strength. Heslop refused. The idea was contrary to every rule of guerrilla warfare, which was to exploit mobility in hit-and-run tactics rather than stand and fight. His remained a minority view.
As more RAF supplies landed, German spotter planes pinpointed the maquisards’ positions and finally began their attack on 25 March. With 8,000 soldiers and two air squadrons on alert, the German assault began with a massive bombardment. Then the Luftwaffe and the troops, among them the crack Airborne Division, launched a massive attack. There was no escape from the plateau and only a handful of the 450 maquisards survived the battle.
Greatly encouraged by their success, the German High Command decided to press their advantage against the Maquis and on 31 March ordered 8,000 troops to be moved north back into the Ain and into the Jura to take part in ‘Operation Frühling’ (Operation Spring). Unlike the wild scrub and irregular wooded hills of the Ain, the Jura with its steep mountains, deep valleys and rivers was less suitable for guerrilla warfare, but the Maquis had always been stronger here than in the Ain and had for some time been cutting the vital rail link between Lyons and Germany.
During the first week of April, General Pflaum again discussed with Knab the exact locations where, according to Gestapo intelligence, the Maquis were concentrated. Knab wanted the attack to start in Nantua, then drive towards the northern part of the Ain, with special attention to the area around Oyonnax, Arinthod and St Claude in the Jura. Pflaum agreed. During the night of 6/7 April, German troops moved into position to seal off all access to the operational area. At 8.00 a.m. on 7 April Pflaum gave the orders for a three-pronged attack to start, concentrating around Gex, Oyonnax and St Claude. At his disposal were five regiments of mountain troops, a regiment of panzers, light artillery and infantry, and a regiment of Cossacks. Ominously, Knab had persuaded Pflaum that no French forces, even the milice, should participate in the operation. According to Pflaum’s post-operation report, Knab had alleged that ‘they were too timid in carrying out executions and in burning houses’.
On the first day, the German forces made no contact at all with the Maquis in Gex or Oyonnax, but in the north they were pinned down by heavy and accurate fire from well-fortified positions around St Claude. This picturesque town with a population of 10,000 sits astride the meeting-point of two valleys. Surrounded as it is by high mountains, access to the town is only possible along narrow, winding roads hugging the wooded mountain-sides. Surprised by the Maquis’ strength, and hindered by the terrain, the German troops had to wait until nightfall before they could escape. Their casualties on the first day were five dead and thirteen wounded. After quickly consulting Knab about Gestapo intelligence reports, Pflaum ordered reinforcements to encircle the town. The first maquisards were captured on 9 April; they were handed over for interrogation to the SS detachment led by Barbie.
Barbie had not left Lyons at the beginning of the operation. Mid-morning on 6 April, a squad of a dozen German soldiers led by Gestapo officers and milice drove from Lyons to the tiny and extremely isolated village of Izieu. Local milice had allegedly heard from Henri Bourdon, a farmer, that for the past year the village’s largest house had been used as a school and refuge for Jewish children, aged from three to fourteen. One of them, Theo Reiss, actually worked in Bourdon’s fields. Until then none of the villagers had been concerned for the children’s safety; the village was so remote from the war that there was no sense of secrecy about their presence. None of them even knew at the time of the two German lorries which had pulled up in front of the house, or of the panic that followed inside. The school’s director, Miron Zlatin, was told by the Germans that the children were to be evacuated for their own safety. Immediately suspicious, he tried to dissuade the Gestapo officers from moving the children; having failed, he told the children to pack their belongings and climb into the lorries.
Julien Favet, a farmhand, was working in the nearby fields at the time. Usually one of the children brought his lunch and, when no one came, he returned to the village. As he walked into the drive, he saw the children filing out of the house. ‘The Germans were loading the children into the lorries brutally, as if they were sacks of potatoes. Most of them were frightened and crying. When they saw me, they all began shouting, “Julien! Julien!”’ As he moved towards the children, a rifle butt was stuck in his ribs. In the midst of the confusion and noise, there was a loud shout. Theo Reiss had tried to jump out of the lorry and escape. ‘They grabbed him,’ remembers Favet, ‘and started beating him with the butts of their rifles, and kicking him in the shins.’ Held back by a soldier, Favet was helpless. ‘Then a German came up to me. I’m sure it was Barbie. For a moment he looked at me, spoke to another German, then said, “Get out.” I left, walking backwards.’
