For a brave minority in Europe there was a seamless transition from angry rejection of occupation, a desire to thwart the Germans, or to escape the dead time of internment and imprisonment, in to what became known as the Resistance, although this assumed varying degrees of virulence. The term ‘resistance’ only gradually became generic to describe whatever actively challenged the Nazi new order, rather than behaviour that was of purely symbolic significance. For some people, just glimpsing armed Germans in their streets was enough, although the disappointing way in which fellow citizens reacted was often important too. The Lyons journalist Yves Farge recalled:
The trolley-bus from Tassin stopped to let a German motorized column pass, and some type on the bus dared to say in a loud voice ‘The French are at last going to learn what order really is.’ I nearly hit him. Then in front of the Grand Hotel there were women waiting to see the German officers emerge. To one of them I said ‘Too old for prostitution.’ It all began in ways like that.1
Individuals from a variety of backgrounds and creeds – ranging from Socialists to the clerical, anti-Semitic and Germanophobic extreme right, an alliance which one resister recalling Stendhal wittily called ‘les Rouges et les Noirs’ – felt so strongly about the conditions imposed on them that they undertook activities that could result in arrest, torture, execution or, from 1941 onwards, deportation to an uncertain fate.
Exactly why only a minority of individuals embarked on this course – albeit over time rather than all together from the start – is unclear, or at least it is impossible to generalise. Material factors, such as food shortages, seem to have played no part in decisions that involved mind and spirit, or witness in the case of committed Christians. If hunger created resistance then it would have been a mass movement rather than the minority affair it was, with only a quarter of a million officially recognised resisters in France after the war.
Perhaps an insistent individualism and a capacity to hold on to essential moral truths were the common characteristics linking colourful adventurers such as Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, a man of the south, with a steely-minded civil servant like Jean Moulin, or Catholics with Protestants, Jews and atheists, monarchists with republicans, conservatives with Socialists. As a disillusioned Communist astutely said, resistance was primarily a question of ‘character’ or ‘nature’ rather than of conscious deliberation. A significant number of resisters seem to have decided that Nazism was inherently evil, again a word that historians – as opposed to say clerics or judges – affect not to use nowadays.2
Although patriotism is another unfashionable word, many of these people were patriots who rejected Nazism, the Munich Agreement and the policies which had led to France’s defeat. Because of the line stipulated by Moscow, and their class-based analysis of events, the French Communist Party adopted what was tantamount to neutrality between ‘imperialist’ Germany and Britain, until the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 dictated another line.3 Other than the Communists, patriotism was evident at all levels of society and was beyond the monopoly of any existing political party, especially as these were universally blamed for France’s defeat. A conservative landowning farmer called Louis de la Bardonnie, who founded the group Confrérie Notre Dame in the Dordogne, singled out the role of humble people, even quoting the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès’ dictum ‘The fatherland is the only wealth of the poor,’ but he was referring to those who indirectly supported the active resisters. These were, initially, overwhelmingly urban and middle class.
A willingness to seek friends outside class or ideological encampments also helped, although more often than not, since it relied so heavily on trust, resistance developed among groups of the like-minded. As Bardonnie recalled: ‘The members of our group were mostly friends from childhood, all orientated to the political Right.’4 Similar bonds had already coalesced among supporters of Republican Spain. As a civil servant in Pierre Cot’s Air Ministry, Jean Moulin had been engaged in secretly shipping aircraft to Spain’s Republicans in the mid-1930s, despite the official embargo on supplying arms. Other groups were a veritable social melting pot, which seems to have been one of their major attractions. The army officer Henri Frenay altered his views under the influence of Berty Albrecht, a Swiss-born woman who had left her English husband to return to France, and who introduced Frenay to exiled German Jews and Spanish Republican refugees. Moreover, in a clandestine war, women were as important as men, particularly because they could exploit their feminity or maternity to evade close scrutiny by policemen. Many foreigners – including exiled Germans, Poles and Spanish Republicans – also figured alongside indigenous elements.5 In the earlier years resistance was very much an urban phenomenon centred on Paris, Lyons and Marseilles, but from 1943 the geography of revolt shifted towards the remoter countryside with the growth of the maquis, armed bands which took their generic name from the scrublands of Corsica. Each region, or sub-region, brought its own micro-conditions to resistance – so that the Protestant Cévennes showed more solidarity to maquisards and Jews than did the Catholic north of the Lozère.
Another common denominator among resisters was their willingness to court risks, represented by the hand on the elbow, the screech of police cars or a pre-dawn pounding on the front door. They had enormous courage, acting in the knowledge of their potential fate. The memoirs of leading resistance figures, such as Henri Frenay, are punctuated by the visceral shock caused by the loss of valued comrades. One such was the lawyer Jacques Renouvin, a former supporter of the ultra-conservative Action Français, who was one of the main advocates of violence against collaborators: ‘My legs crumpled, my voice deserted me. Renouvin, my old friend, in the hands of the Gestapo. If they identified him, he was done for. Once again I had that sensation that always seized me when I heard of the arrest of some dear friend: a constriction in my throat verging on nausea, deep inner dejection, outward distress.’6 The alternative to torture included throwing oneself out of a Gestapo building window – the fate of the northern resistance leader Pierre Brossolette in February 1944 –or swallowing a cyanide capsule, which Jacques Bingen elected to do three months later.
