19
Friedrich Dohse did not have to wait long for the opportunity to test out his plan to establish Maquis officiels in his area.
In the second half of October 1943, the Wehrmacht commander of the region south of Bordeaux contacted him to pass on some intelligence from a captured prisoner about a Maquis unit in the wild area of marshland and forest near the small village of Lencouacq. A few days later, Dohse, on his way to Spain with Claire Keimer, called at the German officer’s headquarters where he was shown a map with the exact location of the old farmhouse in which the men were based. They were mostly fugitives from the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) programme, under which young Frenchmen (and some women) were sent to Germany to work. When the German commander explained that he intended to mount a full-scale attack, with heavy artillery, on the Maquis hideout, Dohse asked him to suspend the operation while he investigated alternatives.
Dohse was later to claim that this was to avoid bloodshed. Perhaps he did have such scruples. If so, they chimed most conveniently with his plan to launch Maquis officiels.
Returning to Bordeaux a few days later, Dohse called in Grandclément to discuss the possibility of persuading the young men at Lencouacq to become his first Maquis officiel. It was only then that Grandclément blushingly admitted that he was, in fact, in contact with the young Maquisards, who were already ‘under his command’. He promised to visit the young men, explain the danger they were in and suggest that if they cooperated and re-formed as a German-sponsored Maquis officiel unit, then they could all remain free and safe. Dohse agreed, suggesting that it might even be possible for him to visit the camp in person to seal the deal.
The sixteen or so men who made up the Maquis de Lencouacq included both Paul Salles, the ‘anonymous’ young man who had, a month earlier, guided Dohse to the first arms cache, and Guy Bertrand, the son of the owners of the Café des Chartrons. The group had started off as a small unit under the control of André Grandclément in the Sabres forest, close to where Grandclément had handed over the first arms dump. On the day after that earlier handover, Grandclément had met the young Maquisards in a local café to try to persuade them to join his original deal with Dohse. They had promised to think about it, and get back to him. But before they could, one of them was arrested and the group decided to flee to somewhere more remote.
Their new hideout was an isolated derelict house called Sescons Farm, which had been abandoned forty years previously. It lay in the shelter of two large oak trees in a forest clearing, twelve kilometres north of Lencouacq, where a small unit of Wehrmacht soldiers also had their base. There were several other small Maquis groups scattered throughout the area; a dozen or so fierce Spanish Republican communists lived in another old farmhouse a couple of kilometres away, and beyond that, deeper into the woods, two more groups had also taken up residence in some abandoned forestry huts. There were even clandestine ‘bistros’ established in local farmhouses to serve the young fugitives.
On 28 October, Grandclément, accompanied by Maleyran, Chazeau and one other – all unarmed – visited Sescons farmhouse and gathered the young fighters together.
‘Grandclément explained to them that, since they were not communists, the Germans had a high respect for their patriotic fight [to free their country],’ one of those involved remembered; ‘they [the Germans] would, if necessary, be ready to help the young men [with money and food] if they undertook to confine their activities to maintaining order after the Germans left and refrained from attacking them while they were still here.’ Grandclément then made his pitch: they could either accept the condition not to attack the Germans, in which case they could keep their weapons and remain as a unit under his command, or they could give up their weapons and be free to return to their homes without any ensuing consequences or reprisals; or they could, of course, do neither and be wiped out in a German attack. Finally, Grandclément made an offer. In four days’ time – at 10 a.m. on 1 November – Grandclément would bring Dohse to their base, unarmed; and after they had presented arms to him, the Gestapo chief would confirm in person the conditions which Grandclément had just laid out.
Having little choice, the young Maquisards agreed to hear what Dohse had to say.
After Grandclément left, the head of the Lencouacq Maquis contacted his commander and explained all. The senior man was horrified, insisting that any ‘surrender’ to the Germans along the lines suggested by Grandclément would be treachery, and ordered them to ambush Dohse’s convoy instead.