There is no reliable confirmation that Barbie did go to Izieu, but his involvement in the arrests and subsequent deportation is beyond doubt. At 8.10 that evening, a telex signed personally by Barbie was sent to Gestapo headquarters in Paris: The Jewish children’s home in Izieu (Ain) was closed down this morning. A total of 41 children aged 3 to 13 [sic] were arrested. Additionally, all the Jewish personnel – comprising ten people, including five women – were also arrested. Money or other valuables were not discovered. Transport to Drancy follows 7.4.44. Signed Barbie. Reiss, another child and Zlatin were deported on 15 May to Reval, Estonia, and shot. The others were dispatched to Paris. Just six days after leaving Lyons, on 13 April, the children and adults were reloaded onto another train destined for Auschwitz, where with just one exception (Lea Feldblaum, a young assistant), they were all gassed.
Barbie has persistently denied involvement in the Izieu arrests and deportations. Wanting to distance himself from any responsibility for the war crime of genocide, he insists that his role was purely administrative. ‘I signed the telex only because Eichmann’s people were not around at the time,’ was his explanation when questioned during the Seventies. He chose to ignore that the Gestapo’s Jewish sub-section was under his direct command and that he had heard a year previously, from other SS men who had returned from eastern Europe, the final fate of all the Jews whose deportation he had authorised.
With that administrative chore completed, Barbie drove straight to St Claude. The 157th Reserve Division had requisitioned the Hôtel de France as headquarters for the operation, and the Gestapo were allotted offices on the fourth floor. On the first day there was no Maquis to interrogate and Barbie, with his small entourage and one hundred Wehrmacht soldiers, drove eight kilometres south to the small village of Larrivoire. As in all villages, the Gestapo’s first suspects were the mayor, the priest and the schoolteacher. Drawing up outside the village school, Barbie marched in and demanded to see the local schoolteacher. It was Good Friday and the teacher, Roseline Blonde, was at home. As a detachment of soldiers went in search of Blonde, other soldiers had already set fire to farmhouses at the edge of the village and begun systematically ransacking the remaining houses, stealing, and drinking whatever they found. Each house was pillaged, then set ablaze. Soon the whole village was burning. Only the village sacristan’s house was spared. He was a known collaborator. After the mayor had been found and shot, Barbie demanded that the petrified villagers bring the teacher to him. But Blonde had already run into the hills.
Barbie already knew, probably from the village sacristan, that Blonde was a Maquis sympathiser who had allowed local maquisards to use the school for meetings, storage and to check on informers. But by the time villagers had found her in the woods, Barbie had already left with the parting threat that, should they fail to deliver Blonde for interrogation, the whole village would be deported.
Blonde was in a panic. She could see not only her own village burning but also, on the skyline, a fierce red glow from the nearby villages of Sièges and Viry. Their inhabitants were to suffer appalling atrocities. Blonde felt she had little choice. As she reluctantly returned to her village, she was assaulted with undisguised venom by her friends and neighbours. Without exception, they blamed her for their catastrophic misfortunes and insisted that two villagers escort her to St Claude to make sure that she did not change her mind. She left, too alienated from the village ever to return.
Barbie meanwhile had hastened back to St Claude. The Wehrmacht had finally captured some members of the Maquis. At the Hôtel de France, Munich-born Corporal Alfons Glas, a twenty-five-year-old member of the 99th Mountain Infantry Regiment, saw the uniformed Gestapo officer several times over the next two days:
He was very noticeable by his behaviour: presumptious, even arrogant. We were irritated that he didn’t feel any necessity to salute our officers. His belt was always crooked, leaning towards the side where his gun was hanging. He had a 9mm American pistol and always carried an American sub-machine-gun. He walked around town completely unprotected, the sort of man who really didn’t know the meaning of fear that he might be shot by someone from the Resistance.
