CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
POW Camp 63 Brienne le Chateâu, France [Kriegsgefangenenpost 62: POW Post Office], September 1, 1954
This was an important day for the camp. The operation of the prisoner facilities and labor force was being turned over to the newly reorganized French army. This was the prisoners’ opportunity to meet the new commandant–the first French officer to take over an American or British base. It was much heralded in town—Brienne le Chateâu—and in the region—Bar-sur-Aube, Troyes, Chaumont, and Saint Dizier newspapers and magazines. There was even a mention in France Soir in Paris the next day. It was a matter of monumental indifference to the prisoners. That day was regarded as no different from the day before; none of those days were another day in paradise, or even the upgrade to the equivalent of a Parisian slum.
At ten in the morning all prisoners were brought back from their now far-flung fields of labor disarming mines and as slave labor for local farmers. The Americans started the practice, and it was continued by the British during their turn at running the camp. The unspoken policy was akin to the black market in Germany, but it had a distinct stamp of French flair—please the officers and guides of the camp with profits over and above their military salaries, please the townspeople and farmers who benefited from having free labor, and the concerns of the prisoner/slaves be damned. From September 1945 on, it was estimated by the French authorities that two thousand prisoners were being maimed and killed each month in accidents.
Outgoing British camp commandant Lieutenant General Sir Cyril Goeffrey Robert Hill-Brownwell, RA, stood before the assembled prisoners and announced, “Per orders from SHAEF headquarters, the American and British occupation of the prisoner of war system comes to an end today. Henceforward, the French army will assume its rightful role as the master of its own destiny in matters military in France. We have the honor to be the first American or British base to turn over command to the French, and it is particularly fitting that the new commandant is to be Lieutenant Général de division Étienne Malboeuf, hero of the Battle of Berlin. I give you, with pride and pleasure, General Malboeuf.”
Antoine and his Gebirgsjägers remained at attention with only their facial expressions telling of their intense hatred for the man. Each of the former French officers of the 33rd Waffen-Grenadier SS Division remembered with a fiery exactness the man who had served as the second in command to Maréchal de France [Marshal of France] Philippe François Marie Leclerc de Hauteclocque, and who had ordered the summary execution of what the French believed were the last twelve men who served the Nazis with great courage and pitiless excess since the unit was established in 1942.
The men had been defeated, captured, and rendered defenseless in the last few days of the war. The scene was a clearing in a woodland near the Bavarian village of Karlstein. They were brought before General Malboeuf of Leclerk’s Second Armored Division, a man who walked with the strutting pride of a martinet in front of the wholly conquered men. His face assumed the disdainful and condescending expression of a haughty great avenger—the god of the day. After a stinging condemnation of each man as a traitor to his country and to civilized humanity, he turned his back to them, and, with a mere flicking of his swagger stick, ordered the firing squad to machine gun the prisoners. He was not aware that another fourteen French members of the 33rd Division witnessed the executions. It would not have mattered a whit to him anyway, and no one was ever to hear about or from those men. They were subsequently captured by the Red Army and eventually transported to Siberian gulags.
The hauteur and rigid pomposity of the French general was unchanged on this day as he stood in front of the helpless prisoners from his demeanor on that dreadful day in 1945 when the atrocity was committed. His uniform was perfectly tailored—a new one in the cavalry style, personally designed by the general himself. His képi of a ereal de division—with its red top, wide brim, high cap, and wide black band bearing a striking gold oakleaf cluster—his knee-high riding boots, polished to a degree that they reflected the sun, his epaulets with three stars, and his spotless freshly pressed coat, blouse, and trousers bespoke a man of supreme authority, inflexible rigidity, and an insufferable dandy. His vanity was stroked by his wearing the medals he had won—not just the campaign ribbons. He was less a handsome man than he was regal with a thick crop of well-coifed silver-white hair without the slightest hint of balding. He carried a hardwood swagger stick containing a concealed blade under his left armpit, and affectation he had copied from American General George S. Patton.
Gen. Malbeouf spoke in a high-pitched, almost falsetto voice, “Stand at attention, defeated German swine! You are in this corrections camp to make restitution for your crimes during the recent war which you started, and which you lost. When you have paid the uttermost farthing, you will be returned to your country of origin to join those unhappy souls living in poverty and misery brought on by your military misadventures. You will work, and you will obey. Your new masters will tolerate no one who is a slacker and no one who will not obey instantly.