On the day fixed for Dohse’s visit, there was a furious debate within the group. Most agreed that Dohse and his party should be ambushed and killed; but one, a close friend of Maleyran and Grandclément and the son of the famous Resistance leader Colonel Rollot, insisted that they should welcome Dohse and accept his proposals. Tempers flared and there was some kind of council of war at which the young dissenter was condemned to death as a traitor. He was swiftly executed with a bullet in the back of the head and buried in a shallow grave near the farmhouse.
Back at Bouscat, Dohse had been forced to delay his departure by some minor personal indisposition. He finally left his headquarters around midday, accompanied by Kunesch, Grandclément, Maleyran and Chazeau. In accordance with the agreement with Grandclément, none of the visiting party were armed. Dohse, overconfident after the success of the past weeks, had not even taken the precaution of warning the local Wehrmacht units, including the one stationed at Lencouacq, of his intentions.
At some point on the journey to Lencouacq, Dohse’s Cadillac broke down, causing a further delay of an hour or so.
The hold-ups saved Friedrich Dohse’s life.
‘We put the ambush in place from 0800 that Monday,’ Paul Salles later recalled: ‘[Our chief] visited us shortly afterwards to check that all was in order, bringing two extra men with him. But for some reason, the Gestapo didn’t arrive when they said they would and, when 1300 came and went without any sign of them, we all returned to the camp, leaving one sentry on watch.’
Arriving at Lencouacq, Dohse’s Cadillac with its five passengers turned onto the twelve-kilometre-long unmade, potholed track leading to the farmhouse. They were travelling now under an overcast sky through flat marshy country relieved only by patches of scrub, scattered tall firs and occasional clumps of marsh oaks, whose leaves were already beginning to turn with the approach of autumn. At around 1600 hours, the group finally arrived at a small house set amongst pine trees. Maleyran explained that this was the house of a local muleteer who was away at the time. It was as far as they could go by vehicle.
The five set off on foot for the final kilometre, walking through sparse woodland and heath and skirting a small field of maze. About 200 metres from their destination they stopped, while Chazeau, at Grandclément’s suggestion, went ahead to warn the Maquisards so they would not be taken by surprise. Grandclément’s thoughtfulness saved his life and that of three of his companions. The sentry at the ambush site had seen the Cadillac arrive and dashed back to alert his colleagues. Paul Salles grabbed a machine gun and moved forward to ambush the party at the perimeter of the forest clearing.
Roland Chazeau had vanished from sight only for a few moments when the stillness was shattered by the rattle of machine-gun fire. A cautious reconnaissance revealed Chazeau lying dead in a pool of blood. Dohse and his party beat a hasty retreat to the Cadillac and returned at full speed to the refuge of the nearby Wehrmacht camp at Lencouacq.
The following day the Wehrmacht attacked Sescons Farm with infantry and artillery. Finding the Maquisards long gone, the soldiers razed the farmhouse to the ground and returned to their base empty-handed, save for the recovered corpse of Roland Chazeau.
Once again, luck had saved Dohse’s life. He boasted that this was ‘Stanislas’s’ second failed attempt to kill him. (In fact, though Landes was later to claim, along with several others, that he was involved in the decision to ambush Dohse, there is no hard evidence to support this.) The reality was that, through his failure to take any precautions, Dohse had acted unforgivably rashly and now bore the main responsibility for the unnecessary death of Chazeau, a valued collaborator, and for risking the lives of Kunesch and the others.
For Dohse’s rivals in KdS Bordeaux the Lencouacq episode was confirmation of their view that he was ‘half-French’ and ‘too soft’. Now he also gained a reputation amongst his superiors in Bordeaux and in Paris as an impetuous adventurer who was not to be trusted.
Dohse, however, true to form, simply ignored the criticisms and, instead of retreating to lick his wounds, set his sights even higher. In anyone else such an appetite for pushing the boundaries, both with the French and with his superiors, could have been viewed as some kind of death wish. But in Dohse it was just the product of his addiction to thinking outside the box and taking risks.