18
SOE had now lost its two largest and most important networks in the occupied zone of France: Prosper and Scientist. Extraordinarily Baker Street, instead of learning lessons, attempted to gloss their losses as evidence of effectiveness and success. SOE’s regular six-monthly assessment to Churchill, for the period April to September 1943, began: ‘The institution by the enemy of violent Gestapo drives against Resistance organisations has been the principal feature during the period under review. Despite increased repression however [we] have made progress and it is probably for this very reason that the enemy have intensified their counter measures …’
The report continued by speculating what might have been if the invasion which had never been planned had happened and their networks, instead of being destroyed, had survived: ‘If a landing had been possible [in 1943],’ it claimed, ‘the assistance invading troops would have received would have been tremendous.’
Finally, they blamed the French: ‘Resistance is still conditioned by the unwillingness of a large part of the population – and particularly [French] Army circles – to take any action before D-Day … Denunciations have become more frequent owing … [to] neglect on the part of the people to “do their duty”.’
Another Baker Street report of the same date took a different approach, lauding SOE’s results and euphemising their losses: ‘[There have been] so many acts of sabotage … in France that [we] no longer enumerate them individually … Continued Gestapo activity arising out of the special drive against Resistance groups in June caused setbacks especially in the Paris and Bordeaux areas … [we have] altogether lost four British officers [actually they had lost five: Suttill, Norman, Borrel, Rudellat and Hayes] and four not very important leaders of Resistance groups.’
In reality Baker Street realised only too well that, with the invasion fast approaching, they would have to rebuild these networks as a matter of urgency – especially in Bordeaux.
But their first priority was to clear up the wreckage.
In the last days of October, Landes sent a signal to London, probably also through Harry Peulevé, asking them to cease all parachute drops. Baker Street agreed and ordered Landes to return to London as soon as possible. Landes, who had decided that he could not leave until he had cleared up loose ends and put his networks into hibernation, told Baker Street that he would not be able to return to England until the second half of November at the earliest.
On 19 October, five days after the battle of Lestiac, André Grandclément passed on an unexpected invitation to police inspector Charles Corbin, Landes’s ‘double agent’. Would he care to join Dohse for lunch at the Vidal (Grandclément’s favourite restaurant) the next day? Fearing a trap, Corbin asked Landes what he should do. Landes tried to think of a pretext for Corbin to refuse. But eventually the two men decided that Corbin would have to brazen it out. Though dangerous, the meeting could even be useful, if Corbin could succeed in probing Dohse’s intentions.
The following day Corbin was picked up by a Gestapo car and dropped under the art deco iron-and-glass awning of the Vidal restaurant, on the Boulevard du Président Wilson. He was the first to arrive and chose a corner table, which gave him good sight of the room and all its exits.
What followed was classic Dohse – part fishing expedition, part theatre, part cheerful bonhomie, part cat-and-mouse – all dished up with a large dose of peppery, if subtle, persuasion to encourage Corbin to choose the right side. Apart from Dohse and Corbin, Grandclément, Maleyran and another young man (probably Chazeau) were also at the lunch. Dohse, who strongly suspected Corbin of playing a double game, was, as ever, charming and courteous – but utterly deadly. He first brought to the table the police officer whom Dohse had tasked with investigating Corbin. The officer laid out in precise, policemanly manner all he had against Corbin: he had given information to assist in the plan to assassinate Poinsot; he had sheltered British agents on the run; he was active in the Gaullist cause. All the evidence, the police officer concluded, pointed in one direction: Corbin was either sympathetic to ‘the terrorists’ or was himself one. Corbin, well used to police interrogation techniques, coolly denied everything. Dohse, possibly fooled by Corbin’s former right-wing credentials, or perhaps simply affecting politesse, appeared to accept the denials. His purpose at this stage was not to arrest Corbin, but to make him understand that he was firmly in the Gestapo’s crosswires and why, therefore, it was in his interests to cooperate. The mailed fist having been clearly exposed, Dohse returned it to the velvet glove and they all had a pleasant meal together chatting about politics and the war just like any group of friends out for a comradely lunch. Then they went their separate ways.
Corbin, deeply shaken, contacted Landes afterwards, who suggested that his friend should take himself out of circulation by feigning sickness. Albertine and Ginette were already safely in the country, so at least Corbin knew that his family was safe.