On the afternoon of 8 April, Glas was sitting at a table in the middle of the hotel’s dining room on the first floor. Six or seven prisoners arrived in the hotel dressed in normal clothing and were ordered to stand with their arms leaning against the wall. The rumour soon reached Glas that one of the prisoners was Joseph Kemmler, an Alsatian Maquis leader:
When Barbie came in the room, the prisoners were visibly frightened. After questioning the others briefly, he turned to Kemmler, questioning him in French, and Kemmler just answering, ‘never’. Barbie hit Kemmler in the face with his gloved hand. He repeated his questions and then hit him again. After having been hit like this three or four times, Kemmler began to bleed from his nose and mouth. Barbie then walked towards the piano which was a few steps away and, with his gloved and blood-smeared fingers, began to play the first bars of the song, Speak to Me of Love. Then he went back to Kemmler and asked more questions. Again he only got the answer, ‘never’. He hit him again.
By then it was night and Kemmler was separated from the others and taken upstairs. The following day the interrogations began again, again in the dining room, although this time behind a glass partition. Glas watched as before: ‘Barbie stood in the rear. Kemmler was standing, alternately being hit by two Frenchmen with a rope, half-an-inch thick, which had a metal snap-hook fixed to the end. They kept hitting him between the shoulder and the thigh, never the head. Barbie asked him questions, followed by more blows.’ Glas watched the interrogation for about ninety minutes until Kemmler was unable to stand. The two Frenchmen carried him to a chair with arm rests, to prevent him falling down. Barbie then left the room. Glas, with several others, watched Kemmler sit quite still and then with a shudder lean forward. ‘About five minutes later, a urine puddle formed underneath his chair. That was how I knew he was dead.’ Kemmler’s half-burnt body was found several days later in les Moussières, brought there by Barbie himself when he raided the village and shot four men suspected of helping the Maquis.
While Kemmler slowly died, Barbie went outside into the Place du Pré, where the town’s population had been ordered by loudspeaker announcements to gather. René Chorier was typical of many who hesitantly walked towards the square. Twenty-three years old, he had dodged labour conscription and had joined the Maquis. It was only by chance that he was in the town to see his father when the German troops arrived. ‘They had machine-gun posts on all the roads, and even in the mountains overlooking the town. There was no chance of escape and, knowing that they were about to search every house, it was better to risk going to the square.’ Surrounded by more machine-gun posts, about 2,000 men were waiting forlornly to be checked. Amid considerable tension, Chorier watched as Barbie, rushing backwards and forwards, screaming orders at Wehrmacht soldiers, tried to organise a check of all identity cards. ‘It was taking too long, so Barbie just gave instructions and began picking people out at random. At about mid-day my mother arrived. She wanted to give me some food. As she began to walk towards me, Barbie went rushing up to her, shouting furiously, and gave her a kick in the buttocks.’
By 4.00 p.m. the SS had finally selected about 300 men. Chorier was among them. ‘One of the men began making a fuss about being arrested for no reason. They just shot him.’ On the side of the rail truck which carried the 300 to Buchenwald, the Germans scrawled ‘Terrorists from the Jura’. The whole town had been punished for the deaths of five Wehrmacht soldiers. As the prisoners were being loaded onto the train, soldiers under Barbie’s direction went to La Fraternelle, the local co-operative store, and plundered it for that night’s dinner.