There was enormous stress involved in living under multiple identities, constantly moving between safe houses and subjecting oneself to the demands of a meticulous tradecraft that left no room for error. Did the initials in a shirt or hat correspond to those of the wearer’s papers, and did his or her place of residence correspond to a laundry mark in an item of clothing? Every journey involved trusting guides whom one had never met, or using public transport where German and Vichy policemen would carefully inspect forged papers, comparing them with the genuine article. Had the forger retained, or corrected, the single deliberate spelling mistake the authorities had included to trap the unwary? Some put their infants in foundlings’ homes for the unknown duration, to avoid the added risks a baby entailed for anyone who might have to move, silently, at a moment’s notice, although the teacher Lucie Aubrac and her Jewish husband Raymond combined looking after their young son Jean-Pierre with activity in the Lyons resistance, while another leading resister had eight children. Aubrac’s memoirs combine the sights and smells of a normal family life with episodes of extreme danger, as when she twice ventured into the office of Klaus Barbie, the infamous Lyons Gestapo chief, to ascertain the whereabouts of Raymond, who had been arrested.7 Other accounts convey the psychological troughs resisters experienced. As he sat writing organisational papers, even such a dedicated resister as Frenay asked himself whether the loneliness was worth it, as armies, airmen and sailors clashed on vast foreign battlefields. In a rare moment of despair, he called it his ‘antlike struggle’.8
The division of France meant that in the north resisters primarily confronted the Germans, while in the Unoccupied Zone they had to deal with Vichy. This represented an insidious challenge to many conservative or Catholic resisters, since Vichy’s regressive National Revolution encompassed values they also espoused, up to and including the desire to find a local French solution to what they concurred was a ‘Jewish problem’ involving an overly dominant elite minority. Many southern resisters, especially those with backgrounds in the military, took some time to relinquish their loyalty to Pétain, a process that became definitive only after he brought Pierre Laval back into office in April 1942. By then Vichy’s claim to be playing a complex double-jeu seemed hollow. Vichy’s attitudes to those who solely opposed Germans rather than Vichy itself was also ambiguous. Since Vichy itself did not recognise the legality of the physical division of France, it was complicit with resisters who slipped back and forth across the demarcation line. As they surveyed the see-saw of Allied and Axis fortunes, the more sinuous Vichy ministers also dabbled in localised truces with the resistance – with Henri Frenay meeting the Interior Minister Pierre Pucheu on two controversial occasions. Vichy officials also tested which way the wind blew; the most striking example was future Socialist President François Mitterrand, as he smoothly migrated from Pétain, who awarded him a medal, via General Georges Giraud in Algeria to de Gaulle, who treated him with unsurpassed frostiness.9
Resisters could be involved in clandestine networks, closely connected to, or indeed established by, the secret services of the Allies and their own exiled governments; or they might be part of self-proclaimed movements which sought to dispel the passivity which the occupiers hoped would spread among the subject population in the absence of mass Fascist mobilisation. They operated in a sort of fog, for they inevitably had complex dealings with a host of agencies they sought to subvert, including the Vichy police, since the boundaries between resistance and collaboration were dynamic, as collaborators made their own complex calculations of self-interest with the rise and fall of Axis fortunes. In other words, resisters were often interlaced with the world they simultaneously fought.
