Otto Abetz was sentenced by a French court to twenty years’ imprisonment in 1949, but released in 1954. He died in a car accident in May 1958.
Ernst Achenbach successfully practised law in Germany post-war. Retained by IG Farben and claiming amnesty for alleged war criminals, he would have probably represented his country at the European Commission, but for evidence of his wartime activities assembled by German lawyer Beata Klarsfeld.
Klaus Barbie was employed post-war by US Intelligence and allowed to escape to Bolivia under the name of Klaus Altmann. In 1971 a Munich court ruled it impossible to prove he knew what happened to his deported victims. After an attempt to kidnap him failed, persistent campaigning by the Klarsfelds resulted in his extradition to France in 1983 to go on trial for crimes against humanity. During the 1987 trial Barbie showed no emotion, even when confronted with witnesses he had sadistically tortured over long periods, and whose relatives he had killed to make them talk. Condemned in July 1987 to life imprisonment, he died of cancer on 25 September 1991.
Paul Baudouin left politics in 1941 to work for La Banque d’Indochine. Condemned in March 1945 to five years’ hard labour for his role in the Armistice, he was released in January 1948 to return to his banking activities.
Karl Bömelburg left France with Pétain in 1945 and disappeared completely.
Pierre Bonny’s bolt-hole betrayed by his rival Joseph Joanovici, he was condemned and shot at Montrouge on 27 December 1944.
René Bousquet was tried in 1949. Scores of high functionaries and dignitaries including bishops and archbishops testified to his pre-war civic record and his non-collaborationist attitude during the occupation. Even the president of the Jewish community of Châlons, who had spent the war in Switzerland, said he had ‘heard nothing against’ Bousquet, while admitting that all the Jews left in Châlons had been deported, of whom only one survived. Acquitted, his Légion d’Honneur returned to him, Bousquet flourished as adviser and later secretary general of the Banque d’Indochine, also serving as director of UTA airline and standing unsuccessfully as an anti-Gaullist candidate for the Marne département.
In 1977 French lawyer Serge Klarsfeld published documents proving Bousquet’s active participation in the genocide of French and foreign Jews. Accused of crimes against humanity, 84-year-old Bousquet was assassinated by a mentally unstable writer on 8 June 1993 just before the scheduled start of the trial. Whether this was coincidence or conspiracy is unproven, but the death did prevent a trial in which he might have said embarrassing things.
Francis Bout de l’An was never prosecuted and died of natural causes at his home in Italy in 1977.
Aloïs Brunner was rescued by the Vatican ratline and given asylum in Damascus, protected by Syrian security services until ‘outed’ by the Klarsfelds in 1982. French demands for his extradition in 1989 were refused, but Brunner was condemned in his absence to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity on 2 March 2001.
Lazare Cabrero was charged with murdering Grumbach with intent to rob. His defence was corroborated by Madame Courdil, who said that a French colonel, conveniently deceased, ordered the passeurs to kill refugees who could not keep up, in case they were found by the patrols and forced to divulge details of the escape network. On 29 May 1953 Cabrero was acquitted.1
Collaborators executed without trial during L’Épuration – the purge after the Liberation – were conservatively numbered at 105,000 between the Liberation of Paris and February 1945 by Adrien Tixier, a post-war Minister of Justice.2 Some 300,000 other persons were accused of various crimes, of which 124,613 received prison sentences and 6,763 were sentenced to death by military tribunals. Approximately the same number was condemned in civil courts, 767 being executed. Fifty thousand others were stripped of civic rights, but most of the tens of thousands of civil servants dismissed or suspended for collaboration were eventually reinstated and recovered their pension rights.
Theo Danneker hanged himself in prison in 1945.
Joseph Darnand enlisted the rump of the Milice at Sigmaringen in the SS Division Charlemagne, escaped to Italy with the help of priests, but was extradited and shot on 10 October 1945.
Louis Darquier de Pellepoix lived undisturbed in Spain despite a death sentence imposed by a French court in his absence. He disclaimed all responsibility for the rafle du Vel d’Hiv, accusing Bousquet of having made all the arrangements, yet famously announced during an interview with L’Express in 1978 that ‘at Auschwitz, only fleas were gassed’. He died on 29 August 1980.