The next morning, at 10.00 a.m., Roseline Blonde arrived at the hotel. It seemed to her as if she were volunteering for immediate execution. Instead, she became involved in an extraordinary display of a split personality. Sitting eating mushrooms and cream, Barbie interspersed his threats to have her immediately shot with a long monologue about the frivolity of women, the latest book he had read, and about football. Why, he asked the teacher, could French intellectuals not understand German charms and qualities. ‘You are an intellectual, you are a schoolteacher. You should be cooperating with the Germans.’ Blonde’s interrogation was broken up by a farce. A soldier, cleaning his gun, mistakenly fired a shot. The glass partition shattered and there was panic. While Barbie beat the soldier, someone arrived with apparently urgent news. ‘They all rushed off like madmen. As Barbie was rushing out, a soldier pointed to me questioningly, and Barbie just said, “Take her away.”’ Blonde was sent to Ravensbrück.
Over the next four days, Barbie rushed frantically and haphazardly through an area south of St Claude, from Villard-St-Sauveur to les Moussières, Les Bouchoux, Molinges, Viry and then north to Morez. In each village there are accounts of betrayals, arrests, intimidation, incineration, plunder, beatings, torture and finally execution. Read together, the eyewitness accounts amount to a description of uncontrolled, frenzied savagery rather than a calculated investigation to crush the Maquis.
On 13 April, in one typical encounter, Barbie arrested Baptiste Baroni in Molinges. To intimidate the Frenchman, he pushed Baroni outside and showed him the body of Gaston Patel whom he had just executed. Where, Barbie wanted to know, was the local Maquis chief Dubail, alias ‘Vallin’. Baroni pleaded ignorance. Acting the part which so delighted Barbie, he ordered a heavily bruised maquisard to be pulled out of a nearby Gestapo lorry and asked Baroni whether he recognised the man. Again Baroni pleaded ignorance. Casually Barbie told the maquisard that he was therefore free to leave. After walking a few steps, German soldiers shot him down. Now Barbie dragged Baroni to a farmhouse from which Dubail emerged. ‘Here’s your chief,’ shouted an exultant Barbie, ordering the house’s incineration. A few hours later, Dubail was shot. Baroni was sent to a concentration camp, but he survived the war.
With hindsight, it is not hard to judge that these operations were militarily abortive and politically counter-productive. Individual deaths could not destroy the Maquis. Throughout the two-week operation, the Germans went into villages and towns and, albeit temporarily, succeeded in intimidating those inhabitants who were helping the Maquis; but they rarely felt sufficiently secure to venture into the fields and forests to hunt their enemy. By the end of April 1944, they had good reasons for fear.
In his report to headquarters, General Pflaum suggested that the lack of contact with the Maquis proved the success of the mission and that the area was finally ‘clean’ – a self-serving exaggeration and distortion. More significantly, he revealed a major confrontation between himself and Knab. Senior SD officers, wrote Pflaum, had tried to give orders to the Wehrmacht, and at least two regiments had complained. Apparently they had refused to participate in SD atrocities. The SD had mercilessly burnt down Sièges, wrote Pflaum, because ‘the operation had not until then been sufficiently spectacular for them’. His only recourse after furious arguments with Knab was an appeal to his corps command for a directive about the SD’s authority over the Wehrmacht. He was reassured that the Wehrmacht was not answerable to the SD, even during a joint operation. His complaint that Gestapo intelligence was not always reliable, was also noted. Pflaum’s contemporary report was, however, ignored by a French court at his trial after the war. He was condemned for allowing soldiers under his command (according to his own report) to kill 148 people, many ‘while trying to escape’, to arrest 923 people and to burn down 204 houses. German casualties overall were six dead and fourteen wounded.
The arguments between the Wehrmacht and the SS were the backlash of their joint frustration at not being able to cause anything more than fear and considerable dislocation among Maquis groups. Railway lines were still being regularly blown up, convoys attacked and Germans killed. However, there was still no suggestion that German military control around Lyons was at risk. German occupation laws were still accepted by the vast majority of Frenchmen. Life in Lyons continued as normal: Knab even issued an order that any Lyons nightclubs which had closed were to reopen. Defiantly, the Gestapo were letting the townspeople know that they did not fear the imminent Allied invasion.