Unfortunately resisters are often synonymous in people’s minds with scruffy partisans bedecked with bandoliers of cartridges, a view which reflects left-wing romanticisation of bandits and guerrillas everywhere. Nothing could be further from the truth, at least before the outbreak of the insurgencies associated with the maquisards in 1943–4. In several places, predominantly conservative Catholic army officers decided to ignore the Armistice by hiding rather than surrendering caches of weapons, which proved useful when resistance took on an armed aspect. Others, such as Frenay, decided to escape from German captivity. The army’s own intelligence service – the Deuxième Bureau – became another hub of resistance, although it combined spying on the Germans with monitoring both Communists and Gaullists, who were deemed ‘anti-national forces’. In such circles it took time to lose old habits of hierarchy and obedience, and loyalty to Pétain took longer to dispel. Another group represented in the resistance were Christian democrats, regular clergy and intellectuals, who also combined opposition to the Nazis with support for Pétain. Often drawn from the ranks of Dominicans and Jesuits, who had no parochial duties to interfere with sustained reflection, these people had already grasped the pseudo-religious essence of Nazism in the 1930s, something also evident in the case of Frenay, who in a lecture to reservists in September 1938 had remarked: ‘The German Army is imbued with a mystique which has potentially dangerous consequences. Tomorrow this army will set out, not on a “lovely war” but on a holy war, its chieftains and its soldiers inflamed with a quasi-religious faith.’ Journalists and academics, evinced a touching regard for the truth in a world of circum-ambient lies.10
The first signs of organised resistance often involved statements of principle and right conduct under German occupation that would appal a modern moral relativist. An air force general called Cochet issued one whose drift was ‘watch, resist, unite’. The art historian Agnès Humbert, who was a leading light of a resistance group that formed in the ethnological museum in Paris, gave an eloquent account of the psychological state of those who embarked on resistance in August 1940:
I find [the art critic and poet Jean] Cassou in his office…Suddenly I blurt out why I have come to see him, telling him that I feel I will go mad, literally, if I don’t do something, if I don’t react somehow. Cassou confides that he feels the same, that he shares my fears. The only remedy is for us to act together, to form a group of ten like-minded comrades, no more. To meet on agreed days to exchange news, to write and distribute pamphlets and tracts, and to share summaries of French radio broadcasts from London. I don’t harbour any illusions about the practical effects of our actions, but simply keeping our sanity will be success of a kind. The ten of us will stick together, trying between us to get to grips with the situation. Basically, it will be a way of keeping our spirits up.11
Such tracts were laboriously copied using carbon paper and manual typewriters, long before anyone acquired mimeographs or a willing printer, the indispensable condition for mass production. The censorship, and the ideological distortion of news, meant that some of the earliest manifestations of resistance took the form of an alternative clandestine press, its historic exemplars being the clandestine papers of occupied Belgium during the Great War or the partisan press of the Dreyfus era. Much of the content derived from broadcasts by the BBC and Swiss or Vatican radios, the only sources of news uncorrupted by enemy propaganda. The most noteworthy French papers included Défense de la France, Libre France, Libération, Le Franc-Tireur, Combat, Valmy and Résistance. A group of Lyons-based Jesuits who helped escaping Jews issued their own Cahiers du Témoinage Chrétien.12 Those who issued these papers invariably claimed they were the organs of shadowy groups, whose grandiloquent names belied the fact that they had very few members. In this respect they resembled most revolutionaries everywhere, going back to the Carbonari conspiracies of the early nineteenth century.13
These papers might be followed with booklets of slogans to be chalked or daubed on prominent walls, a spectacular example being the black-lettered ‘THE RESISTANCE GROUP COMBAT PUNISHES TRAITORS’ which appeared on the aqueduct at Montpellier, but it was often just a Cross of Lorraine (the symbol adopted by de Gaulle’s Free French) or a V for Victory echoing the signature signal of the BBC. German or Vichy posters were defaced or torn down too. The newspaper distribution networks drew in recruits, maintaining their activist commitment and forging group solidarities, while giving those involved experience of the rudiments of clandestine activity. Tracts had to be left on public transport, or slipped into clothing displayed in shops and department stores, or covertly put in mail boxes by brave concierges. The readers of underground papers developed a sense of being a complicit group, with the newspaper or pamphlet taking the place of public meetings, which were prohibited. In other words, the papers were the sinews of a broader movement which for reasons of security operated as distinct cells. From there it required more grit, and a higher level of resolution, to destroy the competition. This was the task of the corps francs, which Jacques Renouvin organised from his base in Montpellier, to deter collaborators. A newsstand owner selling German illustrated magazines such as Signal would receive an anonymous appeal to his patriotism. Next would come an unfriendly warning, accompanied by an explosion or fire in the newsstand if he ignored it. A circular would explain to other businesses why this had happened. Further attacks hit the offices of Fascist parties or the recruitment offices for the labour-prisoner of war substitution programme known as the relève which exchanged French workers in greater numbers for returned POWs. Such attacks initially amounted to stunts when compared with the assassinations and bombings being perpetrated by the Communists – occasioning the sanguinary German reprisals we saw in an earlier chapter.14
In most occupied countries, organisation of disparate resistance groups was the precondition for sustained fighting. In France concerted attempts to unite the highly fissiparous and localised resistance movements resulted from Jean Moulin’s visit to London in September 1941, during which he met de Gaulle. In so far as either man was capable of much human emotion, they liked what they saw. Although Moulin was not entitled to speak on behalf of the internal resistance, de Gaulle empowered him as his official Delegate of the French National Committee to the Unoccupied Zone, with his written commission in the form of a microfilm strip concealed in a matchbox. While many resisters regarded the authoritarian de Gaulle as a Fascist, Moulin had one major asset, namely the money and arms he was promised from London, which tended to concentrate minds. One should not underestimate the difficulties he faced in making large egos co-operate with one another, especially since Frenay’s Combat was much bigger than the rival organisations in the south, notwithstanding the larger-than-life personality of d’Astier. There was also the parallel problem of dealing with the Communists, who sought to monopolise all resistance by forming so-called national fronts, which they could covertly control.