Marcel Déat escaped from Sigmaringen into Italy with his wife, helped by priests. After spending two years in Genoa awaiting his turn on the Vatican ratline to South America, he moved to Turin in 1947 and died there on 5 January 1955.
Fernand de Brinon claimed he had acted to prevent a repeat of the slaughter he had witnessed on battlefields during the First World War. At Sigmaringen, Darnand, Déat and Luchaire wanted to go down fighting with the SS Charlemagne Division, but de Brinon fled. Learning of Pétain’s trial while staying at Innsbruck, he decided to return to France, saying, ‘They will shoot me, but at least I should like the chance to explain myself.’3 Arrested in Bavaria, he was condemned and shot on 15 April 1947.
Alphonse de Châteaubriant left Sigmaringen for Austria in 1945 and lived there under the alias of Dr Alfred Wolf. Condemned to death in his absence on 25 October 1945, he died of natural causes in a Tyrolean monastery in 1951.
Roger Delthil was first reinstated as mayor of Moissac and a senator after the Liberation, but in the in-fighting between the parties post-Liberation was then divested of his public functions a second time for being one of the senators who voted full powers to Marshal Pétain at the Casino in Vichy.
Jacques Doriot died when his car was strafed by Allied aircraft in Germany on 22 February 1945.
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle went into hiding at the Liberation and committed suicide in Paris on 15 March 1945.
The Drancy guards got off lightly. Ten were accused, two disappearing while on bail before trial, together with their commanding officer. Despite harrowing evidence of maltreatment of old and sick detainees, five gendarmes who had stolen prisoners’ meagre rations, maltreated the sick, run the black market and escorted deportations were reintegrated into the force. Two men sentenced to two years’ imprisonment were released after one year.
Marie-Rose Dupont waited twelve months after the shame of being exhibited to the crowd in Moissac before her hair was fully regrown. She was still corresponding with Willi, but never mentioned her public humiliation to him. Leaving Moissac, she found work in a hairdressing salon at Nice. When a male colleague fell in love with her, she told him about Willi and accepted his decision to tear up all her letters and photographs, saying, ‘We’ll pull the curtain on the past. It’s all over and done with.’
After setting up home in Moissac – she to re-open her salon and he as travelling rep. for a hair-products company – it seemed that everyone had forgotten the shearing, until the day she came into the salon and found her 8-year-old son sitting in one of the chairs with a pair of clippers in his hand, totally bald. She never spoke of her humiliation in September 1944 again until interviewed by the author in January 2006.
Rodolphe Faytout was sentenced to hard labour for life, but pardoned by President Coty and released in the fifties. Forbidden to return to his home in Gironde, he nevertheless did so and kept a low profile for the rest of his life, treated with disdain but never attacked by his surviving victims or the relatives of those whose deaths he had caused.
Lucienne Goldfarb was rewarded for her role as police informer by protection that continued after the Liberation during the years when she ran a highly lucrative brothel known as ‘10-bis’ on rue Débarcadère in the XVII arrondissement of Paris – during which time her professional name was Katia la Rouquine (Red-haired Katie). She sprang to fame again at the age of 74 – half a century after the deaths of Manouchian and his twenty-one comrades. Her friend Christine Deviers-Joncour, ex-mistress of Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, gave her 1 million francs in November 1997 ‘to look after my mother and children’ because Deviers-Joncourt expected to be sent to prison for her part in the petroleum bribes scandal that caused Dumas’ fall from power.
Georges Guingouin was elected mayor of Limoges by its grateful population in 1945, the PCF leadership having done everything possible to undermine his election campaign. Labelled a Titoist deviant, he was expelled from the party in 1952 and thus deprived of its political protection. In the aftermath of the 1953 amnesty for collaboration crimes, many counter-accusations were levelled at former résistants. Guingouin was among those arrested for alleged assassination of collaborators during the Liberation. He survived a murder attempt in prison before being released in June 1954. Not until 1998 did PCF leader Robert Hué publicly apologise for the harassment of this renegade communist. Asked for his reaction, Guingouin replied, ‘I’ve reached the age of serenity. It’s a problem for the Party and no longer concerns me.’4
Dr Josef Hirt, the collector of Jewish skulls from the Natzwiller gas chamber, is thought to have committed suicide in the Black Forest on 2 June 1945.