On 26 May the atmosphere in the city changed dramatically. In a prelude to the Normandy landings, seven hundred B17 and B24 bombers attached to the 15th US Air Force carried out a daylight raid over Lyons and other cities in southern France. Starting at 10.43 a.m., 1,500 incendiary bombs and explosives were dropped onto the city. Officially the targets were military sites, power stations and railway lines but, as so often, the bombers unintentionally destroyed much more. Houses, factories and offices collapsed under the onslaught. In Lyons, at least 717 people were killed and 1,129 were injured. Pro-German sympathies and resentment against the Allies rose proportionately. Within four days all the rail lines had been repaired, but the anger remained. Alban Vistel, the regional Resistance leader, cabled the Free French government in Algiers: Effect on morale even more disastrous than material effect. Population painfully indignant … Ready for all sacrifices but useless ones. [Resistance] are capable of cutting rail lines more effectively …
The town’s only consolation was that among the unintended targets was the Gestapo headquarters at the Ecole de Santé. The buildings were destroyed and an unknown but substantial number of prisoners were killed. A few Gestapo officers also perished. Those who survived could no longer feel immune from the Allies. Gestapo methods did not change. Only the venue. Interrogations were now carried out at the Place Bellecour.
The day after the bombing, a Maquis ambush organised by Heslop attacked a milice convoy. Twelve milice were killed and thirty-eight wounded. It was the second major attack that week. Earlier, over seventy maquisards had ambushed a German convoy at the Bois d’Illiat, killing, according to the Maquis, fifty-two Germans and wounding about one hundred and thirty. Barbie admits that attacks on Germans were answered by reprisals, but there are no records of massacres during the last days of May. The Gestapo were now fully occupied trying to counter an epidemic of attacks on the railways. Obeying the call from London, the Resistance were not only cutting the lines, especially those linking Lyons with Germany, but also destroying bridges and tunnels. Under Heslop’s orders, a Maquis sabotage squad destroyed a complete engine depot and fifty-two locomotives at Ambérieu. Another SOE group, PIMENTO, the only early one to survive Barbie’s first year in Lyons, wrought havoc on the railway lines linking Lyons with the south and east of the country. The preparation and waiting were finally over. The Nazis were to be challenged and fought to the bitter end.
A rash of major battles now broke out between hundreds of Maquis and the Wehrmacht. As in so many other parts of France, the news from Normandy hypnotised many with hope of early victory, inciting groups of maquisards around Lyons to declare their own liberation prematurely. Roads leading into villages were blocked by felled trees; proclamations were read announcing provisional governments; collaborators were executed; everywhere maquisards came out of the forests in a show of force.
On 8 June, in Dortan, a mile from the burnt-out shell of Sièges, a Maquis group proclaimed the Fourth Republic. For four weeks the villagers enjoyed their liberation and forgot about the occupation. The Germans, they felt, would be more concerned about fighting in Normandy. Their exhilaration ended when they heard the menacing sound of grinding truck engines and the news that ‘thousands of Germans’ were poised to attack. Most fled into the hills and woods. Effortlessly, German soldiers and contingents of Russian soldiers from the collaboration army led by General Andrei Vlassov recaptured Dortan, torturing, raping and murdering those who remained. All 178 houses in the town were burned down. As the refugees in nearby hamlets watched their homes burning, they were suddenly attacked by mortar fire, and by machine-gun strafes and bombs from the air. Across the fields, German troops were advancing in a vast chain. There was no escape. For four days the area was pillaged and the inhabitants terrified until the Germans withdrew without even bothering to conceal their activities. All that remained was the local château which was used by both the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo during the weeks as a convenient site for rape and torture.
Dortan’s experiences were a carbon copy of similar incidents throughout the Ain: Maquis groups seizing control of towns, villages and hamlets, barricading roads, and waiting for the German attack. With predictably methodical ruthlessness, the German arrival meant the destruction of the liberated village. At least 200 civilians in the Ain were shot dead during the three weeks after the Normandy landings. Panic gripped the Wehrmacht, milice and the Gestapo. Without provocation or reason, Germans passing in convoys took fatal pot shots at farmers in their fields, shoppers in the streets or old people in their gardens.