“You will not look a guard or an officer in the eye. You will never speak unless spoken to. When you walk, you will look down at the ground. When you approach a gate or a door, you will wait until a guard appears and gives you permission. You will not register complaints. You will not ask for more food, better clothing, or improved housing. You do not deserve even what you have or will yet be given. Remember when you used to say, ‘Es ist nicht ein Mann; es ist ein Jude?’ [‘It is not a man; it is a Jew.’] You are now the Jews. You once brutalized and tortured the French people. Now you will feel the sting of their hatred and righteous wrath. You are dismissed. Get back to work.”
Antoine watched the general strut past the front row of prisoners. One man made the mistake of looking up at the officer and received a hard swipe of Malbeouf’s swagger stick, an object lesson for the first day. Antoine and his Gebirgsjägers were kicked, shoved, and driven with cattle prods to their work sites and began another day of unearthing mines and disarming them. Gen. Malbeouf was driven by his staff car to his house in the Hôtel de ville Square in Brienne-le-Château for a celebratory picnic with the mayors of the region’s towns, the sheriffs, the French army officers in the Aube department in north-central France, and the American and British army officers who were preparing for their return to the United States and the UK. Malbeouf did not approve of women being invited to such important gatherings.
Malbeouf expressed his personal gratitude to Lieutenant General Sir Cyril Goeffrey Robert Hill-Brownwell, RA for the generosity of the United States which provided the slave labor for the now French camps—740,000 of them (with the promise of 560,000 more) over the course of the upcoming year. The British were credited with handling the administration of the huge prisoner transfer. The annual death rates for the prisoners held in American-run camps—as brutal and neglectful as they were—was about one percent. The French succeeded in raising that number to 2.6 percent. On one occasion during the period of internment, nearly 1000 SS officers were poisoned to death by bread laced with arsenic.
Malbeouf and his guests enjoyed a sumptuous déjeuner of pâté de Foie Gras, Salade Nicoise, savory buckwheat galette filled with ham and cheese, and for dessert, pain au chocolat and Croque Madame. They quaffed Brut Réserve champagne from the house of Billecart-Salmon flown in from Paris for the occasion. The one meal of the day for the POWs and Disarmed Persons was a further lesson and warning for them: grass and weeds picked by their own hands and placed in a tin can containing a thin soup canned specially for the French prisoners. It was more than evident that Gen. Malbeouf and his Frenchmen and Lt. Gen. Hill-Brownwell and his Brits intended for them to die in this place and be forgotten. It was one of the few times the French and the British agreed on anything, and it was cause for another round of champagne.
Over the next several weeks, the men became emaciated and suffered raging dysentery. Many were too weak to dig latrine trenches and few could make it to such a trench if one were present. They were packed into crowded conditions so severe that many could not get to food when it was made available by dumping it on the ground. The slit trenches which were still open were so crowded that many men simply lay down and fell asleep in their own excrement, too exhausted to move or to care. Those men died. None of the French guards made a move to help them, and there was no medical assistance of any kind.
The irony of the camp was that many of the men were nothing more than sharecropper farmers and unskilled workingmen. They were simple and ignorant, and even if they had been soldiers, they were more victims of the Nazis than they were perpetrators. Work results fell to a minimum despite the vicious beatings delivered upon slackers. The world of the French slave labor POW camp became a Hobbesian nightmare peopled by zombies, many of them having lost their minds. Some of those used their last vestiges of strength to make an insane and suicidal dash for the river to get something to drink and were strafed with machine gun fire.
Antoine and his men were an exception to the starvation. The ODESSA and their former providers—American corporal Jimmie Clemmons and his black markeeters—who brought in food for the Gebirgsjägers in return for the promise of a larger share of the Nazi gold they were assured would be available to them once Jérôme Christophe Mailhot was able to escape with the help of the ODESSA. They were recognized as being able to work and joined approximately four thousand other men who were able to be productive to one degree or another. They were trucked to labor on farms, the minefields having been largely sanitized.
The trucks left the camp at six in the morning on the dot and returned at eight in the evening with equal precision. Any German prisoners who were so exhausted that they staggered, fell down, or lagged behind were clubbed to death—not being considered to be worth a bullet to the head. The bodies were dragged to the side of the road by the other prisoners and left there to be picked up by a burial brigade when they could get to them. Not a few of the men intentionally fell to their knees and awaited the inevitable, preferring a quick death to the slow starvation back at POW Camp 63, which was known to the prisoners as the “killing fields.”