Moulin discovered that indirect, practical co-operation was the most effective route to unity, founding a joint Press and Information Bureau and a General Study Committee to mull over long-term issues. Unity at the activist base that was derived from joint participation in demonstrations also put pressure on the leaders at the top. A single southern resistance movement called the United Movements of the Resistance (MUR) emerged only in January 1943. Although the idea of obeying orders from London was often anathema to them, the three southern military wings coalesced into a Secret Army under a regular army officer, General Charles Delestraint. This was a mixed blessing, as it meant the subordination of armed resisters to de Gaulle’s strategy of linking any substantive action to an Allied invasion. How did one maintain group cohesion and effectiveness for a fight that seemed to be indefinitely postponed?
By this time, de Gaulle’s own hard-won position had been complicated by the emergence of Admiral Darlan and then General Giraud in North Africa, in whom US President Roosevelt saw an alternative French leadership with serious armed forces at their disposal. The domestic resistance also had to consider how to respond when in the spring of 1943, following the introduction of compulsory labour service in Germany, thousands of young men decided to take to the hills. Further difficulties arose when de Gaulle decided to incorporate the old political parties into the resistance, to prove his democratic credentials, with the establishment of a new Resistance Council. There was concerted opposition to this development, not only among the movements of the Occupied Zone, but also among some of those in the south who despised the ‘greasy pot-bellied politicians’ of the Third Republic. Representatives of eight resistance movements and five political groupings (there was no representative conservative presence) met in a Parisian apartment on 27 May 1943.
Despite Roosevelt’s animus, de Gaulle demonstrated greater political skills and managed to exclude Giraud from the National Committee of French Liberation, the provisional government founded in Algiers which he headed. The murky circumstances surrounding the capture of Jean Moulin at Caluires on 21 June 1943, and de Gaulle’s preoccupation with events in North Africa, meant that much of the work done by Moulin to centralise – or, as his critics averred, ‘bureaucratise and sterilise’ – the resistance was undone after his demise. What had begun with the printing of pamphlets and newspapers was increasingly dominated by the bomb and gun, especially when at this late stage the Communist Sharpshooters and Partisans (FTP) set the tone among resisters. In the first nine months of 1943 there were 3,800 acts of sabotage, and an increasing number of assassinations of collaborators and members of the newly founded paramilitary Milice, a rag-bag militia of delinquents, fantasists and Fascists. Even movements which had refrained from violence for religious reasons now found themselves employing a rabid tone. Witness the following from a Catholic resistance movement called Défense de la France:
Kill the German to purify our country, kill him because he kills our people…Kill those who denounce, those who have aided the enemy…Kill the policeman who has in any way contributed to the arrest of patriots…Kill the miliciens, exterminate them…strike them down like mad dogs…destroy them as you would vermin.15
One major consequence of this mentality was that resistance mutated into an outright civil war between resisters and collaborators, notably members of the Milice. It was no longer only the Germans who carried out reprisal killings against innocent civilians. Already in 1943 the Communist underground paper Franc-Tireur warned: ‘For each new murder that they commit, the milicien and the PPF, or Fascist French Popular Party must expect immediate and merciless reprisals…the French Resistance sends a warning – “For an eye, both eyes; for a tooth, the whole jaw!” This principle could affect many more than individuals directly responsible for atrocities. Thus in April 1944 the resistance assassinated the Milice chief Ernest Jourdan in Voiron near Grenoble. But they also killed his wife, his octogenarian mother, his ten-year-old son and his fifteen-month-old daughter.16
Inevitably, in such a vicious struggle, it was not only the Germans, or supporters of Vichy, who bent the rules of war. The SOE agent Harry Peulevé was an exceedingly brave man who organised and equipped maquisard forces in the Corrèze. This meant leaving pocket torches containing bombs in the coats of German soldiers in bars and cafés, which blew off their right hand when they switched them on; sabotaging arms dumps, factories and railways; and eventually organising ambushes of German convoys on open roads. The effect was to subtract large parts of the region from Vichy control. The maquis did not take prisoners and shot the wounded, as they had no facilities to treat them. Savage German reprisals against civilians were discounted by Peulevé himself:
For every German we killed, they would kill twenty or thirty hostages, taken at random from the villages through which they passed, but we never let up on them. They were haunted day and night by us, the ghosts in the woods who swooped down on them at every opportunity. This was my revenge for the years when unequal odds and circumstances had put me in the humiliating position of a fleeing coward…Their reply to this treatment was the coward’s way out. They took revenge on the women, children and old men…But they could not get us out of the woods.