There is little eyewitness evidence of Barbie’s own activities during the June and July carnage. He was ‘seen’ in a few villages and there are accusations that he committed several murders. Ludwig Henson, the Gestapo chief at Chambéry who was answerable to Barbie, claimed at his trial in Lyons in February 1948 that ten executions in Arbin on 21 June 1944 were carried out on Barbie’s explicit instructions. ‘It was Barbie himself and his men who went to fetch the prisoners and took them to the place where they were executed.’ Another Gestapo officer, Ernst Floreck, in a statement to the Lyons court, claimed that Barbie was present and responsible for at least thirteen mass executions between April and July, killing at least 212 people. Floreck, who was himself a self-confessed torturer, described Barbie as ‘the biggest bastard of them all’.
There is no reason to believe that Barbie altered his methods of work in Lyons. At Montluc, which was his direct responsibility, the ‘cleaning out’ suddenly became a daily occurrence. But with railway lines to Germany routinely cut, deportation to concentration camps became rarer. Instead, groups of prisoners were regularly told to come out of their cells, ‘without your belongings’. Loaded onto lorries, they were driven by the Gestapo from Lyons either to isolated fields in the country or to small villages throughout the Ain. With their handcuffs removed, they filed slowly towards hedgerows or copses and were ordered to stand forlornly in a line or lie on their stomachs. According to the very few Frenchmen who miraculously survived their wounds, little was said besides a muted farewell. The sub-machine-guns (often of British or American make and seized from the Resistance), were fired and the executioners returned to Lyons. Pressure of work, indifference about the possibilities of detection and the sheer habit of killing meant that the bodies were invariably left where they fell.
Some victims were allowed to write farewell letters to their family, but those written towards the end of the German occupation were never passed on; they were destroyed by the milice or Gestapo. Henri Mazuir’s letter to his wife, written before his execution in December 1943, survived:
My darling little girl, Give my love to your mother and to Roger. My last thought will be for you and for my parents. A few tears fall on my letter. They are the last. They are the last gift I can make to thank you for our 39 months of marriage. My poor darling, you are very young and the pain will be cruel. I ask you to think of me in your prayers. God has not abandoned me yet, and in a few moments I will be able to hear mass and take communion. I love you and embrace you with all my strength. Be happy and make a new life … Long Live France.
By the beginning of July, the Lyons Gestapo’s ability to maintain the security of the region had dropped considerably. Although Gestapo bureaux throughout the area were still receiving reliable reports from collaborators and passing them on to the Wehrmacht, the swift battle against Maquis camps throughout the Ain plain had become essentially a military operation. Determined to restore German control over the vital Rhône-Saône corridor, at least nine thousand German soldiers were mobilised to fight the Maquis for the third major operation that year. The principal targets were the ‘free zones’ of the Ain and Vercors.
In the Ain, Nantua and Oyonnax were under total Maquis control; German control of other towns depended on the strength of the Wehrmacht contingent present at the time. The Wehrmacht objective was simply to kill as many Maquis as possible, and force the remainder to disperse. On 10 July the Wehrmacht, operating in fast-moving columns from several directions, reoccupied the Ain. Among those forced to move were Johnson and Petit whose headquarters were in the very pleasant Château Wattern at Izernore, just north of Nantua. Their tranquillity was shattered by the sound of a bombardment. German panzer tanks were heading in their direction but had confused their intelligence and were aiming at a château on the other side of the valley. ‘Petit ordered us to retreat towards the Jura,’ remembers Johnson. ‘There were three hundred creeps with us, including the sous-préfet of St Claude and his mistress, who was still wearing high-heeled shoes.’ As they withdrew, the RAF indiscriminately dropped tons of arms most of which were seized, to Heslop’s fury, by the Wehrmacht.
Two days later, seventy-two RAF planes dropped arms and ammunition over Vassieux, in the Vercors. Within a week the German army had been diverted to surround the plateau area which had been proclaimed a ‘Free Republic’ forty-three days earlier. Their attack began on 21 July. Within two days the French were crushed, claiming losses of 500 maquisards and 200 civilians killed, and 500 houses destroyed.