Helmut Knochen was sentenced to death by a British court in Germany during June 1946 for a massacre of Allied aircrew. Extradited to France, he received a second death sentence, also commuted to life imprisonment. After serving seventeen years, he was released in 1962, returned to work as an insurance agent in Offenbach, married a second time and retired in Baden-Baden to die there on 4 April 2003.
Charles Krameisen was at first disbelieved, until the bodies began to emerge from the wells at Guerry. Accorded French citizenship in recognition of his suffering, Krameisen may have spent time in an insane asylum, but his grandson communicated with the author in February 2014 to say that he led a normal life afterwards.
Joseph Kramer was condemned and hanged by a British court at Hassel on 13 December 1945.
Inspector Henri Lafont was, like Bonny, betrayed by Joanovici and shot at Montrouge on 27 December 1944.
General Heinz Lammerding was never brought to trial, despite abandoning an alias to live as a civil engineer under his true name in Düsseldorf. He died on 13 January 1971 at Bad Tölz, Bavaria.
Pierre Laval cabled the Spanish government on 17 April 1945: ‘It is neither the statesman nor the friend who is asking your help, but simply the man. I ask you in my own name, as well as in that of my wife and my faithful friend Maurice Gabolde, for permission to enter Spain and await better days. Today it is a tired and worn-out old man who is writing to you, and in memory of our long friendship, I thank you in advance.’5 Returning from Spain to give evidence at Pétain’s trial, he was tried by a court that refused to hear his defence. He was shot in Fresnes prison on 15 October 1945.
Joseph Lécussan and other miliciens involved at St-Amand-Montrond were shot in 1946.
Jean Leguay, the key planner of the rafle of July 1942, pursued a successful post-war career with the perfumery company Nina Ricci in the US and later in France. He was never prosecuted before his retirement in 1975, but subsequently became the first collabo to be indicted for crimes against humanity, dying on 3 July 1989 before being brought to trial.
Jean Mayol de Lupé, the aging chaplain of the LVF, was arrested by the Americans in March 1945 and condemned by a French court on 14 May 1947 to fifteen years’ imprisonment and confiscation of his property. Released in May 1951, he retired to Lupé and died there in June 1956.
Bernard Ménétrel, Pétain’s doctor, was imprisoned in Fresnes on his return to France in May 1945, but released for health reasons in 1946 and died accidentally the following year.
Karl Oberg was condemned to death in Germany, but returned to France for a second trial with Knochen in October 1954. His death sentence in 1954 was commuted to twenty years’ imprisonment. In 1965, he was granted a presidential pardon and returned to Germany, where he died the same year.
François Papon succeeded in the civil service until 1981, when evidence linked him with Jewish deportations from the Gironde département. Accused in January 1983, he displayed scant respect for the court or his judges and exploited his poor health to delay hearings. Sentenced to ten years in prison for his role in sending 1,560 Jews of all ages to their deaths, he was released after three years thanks to a specially introduced law of March 2002 permitting liberation of prisoners whose health was endangered by incarceration. Of nearly thirty prisoners over 80 years of age in French prisons, Papon was the second to be released. On 25 July 2002, the European Court of Human Rights declared his trial to be ‘inequitable’.
Philippe Pétain returned voluntarily to France in April 1945, by then partially incontinent and not truly lucid. He was sentenced to death on 15 August for high treason and aiding the enemy, but de Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Transferred to a military prison on the island of Yeu, Pétain survived to die aged 95 in 1951.
Dr Marcel Petiot was identified and arrested at a Paris Metro station on 31 October 1944. He defended himself vigorously to the examining magistrate, claiming to be the head of fictitious Resistance network ‘Fly-Tox’, but no résistant had ever heard of him. His story of having provided false medical certificates for STO evaders likewise rang false when he could not name a single man helped in this way.