Suspected spies were treated ruthlessly. On one occasion, Peulevé surmised that the young British airman he was exfiltrating to Spain was a German plant. The ‘pilot’ made the mistake of being overly familiar with a Cambridgeshire pub Peulevé had invented. Eventually, Peulevé ran a small quantity of plastic explosive around a sapling tree which was instantly cut in half when detonated. He then wrapped a similar charge around the ‘pilot’s’ right shoulder and lit the fuse. The German agent confessed and was shot. Although Peulevé endeavoured to have him decently buried, his maquisard comrades dug the man up and sent the corpse in a crate to the Gestapo HQ in Paris, courtesy of the ‘British Intelligence Service’.17
The New Zealander Bill Jordan, who subsequently became a Catholic priest, was an SOE agent attached to resisters in the Lozère in 1944 after a protracted mission in Greece. His comrades included former policemen attached to the Deuxième Bureau, whose remit included interrogating suspected traitors and captured Germans. To this end they savagely beat them before getting to work with irons heated in a small forge, sometimes by inserting these implements into the suspect’s rectum or pressing them into the back and stomach simultaneously to simulate disembowelling. The victims were invariably shot after their ordeal. Jordan was uneasy about the entire process, especially when inflicted on women or girls. When he pointed out that the person operating the forge seemed to be enjoying his work, he was told that the man’s entire family had been killed by the Germans after his role in the resistance had been betrayed. It seems unlikely that torture was any more effective than other forms of interrogation. In this case, were it not for the overwhelming evidence of Nazi murderousness, it might have damaged the resistance’s claims to moral superiority. In the event, it would take the presence of multi-decorated veterans of the resistance among the military and police torturers unleashed in colonial Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s to do that, although the opprobrium has never become totally retrospective.18
It was not only Communists who courted German or Vichy reprisals for their multiplier effect in recruiting more sympathisers to the cause. However, the Communists were certainly those who took the most cold-bloodedly instrumental view of the casualties of this sort of dirty war. Blood spilled in resistance became a form of stake wagered on the board of post-war politics, a blood sacrifice whether to restore the nation’s honour or as part of a class war, for the Communists took to referring to themselves as the ‘party of the executed’ or of ‘the 75,000 dead’ to give it a round number – a sacrifice justifying their bid for power or a moral debt that others would owe. After the Allies had invaded France, many non-Communist resisters elected to liberate their own nation before the Anglo-Americans arrived, subtracting ever larger areas from either German or Vichy control, although that sacrifice was for France rather than in the interests of the Soviet Union. This conjunction of abstract sacrifices brought multiple human tragedies in its wake.
Saint-Amand-Montrond was a small town of about ten thousand people in the Limousin’s sub-region of Cher-Sud. Despite the fact that it was suicidal to try to liberate such a place in rural central France with German troops still in neighbouring towns, the Communist-led resistance in Limoges gave the order to seize it, even though the Limoges Communists would not take part in the action. Closer to the ground, young resistance leaders, spoiling for a fight after years of distributing leaflets, ignored wiser counsels and decided to act. In days rife with unfounded rumours, they imagined simultaneous uprisings would occur in neighbouring towns. They were wrong.19
At six in the evening on 6 June 1944 about seventy resistance fighters attacked Saint-Amand. They were welcomed by the sub-prefect, the mayor and the local chief of police, who all sympathised with the resistance. The only fatalities were two hapless members of the Milice who drove into their midst and were captured and shot. The attackers laid desultory siege to the local Milice outpost, which after a perfunctory exchange of inaccurate gunfire and a grenade decided to surrender. An honourable resistance leader thwarted the general desire of his comrades to shoot the eight prisoners, who included a woman with a child of three and another of six months, apparently suffering from bronchitis. They also captured the woman’s mother-in-law, with whom the family was lodging. The young mother’s name was Simone Bout de l’An, but this meant nothing to them. Inside the base, the resistance fighters found files with the names and addresses of many more miliciens in the region – orders went out to detain them too. The prisoners, including Simone, but not her children or mother-in-law who were sent to the local hospital, were removed to the town hall to serve as hostages. Simone’s husband was alerted to the fate of his family after one of the Milice men escaped through a window. Soon her captors would learn it too. He was Francis Bout de l’An, the thirty-four-year-old Assistant Secretary General of the Milice throughout France, the organisation’s national chief since its titular head, Joseph Darnand, had assumed general responsibility for the Interior Ministry. Bout de l’An, a professor by vocation, left Vichy with thirty miliciens while German spotter planes circled Saint-Amand. There, a party spirit erupted among the liberated inhabitants, while young men who had missed the war rushed to volunteer at a sort of maquis recruitment fair at the Rex cinema.
Many more citizens presciently realised that there had been no general uprising and fled. Grasping their predicament, the resisters put up posters warning that their thirty-six hostages, including Simone, would be shot if there were any attempt to free them. They also decided to move the hostages elsewhere, releasing a few of them as ordinary people indicated that they had been falsely arrested and had never belonged to the Milice. They drove to a neighbouring town, with one of the women hostages miscarrying in a truck as it bumped along a rural route where the signs had been obscured with tar.
At dawn on the 8th, German troops with their faces blackened and wearing helmets camouflaged with foliage entered the town with armoured cars and light tanks. People they encountered were randomly shot in the street, while about two hundred others arbitrarily identified as sympathisers of the resistance were herded into the sub-prefecture building. In the afternoon, they separated eight of those easily identified as resisters by armbands and the like and shot them in a garden. When one of their Milice associates accidentally fired his weapon, the Germans used flamethrowers and incendiary grenades to burn down several houses. After the arrival of Francis Bout de l’An, who liberated his mother and his two children from the town hospital, the surviving Milice in Saint-Amand set about their own man hunt, arresting sixty persons whom they took to be resisters or their relatives and sympathisers. In other words, the resisters’ gambit of taking hostages to prevent reprisals had backfired – they now had their own hostage crisis involving their own friends and relatives and other innocent people.