In fact, for all his subtlety and intelligence, Dohse had this time misjudged his man. ‘I thought he agreed with us … I should have immediately arrested him,’ Dohse admitted later. He had hoped to play Charles Corbin. But instead Corbin was the only Frenchman successfully to play Dohse, staying resolutely loyal to Roger Landes while successfully convincing Dohse that he supported Grandclément.
On the day that Dohse had lunch with Corbin, a new chief of KdS Bordeaux arrived to take over from Hans Luther.
Walter Machule, tall, corpulent, with a livid duelling scar on his cheek, was a forty-seven-year-old doctor of philosophy. Devoted to the good life, he was an accomplished pianist, notoriously corrupt and an energetic sexual adventurer who did not take long to acquire himself a local mistress. As far as Dohse was concerned, he shared one useful characteristic with his predecessor Luther – indolence. Machule had been keen to be posted to Bordeaux because it was regarded as a quiet backwater. Few if any German VIPs visited; life was good and the danger level low. If there was trouble then he had the experienced Dohse to deal with it. So, provided Dohse continued to deliver successes and not problems, Machule would support his approach over Kunesch’s more brutal methods. Which was just as well, because Friedrich Dohse’s plans were about to get even more ambitious.
On the face of it, André Grandclément’s importance to Dohse remained just as it was. Dohse allowed the Frenchman to hold court with Resistance colleagues in the attic bedroom (he had seen Louis Verhelst there before the battle of Lestiac) and gave him free rein to wander at liberty around his headquarters. Maleyran and Chazeau were also frequent visitors to the Bouscat attic and, together with Grandclément, dined with Dohse at local restaurants, usually once a week.
But appearances were deceptive. In reality, with the end of the current phase of arms recovery, Grandclément’s usefulness to Dohse was diminishing fast. In late October, someone came up with a solution: Dohse claimed it was Machule, who took a close interest in the Grandclément affair, but there is evidence that it could easily have been Grandclément himself. The suggestion was that Grandclément and Dohse should set up their own official – that is, German-sponsored – Maquis. The French would christen them Maquis officiels, or, on occasion, Maquis blancs.
André Grandclément would be allowed to form the core of a new Maquis officiel from the 250 prisoners the Germans had liberated, plus the 150 who they had refrained from arresting under the Grandclément–Dohse ‘deal’. The purpose of these Maquis officiels was to create a force capable of ‘saving’ France from communist takeover once the German occupation had ended. Provided the officiels stuck strictly to this purpose and did not in any way or at any time attack or harass German forces, they would be given back their weapons – with the exception of the explosive, detonators and grenades – and would be free from any further German harassment.
At first sight, his was an extremely radical proposal, since it was based on the premise that Nazi Germany’s occupation of France would eventually end. At the time, any such admission was regarded by Berlin as defeatism, punishable by death. In fact, the formation of the Maquis officiels was not as radical as it seemed, either for Grandclément or for the Germans. As far as Grandclément was concerned, it was almost identical to the proposal he had made to the Vichy authorities in Paris before his arrest: to hand over his Bordeaux organisation to the anti-communist Maquis formations which had already, with the tacit agreement of the German occupiers, formed within Vichy circles. For Berlin, it was very similar to their policy in Yugoslavia, where they had backed General Mihailovic’s Serbian royalist Chetniks against Tito’s communist partisans.
The proposal also had specific attractions for both Grandclément and Dohse personally. For Dohse, this was the perfect way to neutralise the Resistance and bring it under German control, while at the same time providing a means to rebuild André Grandclément’s flagging influence among his French friends and Resistance colleagues.
The appeal to Grandclément was that he would once more be in charge of a regional force which would, in due course, play a historic role in shaping the post-war destiny of his country. Dohse, playing shamefully to Grandclément’s ego, explained in detail what an important role this would be. Always quick to provide a cunning ruse with a cloak of respectability, he backed his proposition with a visionary thought. When the war was over, he predicted, the biggest threat to the West would not be Germany, but the Soviet Union. To face this threat, there would need to be a united Europe built around a Franco-German axis. Grandclément’s Maquis officiels was merely the first step towards this end, making Grandclément, he suggested, a pioneer in the creation of a united Europe, in the interest of both France and Germany. Dohse had, with deadly purpose, carefully taken Grandclément up the mountain and laid out before him all the land that would be his, stretching as far away as the eye could see and as far into the future as any man seeking glory could possibly hope for.