French Officers Mess Recipes
Croque Madame—Serves 4
Ingredients
Dry—3 tbsps all-purpose flour, ¼ tsp salt, ⅛ tsp black pepper, ⅛ tsp freshly grated nutmeg, 3½ oz (1⅓ cps) coarsely grated Gruyère cheese, 8 slices firm white sandwich bread, ½ lb thinly sliced high quality cooked ham, 4 lg eggs. Liquid—5 tbsps unsalted butter, 2 cps whole milk, 4 tsps Dijon mustard
Preparation
Sauce:
Melt 3 tbsps butter in a 1–1½-qt heavy saucepan over moderately low heat, then whisk in flour and cook roux, whisking, 3 mins. Whisk in milk and bring to a boil, whisking constantly. Reduce heat and simmer, whisking occasionally, 5 min. Whisk in salt, pepper, nutmeg, and ⅓ cup cheese until cheese is melted. Remove from heat and cover surface directly with a sheet of wax paper.
Sandwiches:
-Spread 1½ tbsps sauce evenly over each of 4 slices of bread, then sprinkle evenly with remaining cheese~¼ cp per slice. Spread mustard evenly on remaining 4 bread slices and top with ham, dividing it evenly, then invert onto cheese-topped bread to form sandwiches.
-Lightly oil a 15- by 10-inch shallow baking pan.
-Melt 1 tbsp butter in a 12-in. nonstick skillet over moderately low heat, then cook sandwiches, turning over once until golden, 3–4 min. total. Remove from heat and transfer sandwiches to baking pan, then wipe out skillet with paper towels.
-Preheat broiler. Top each sandwich with ⅓ cp sauce, spreading evenly. Broil sandwiches 4–5 inches from heat until sauce is bubbling and golden in spots, 2–3 mins. Turn off broiler and transfer pan to lower third of oven to keep sandwiches warm.
-Heat remaining tbsp butter in nonstick skillet over moderate heat until foam subsides, then crack eggs into skillet and season to taste with salt and pepper. Fry eggs, covered, until whites are just set and yolks are still runny~3 mins. Top each sandwich with a fried egg and serve immediately.
Note: The egg yolks in this recipe will not be fully cooked, which may be of concern if salmonella is a problem in your area. You can use pasteurized eggs (in the shell) or cook eggs until yolks are set, but while safer, the runny eggs are better.
Terrine pâté de Foie Gras—Serves 10
Ingredients
-1½, lb. fresh duck foie gras, ⅓ cup good-quality sauternes, sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, 1 finely chopped black truffle.
Preparation
Prepare foie gras:
First, allow chilled foie gras to warm up so that it’s tender and manageable because cold liver is brittle, and its veins harder to locate and remove intact. Pull any bits of translucent membrane from the surface and separate the two lobes using a knife to sever any connecting veins. Inspect the folds for patches of bitter green bile that could mar the terrine and extract them with a knife.
Second, clean and devein. For a smooth terrine, you must remove the thick, branched main vein that runs through the center of each lobe. Dig into the middle of each lobe with a paring knife, catch the vein under its tip, and pull it out.
Third, soak deveined foie gras pieces overnight in ice water to draw out any excess blood.
Fourth, the next day, break the liver into pieces and marinate it for 2 hrs in sauternes.
Fifth, cook the foie gras in a bain-marie. Considerable fat will be rendered. This fat is precious, both for flavoring and preserving the terrine. Save excess fat and refrigerate. To store terrine, pour melted fat over foie gras to seal it.
-Place foie gras in a medium bowl, break into even pieces, and add sauternes. Season with salt and pepper and allow to marinate 2 hours.
-Preheat oven to 400° F. Remove foie gras from marinade; press into a 2½-cup terrine, leaving a bit of space at top. Place terrine on 3 folded-over paper towels in the bottom of a deep skillet, and fill skillet with hot water to reach halfway up sides of terrine. Cook until internal temperature of foie gras reaches 115° F on a meat thermometer~30 mins. Pour off fat and reserve. Cool terrine.
-Cut a piece of cardboard to fit inside top of terrine and wrap it in plastic wrap. Gently press cardboard onto foie gras; weight with a small can for 1 hr. Remove can and cardboard, return reserved fat to terrine, cover, and refrigerate 1–2 days.
-To unmold, dip terrine in a bowl of warm water for 30 secs, run a knife along edges, and invert onto a plate. (Reserve fat in terrine.) Serve thinly sliced, garnished with truffle, if desired. If covered in reserved fat leftovers, the foie gras will keep if refrigerated for 1 wk.