While young men with guns postured on either side, more reflective individuals acted to prevent multiple tragedies. The town mayor, a sixty-year-old wine grower called René Sandrin, sought out Bout de l’An’s deputy, successfully interceding for the release of about twenty of the hostages who he claimed had no connection with the resistance. They were rearrested once Bout de l’An heard of this development. Moreover, he told his deputy to announce that if his wife was not freed in forty-eight hours he would shoot all the hostages and destroy the town. As a demonstration of earnestness, he sacked his errant deputy, replacing him with a notorious Jew-hater called Joseph Lécussan, an alcoholic with a reputation for extortion and murder of elderly Jews. In the time before his arrival, Mayor Sandrin struck a deal with the outgoing deputy. If he could find and return Simone Bout de l’An, both the hostages and town would be spared destruction. Together with two brave volunteers he set off, with only the vaguest idea of where the resisters and their hostages might be. The day ended with no success in making contact, even as Bout de l’An ordered the arrest of more hostages that night. Moreover the newly arrived Lécussan was contemptuous of the deal Sandrin had arranged, despatching the hostages to Vichy the following morning.
Meanwhile, after receiving a tip that the resistance was holding its hostages in a nearby château, Sandrin and his colleagues set off in their car, bedecked with the white sheets of those seeking to parley. In addition to negotiating multiple checkpoints, they were frequently halted by herds of cattle or flocks of sheep. In the end, although a rendezvous with the maquis was set up, they waited on the wrong road. At Vichy, Francis Bout de l’An greeted the sixty hostages sent by Lécussan by informing them that men and women would be shot in batches of ten starting at 10 a.m. the next day, and that the whole of Saint-Amand town would be erased if Simone was not released by that deadline. All the male hostages were repeatedly assaulted throughout the night and underwent terrifying mock executions.
Among the rival groups of hostage-takers confusion reigned, for over the radio the Free French Forces commander, General Pierre Koenig, demanded that the resistance refrain from large-scale insurrectionary activity, largely because of the Allies’ problems of resupplying them with arms. On finally learning of Mayor Sandrin’s attempts to contact them, her captors dictated a letter for Simone Bout de l’An to write, pleading with her husband to spare the lives of the hostages he held. This was delivered by a circuitous route to Bout de l’An in Vichy. He agreed to delay the executions by a further forty-eight hours. Contact with the men holding Simone and the Milice hostages proved hard to establish, since they had fled into the Creuse, where the hostages were being held in the chapel of a remote castle. Both Sandrin and the Archbishop of Bourges offered themselves as substitute hostages, a gesture Francis Bout de l’An rejected in one of many telephone conversations with the major. The archbishop was more effective. After pleading Christian charity, the archbishop argued that if Bout de l’An shot the hostages he would never see his wife again. Bout de l’An saw reason and postponed the decision to shoot them while negotiations continued. However, he also warned that he would cut off Saint-Amand’s utilities and deprive its children of milk by way of piling pressure on the partisans.
Gradually, the terms of a potential trade-off came into view, at least among those engaged in saving lives rather than posturing. Bout de l’An was interested only in the release of the women hostages. He had written off the Milice men on the grounds that they should have put up a better fight to defend his wife. For his part, he was prepared to release all his hostages provided they had not been caught bearing arms. He backed this up with a warning that if Simone was not freed, he would turn the town over to the Germans and have his hostages shot, regardless of the outcome of any trial. The fate of Oradour-sur-Glane, where the SS had massacred nearly a thousand people on 10 June, hung over the dinner arranged by Bout de l’An and Lécussan for the Saint-Amand negotiators, for this was still France. The negotiators even managed to extract a ‘proof of life’ visit to see Bout de l’An’s female captives, held with the others at a racecourse.
After further adventures on dangerous roads, the negotiators (no longer including Sandrin, who had hurt his foot) eventually met a senior resistance figure, who struck the tough postures he thought synonymous with guerrilla leadership and claimed to be leader of the group holding Simone Bout de l’An and the Milice members. Actually he was not, which meant that the ensuing talks with him represented a loss of valuable time. In a striking echo of Bout de l’An’s indifference to his cowardly militiamen, this partisan leader – François being his nom de guerre – was uninterested in the male hostages Bout de l’An was holding, on the grounds that if these men had had any guts they would have joined the partisans already. Nor did he want to be seen to acquiesce in a deal whose terms were seemingly dictated by Bout de l’An, with whom he was engaged in a remote battle of masculine wills. However, he would be prepared to release ‘his’ hostages if the Germans would free an important resister they had captured, although that was to overestimate Bout de l’An’s influence. Finally telling the negotiators that he would hang them if he encountered them again, the maquis leader handed them a letter to give to Darnand – on the erroneous assumption that Simone Bout de l’An was the latter’s mistress. The gist of this missive was that if Bout de l’An harmed any of his hostages, the resistance would cut Simone Bout de l’An into pieces and mail her to her ‘lover’ in Vichy. While Bout de l’An improved the condition of his own hostages, he also arrested the wives of three men whom he had misidentified as running the resistance organisation responsible for his wife’s abduction, again to multiply the pressure.