Significantly, the city of Lyons itself stood isolated from the seeping chaos and bloodshed in the countryside. The Groupe Franc, unlike the Maquis, lacked a hinterland into which it could disappear and the townspeople were unwilling to take risks. Under Barbie’s direction, the Gestapo had effectively limited potential armed opposition in the birthplace of the Resistance. There were isolated attacks but they were definitely counterproductive. On the night of 26 July, a bomb was thrown into the Moulin à Vent, the popular restaurant on the Place Bellecour, frequented by Gestapo officers including Barbie. No one was seriously injured. At noon the following day, Erich Bartelmus arrived outside the damaged building with five prisoners from Montluc, including the Maquis leader, Albert ‘Didier’ Chambonnet. All five were shot and their bodies left where they lay as a deliberate warning to others contemplating any attack on the Gestapo. The executions stunned the Lyonnais, who were perhaps unaware that similar shootings were a daily occurrence in the countryside. Loyally, Bartelmus, who now lives in Trippstadt, West Germany, has consistently refused to reveal whether the order to attack was given to him by Hollert or Barbie, but by then reprisals had become so routine that it is possible he simply cannot remember. Fearful of the inevitable condemnation, no Resistance group has ever admitted responsibility for the attack.
‘Operation Dragoon’, the long-awaited American landing on the southern coast of France, was successfully completed on 15 August. With the Allied armies in the north on the verge of a final breakthrough towards Paris, the German occupation of the south was doomed. Only the 198th and 333rd German Infantry Divisions, and the XIth SS Panzer Division, stood between the American Seventh Army and Lyons. On paper the German army looked impressive, but it was seriously weakened by insufficient supplies and untrained soldiers, and its numbers depleted by movements to defend the north. Berlin gave the command for them to commence an orderly, fighting retreat. At Gestapo headquarters, Knab and Barbie gave the orders for a final ‘cleansing’ operation.
Heslop and Petit, realising that the speed of the American advance depended on a clear run through the Belfort Gap, mobilised the Maquis to harrass any German defensive position. Throughout the countryside, Maquis groups launched into the final battle with savage gusto. It is a mark of the Maquis’s success in the Ain and Savoie, that the speed of the American advance and the rapid retreat of the Germans was far beyond the expectations of Allied planning staff at SHAEF headquarters.
Two days after the Allied landings, the ‘clearing’ operation at Montluc was accelerated. On 17 August, 109 prisoners, mostly Jews, were taken to Bron airport on the outskirts of Lyons, shot and buried in the bomb craters which pockmarked the field. Three days later, 110 men and women were driven from Montluc to the disused fort of St Genis-Laval. According to a sworn statement by Max Payot, a member of the milice who worked in Gestapo headquarters, ‘Fritz Hollert, my boss, walked up to me and rubbing his hands gleefully said, “Today we’ve got some good work to do.” At 7.00 a.m., thirty-five of us were in Place Bellecour. At first I thought it was going to be a major police operation, but I realised my mistake [and] understood it was going to be more executions.’ When the convoy reached the Fort, the prisoners’ hands were tied up, led in small groups to the first floor, and systematically shot. Payot sent the prisoners up the stairs. After some time, ‘the prisoners had to walk over a heap of their former comrades. Blood was pouring through the ceiling and I could distinctly hear the victims fall as they were shot. At the end the bodies lay one and a half metres high, and the Germans sometimes had to step onto the bodies of their victims to finish off those who were still moaning.’ The bodies, covered in petrol, were then burnt and the building dynamited.
While the fire was raging, we saw a victim who had somehow survived. She came to a window on the south side and begged her executioners for pity. They answered her prayers by a rapid burst of gunfire. Riddled with bullets and affected by the intense heat, her face contorted into a fixed mask, like a vision of horror. The temperature was increasing and her face melted like wax until one could see her bones. At that moment she gave a nervous shudder and began to turn her decomposing head – what was left of it – from left to right, as if to condemn her executioners. In a final shudder, she pulled herself completely straight, and fell backwards.