For Grandclément the dreamer, it was all irresistible, since it played perfectly to his sense of self-worth. For Maleyran and Chazeau, a German-sponsored Maquis officiel had more practical attractions. With winter coming, they had no idea how they could provide food and shelter for their young Maquisards – and especially those who had been released from German prisons under the Grandclément deal. This would solve their problem.
For Dohse, all the evidence suggests that this was, in fact, more than just a short-term artificial confection cooked up to cover a treachery. He really believed in the idea. It was exactly what he had worked on when, at Bömelburg’s request, he had acted as the secretary to the Paris-based Cercle Européen, the Franco-German body which proposed a united Europe, dominated by the French and the Germans after Nazi Germany had won the war.
Sometime in the second half of October, Dohse called an extraordinary conference in the casino-cum-officers’ mess housed in one of the KdS buildings in Bouscat. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss and agree the basic premise of the Maquis officiels. All Dohse’s senior colleagues were present, as were Machule and Grandclément.
After the meeting, Dohse took Grandclément to one side and informed him that he knew of the existence of the missing thirty-five tons of arms, which should have been delivered up under their deal. He insisted that these should now be surrendered so they could be used to arm the Maquis officiels. Grandclément prevaricated, claiming that the arms could not be recovered as they had already been distributed; but, to compensate, he would now actively contact all Maquis units outside his immediate control and try to persuade them to join the new Maquis officiels under his command. Dohse saw no purpose in pushing the matter and accepted the compromise.
What no one knew, either at this meeting or amongst Dohse’s superiors in Bordeaux and Paris, was that Dohse’s fertile mind was already ranging onto even more dangerous ground. He was beginning to assemble a plan which, if discovered, would have been seen by his masters ‘as an act of treason resulting in my execution by firing squad’. Dohse reasoned that the total collapse of Scientist had put the British in a very weak position in southwest France. Furthermore, it was obvious to him (if no one else) that an invasion across the beaches of the Aquitaine coast was not – and never would be – an option for the Allies. The supply lines from Britain necessary to keep an invasion force in operation in southwest France would be just too long and too exposed. He concluded, therefore, that the British might be willing to consider renouncing their plans for resistance in the southwest in favour of supporting armed Maquis officiels, which would stop France falling to communism after the defeat of Germany. This led Dohse to the even more startling conclusion that there might – just might – be a basis for a Grandclément-style deal with London:
It seemed to me very likely that the English would be interested in establishing a strong anti-communist force in France, now that it was clear that we Germans were going to lose … I was thinking about a meeting in Spain with Claude de Baissac and Grandclément to discuss the British renouncing their organisation in the southwest and providing instead moral and material support [weapons], so as to turn Grandclément’s ‘Maquis Officiels’ into a credible military organisation.
For those who find such an idea fanciful, it is worth remembering that Churchill, at the Tehran tripartite conference just a month later, also wondered aloud whether, with German defeat now inevitable, the real threat to the Europe of the future would come not from Hitler, but from Stalin.
Dohse’s final thought was the most dangerous one of all: ‘A meeting [with de Baissac] would also enable me to establish direct contact with the British, which could provide me with a line of escape, if my plans came to light, causing my superiors to take severe sanctions against me.’ This was extremely dangerous stuff – and made even more so by the fact that in early 1944 an Abwehr officer would do exactly what Dohse was considering he himself might have to do – defect to the British.
As Dohse’s thinking ranged ahead on the next stage of his journey, André Grandclément, though he probably wasn’t aware of it, was reaching the end of his. He had begun his relationship with Dohse as a misguided ‘patriot’; now he was a fully fledged traitor. He had started by handing over some weapons to save his men – and ended as a wholehearted and committed agent of influence for the Gestapo. Dohse had achieved his objective. The tiger had eaten his rider.
And so it was that as Dohse’s influence beyond Bordeaux grew, Grandclément’s began to dwindle. And as the Frenchman’s position weakened, he became more vulnerable to his many enemies. During the first half of October 1943, local Resistance leaders meeting in a council of war at a secret location confirmed the sentence of death on André Grandclément and ordered that he should be executed immediately.
This death sentence was confirmed by London on 28 October, when an official order was sent from the French counter-espionage service in the British capital to France. It instructed one of the French assassination teams in the Charente to kill not only André Grandclément, but also Lucette, without delay.