Meanwhile, the tough Lécussan had grown impatient with the perpetual motions of the negotiators, whom he regarded with as much disdain as the partisan François had shown. He announced that that he was going to start shooting hostages, and summoned German troops, who took up positions near the town, decisions he took while fortified by drink. The negotiators made a final effort and succeeded in meeting the group actually holding Simone Bout de l’An and the Milice hostages, men it transpired who were themselves from Saint-Amand. These resisters in turn had to seek authorisation from the same François who already been so implacable with the negotiators. ‘Do what you want,’ he replied. On 23 June the negotiators took custody of five women, including Simone Bout de l’An, who were dropped off blindfolded at a remote junction. Simone’s favourable view of her captors irritated Lécussan, who had wept tears of inebriate joy on seeing her. Two days later, Bout de l’An kept his word by releasing the hostages and the wives of resisters.
The resistance still held about twenty male Milice hostages, as well as a baker’s daughter who had elected to stay with the partisans rather than face the wrath of her father for dating a Milice member, and another mysterious woman known only as ‘the Jewess’. As German forces converged on the area, the partisans split into smaller units; the group that had taken over Saint-Amand was surprised by Ukrainians serving in the German army. Nine men were killed and sixty-two captured after a ferocious firefight in a wood. The wounded were shot dead. The captives were handed over to the SS and in August deported to concentration camps in Germany. The group holding what had become thirteen Milice captives kept themselves just ahead of the pursuing Germans, their speed restricted by heavy equipment and the exhausted hostages. As matters became more desperate, it was decided to kill them, since they could easily alert the Germans who were within earshot. This was a difficult decision, because over the previous six weeks the partisans and their prisoners had bonded; after all they were all mainly from Saint-Amand. As the noise of gunfire would have attracted the Germans, the partisans used parachute cord slung over branches to hang the thirteen Milice men, holding them up to create a sufficient drop to break their necks. On learning of these deaths, Lécussan decided to unleash his wrath against the ‘real’ culprits, as he conceived of them – the two hundred Jews in Saint-Amand, the remnant of two earlier waves of deportation. A combined force of Milice, German soldiers and the Gestapo descended on Saint-Amand. After a celebratory dinner, they detained nearly eighty Jews, ranging in age from a fifteen-month-old infant to war veterans in their seventies, in the Rex cinema.
The majority of these people were moved to a Gestapo prison in Bourges the following day. Since the Allies’ interdiction of rail transport made it impossible to ship the Jews to the places of death that had consumed millions, the Gestapo decided to liquidate the twenty-six men on the spot, for the prison was overcrowded. This had to be done surreptitiously given that the Allies had landed in France. After a lengthy search for a suitable site, during which the victims sweltered inside a truck, the Germans (and some of their French associates) alighted upon a disused farm with three deep wells littered with abandoned building materials. The Jews were split into groups of six. Each man was told to pick up a heavy stone or sack of spoiled cement before being thrown down one of the wells. They either died as they hit the side walls or were asphyxiated under corpses and bags of cement. Only one man managed to escape, and was hidden by local farmers. The Jewish women, who had been spared execution, turned out not to be safe. After the maquis had boldly assassinated the Milice chief in Bourges, eight of the women without children, and a man the Gestapo had also held back, were taken to the wells and killed too.
The weeks before and following the Allied invasion of France witnessed an upsurge of acts of sabotage which were met with a sanguinary response. Although a rosy hue surrounds the deeds of the partisans, for many people they were not only thieves who issued dubious promissory notes for the food they took, but a dangerous liability that brought indiscriminate German reprisals in their wake. Ascq was a small town near Lille in the region of north-east France incorporated into occupied Belgium. On Saturday 1 April 1944 a small charge exploded on a track near the town’s railway station, halting a troop train carrying the SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend to the Normandy coast. These men were mainly recently recruited members of the Hitler Youth, but most of the officers, who were scarcely older, had served on the Eastern Front. Although the train suffered minimal damage and no one was injured, it was stuck in an area apparently alive with partisans and with Allied aircraft searching for targets of opportunity such as the stationary SS convoy now presented. Unsurprisingly the troops were agitated and jumpy, always a recipe for someone getting killed.