At Gestapo headquarters in Place Bellecour, prisoners were shot in their cells or at the top of the stairs leading down to the basement. The fate of the 800 prisoners still remaining at Montluc was seemingly sealed.
By 20 August, the German forces were falling back in the face of the advancing American army, fighting a stiff but organised retreat. In Lyons, the German military command under General Wiese was ordered to hold the city until the retreating XIth SS Panzer Division had passed through. It was a difficult mission which he fulfilled with ruthless efficiency, cool nerve and fanatical dedication. Confronted by an insurrectionary strike in Villeurbanne, he ordered Wehrmacht units to crush the uprising; they demolished blocks of apartments where suspected resistants were hiding, and indiscriminately shot anyone on the streets, frantically clinging to their fragile control. The city was gripped simultaneously by terror and hope. For the first time, the Gestapo were compelled to make compromises. In a signed letter to Knab, Yves Farge, a Resistance leader, threatened that Germans taken hostage by the Maquis would be executed as a reprisal should any remaining prisoners in Montluc be killed. Uncharacteristically, the Gestapo hesitated. While forty Jews were taken immediately, probably on Barbie’s orders, to be executed, the other prisoners remained for the moment untouched.
On 24 August, Cardinal Gerlier, horrified by the St Genis-Laval massacre, went to Gestapo headquarters, to plead with the Germans to stop the killings. That evening, Knab was again personally threatened by a Resistance messenger that there would be reprisals if any of the 800 prisoners were shot. According to Wilhelm Wellnitz, the Gestapo’s telex officer who left Lyons with Knab, the Gestapo chief was forced into concessions because many German soldiers were being shot in the back. The Wehrmacht refused to continue to support the Gestapo’s operations. At 9.50 that evening, the prisoners inside Montluc suddenly realised that the Germans had abandoned the prison. Outside in the streets, Resistance fighters who had come to help the inmates heard loud, rousing singing as the embattled and tearful survivors sang La Marseillaise.
It is believed that Klaus Barbie left Lyons for the first time on 22 August, and travelled north towards Dijon. Grenoble had been liberated that day and it seemed that German control of Lyons was on the verge of evaporating. The city was drifting towards anarchy. Over the next twelve days, the Wehrmacht, in spite of barricades and sniping, steadily patrolled the town, allowing retreating units to pass through unhindered. Vistel, realising the weakness of the Resistance, spent the last days of the occupation struggling to prevent rather than encourage an attack on the Germans. The Gestapo withdrew from the city undefeated, having methodically destroyed all their records. The absence of any documentary evidence successfully hampered French prosecution of former Gestapo officers.
According to a former American intelligence officer, Barbie confided to him after the war that he had returned to the city during that last week ‘to clean up the mess’. Over twenty of his closest collaborators, Frenchmen who could reveal the truth about his crimes over the previous twenty-one months, were murdered. His girlfriend was also allegedly killed. Although he now claims that his right foot was injured during a Maquis attack while he was travelling to Dijon, he told the same American that his foot was injured during the final massacre. He left the city a wounded man. Lyons was finally liberated by the American army on 3 September.
On 14 September, Barbie was recommended for promotion to captain. In his report SS Sturmbannführer Wanninger wrote:
Barbie is known at headquarters as an SS leader who knows what he wants, and is enthusiastic. He has a definite talent for intelligence work and for the pursuit of crime. His most notable achievement was the destruction of many enemy organisations. Reichsführer SS Himmler has expressed his gratitude to Barbie in a personal letter commending his pursuit of crime and his consistent work in defeating Resistance organisations. Barbie is dependable in both his ideological approach and character. Since his training and during his employment in the SD, Barbie has led a regular career as a director of the ‘senior service’ and, providing that there is no objection, it is recommended that he be promoted as from 9 November 1944 from SS Obersturmführer to SS Hauptsturmführer.