All German forces in the west had been issued with fresh orders on 3 February regarding how to respond to ‘terrorist’ attacks such as this. They were to seize civilians from the immediate surrounds, burning down any houses from which they took fire. That was not exactly what these SS had undergone at Ascq, yet acting on orders from twenty-six-year-old SS-Obersturmführer Walter Hauck, the SS troopers raided the town, dragging together all adult males and shooting anyone who resisted or tried to flee. The men they captured were shot in batches at the crossing near where the train had halted, a process that took about an hour. In total some eighty-six innocent civilians were either massacred in their homes or by the railway, including the town’s curate who had been giving the last rites to the dying in the street. This action adversely affected the good relations which had existed between the local German authorities, the regional prefect and the Catholic Church. Cardinal Liénart, a notorious Pétainiste, was moved to protest about the killing of one of his clerics. He was not satisfied when the Germans shortly tracked down and executed six railwaymen, whom they held responsible for the bomb blast. He also dismissed German claims that before their deaths these men had identified thirty resisters among the Ascq citizens slain. The cardinal also dismissed Hauck’s claims that the convoy had come under fire after the explosion.20
As part of attempts to divert German forces from Normandy, the Free French planned Operation Alligator, which involved the large-scale mobilisation of maquisards on the Massif Central. Although the plan was subsequently abandoned, after consulting the SOE agent Maurice Southgate, the local Auvergnat resistance leader Emile Coulaudon went ahead regardless of the absence of orders from London or Algiers. A large group of maquisards converged on the area of Mont Mouchet, many of them factory workers or students from Clermont Ferrand and Montluçon, in other words men wholly lacking combat experience. After a strong German force had counter-attacked, the partisans divided into smaller groups and dispersed. En route to this engagement, German troops – who seem to have included many Azerbaijanis – ran into small-arms fire in various villages along their route. At Ruines they machine-gunned twenty-five of the inhabitants; at Clavières they killed nine people and burned the village down. Meanwhile, at Murat, where the maquis assassinated the Vichy Gestapo chief, twenty-five local people were summarily court-martialled and shot. Subsequently a further 115 people were deported to concentration camps.
The perils of precipitate action by the resistance were also evident in the unremarkable town of Tulle. Throughout March and April 1944, both an SD and Sipo commando unit and a heterogeneous force called the Brehmer Division, largely consisting of Georgians, attempted to suppress the maquis in this part of the Corrèze, although most of the fifty-five people they shot had nothing to do with it. Tulle itself was garrisoned with seven hundred German troops, with a similar number of Garde Mobiles and Milice stationed in the town, although local partisans miscalculated the total enemy force at 250 Germans and 400 Garde Mobiles. Local Communists decided to attack the Germans in Tulle, despite this course of action having been vetoed by the resistance leadership in the parallel case of the Limousin’s capital of Limoges.
At 5 a.m. on 7 June forces from the Communist Franc-Tireur et Partisans irregular riflemen under the charismatic schoolteacher Jean-Jacques Chapou, or ‘Kléber’ to use his nom de guerre, infiltrated the town and attacked the German garrison. The Garde Mobiles force asked to leave town under a flag of truce which was granted. Throughout the day the Germans – mainly older men, albeit with military training – kept up a withering fire from the Ecole Supérieure. This took its toll on the maquis who began to run out of ammunition or did not know how to operate more sophisticated weapons such as bazookas. One group of Germans eventually surrendered and Tulle’s citizens gradually came out into the evening light to celebrate their liberation. No steps had been taken to create obstacles to slow down a relief force. The rumble of tracks and the noise of engines was audible and coming nearer. The partisans retreated as a reconnaissance unit of the SS ‘Das Reich’ 2nd Panzer Division probed the town, establishing that a group of frightened German soldiers were still resisting from the school. Throughout the night, heavily armed and camouflaged SS troops retook control of Tulle, but not before nine captured members of the Gestapo had been shot in addition to the 139 men killed in the day’s action. Despite seeing that wounded Germans had been treated in the town hospital, the SS affected horror at the ‘mutilation’ of some of the German fatalities, who had in reality been torn apart by grenades. The core of the ‘Das Reich’ Division were SS veterans of the Eastern Front, who were well acquainted with every sort of depredation against civilians.21
In line with orders issued by their commander, General Heinz Lammerding, the SS rounded up every male aged between sixteen and sixty, corralling about three thousand of them in the town’s arms factory, where many worked. All but five hundred were gradually released after various French notables had assured the Germans of their indispensability to the smooth running of the arms plant and Tulle itself. One of the survivors of the attack on the German garrison, a Sipo–SD officer called Walter Schmald, whose closest comrade had shot himself rather than surrender to the partisans, then selected a group of 120 men from the detainee pool, his criteria being that their muddy boots or dirty and unshaven faces indicated they were maquisards. By the afternoon it became evident that the SS intended publicly to hang this group, with the five hundred men from the larger surviving group forced to watch. When the mayor protested against the method of execution, he was told that it was ‘nothing for us’, as the division had hanged ‘a hundred thousand’ people in Kiev and Kharkov in the Ukraine. The SS set up ad hoc gallows on trees and lamp-posts or the balconies of apartments. While the executions took place, other SS personnel loitered, listening to gramophone music in the Café Tivoli. Eventually after hanging ninety-nine men, they called it a day and reprieved twenty-one. Of the larger surviving group of detainees, 149 were subsequently deported to Dachau, from which only forty-eight returned alive, while the rest were released.22