The mystery of the burning bodies in the rue Lesueur was unravelled when it was discovered that Petiot had been arrested on 23 May and spent the eight missing months in Fresnes prison for allegedly helping people escape from France – which posed the question why he had not come forward at the Liberation to claim his reward as a patriot. Petiot’s military discharge papers of 1918 recorded signs of mental disturbance, which had not prevented him from qualifying as a doctor. So popular was his first practice at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne in Burgundy that he had been elected mayor in 1927 – until dismissed for petty theft and shoplifting, and suspected of drug trafficking. After that, he fled to the anonymity of Paris, opening his consulting room near the Opéra in 1933.
Police investigations connected numerous missing persons with Petiot. When more than forty suitcases filled with men’s and women’s clothing were found at the home of a friend of his, the truth at last came out. Telling Jews threatened with deportation to come to the apartment in rue Lesueur with only their most precious possessions, he gave them a lethal injection under the pretence that it was a sedative – and banked the proceeds. Charged initially with twenty-seven murders, of which he admitted nineteen, he eventually confessed to having killed sixty-three people in this way and was found guilty on 132 of 135 indictments. Sentenced to death, he called across the courtroom to his wife, ‘Avenge me!’ He was guillotined on 25 May 1946.6
Louis Petitjean was arrested by his colleagues in February 1944 for helping refugees and escaping Allied aircrew and other Resistance activities. He was unable to obtain his release until May 1945, even though the superior officer who had him arrested was himself sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour after the Liberation. Reinstated in the RG, Petitjean lost fifteen months’ seniority and pension rights for the time spent in jail.7
Police-Gestapo co-operation, according to an interview Knochen gave to Historia magazine in 1972, was crucial after the Wehrmacht’s refusal to round up Jews because the task would otherwise have been impossible. Around 30,000 police worked directly for the German security organisations: in Marseille, 1,000 French supported a German staff of fifty; in St-Étienne there were 344 French for only ten Germans.
Pierre Pucheu was displaced by Laval’s return to power in April 1942 and slipped through Spain to North Africa, hoping to change sides. Arrested in Casablanca on 11 August 1943, he was condemned to death by a military court and shot near Algiers on 20 March 1944.
Louis Renault surrendered himself in ill health to a judge on 23 September 1944 and was jailed at Fresnes. Beaten up during the night of 4 October by communist detainees, he died in hospital on 24 October 1944 from head injuries. In 1945 de Gaulle nationalised the Renault company. Not until 1967 were the family shareholders compensated. In contrast, the company Sainrapt et Brice was permitted to keep as legitimate earnings profits of 360 million francs from construction contracts for the Wehrmacht.8
Heinz Röthke, who had declared that even a baby born in Drancy must be gassed in Auschwitz because it was a ‘future terrorist’, died peacefully in 1968 in Wolfsburg, where he had a legal practice.
SS Division Das Reich: Of the hangings in Tulle, in which they participated, SS officer Wulf and Sargeant Hoff had ‘no recollection’ at their trial in July 1951. Sentenced to ten years and life respectively, they were freed the following year. Lieutenantt Schmald, who had made the selection of those to hang, was shot by the Maquis in August 1944, muttering, ‘Ich hatte Befehl’ (‘I was ordered to do it’).9
The killers of Oradour were tried – some of them – by the Haut Tribunal Permanent des Forces Armées sitting in Bordeaux from 13 January to 12 March 1953. Strangely, General Lammerding was not extradited to give evidence, although known to be practising as a civil engineer in the British Zone of Germany. Forty-three men were condemned to death in absentia, most of them having been killed during the subsequent fighting in Normandy. In the dock were seven Germans and fourteen Alsatians – one volunteer and thirteen conscripts. Whether for political reasons – Alsace had been German in 1944 but was part of France in 1953 – or for diplomatic reasons with the Cold War at its height, or because of a need to cover up the alleged Maquis atrocities, the sentences were not exemplary. The senior German accused was sentenced to death; four others were given forced labour of ten to twelve years; one was acquitted. The Alsatian volunteer was also sentenced to death; nine of the conscripts were given five to twelve years’ hard labour; the other four received five to eight years’ hard labour.
In the Limousin, the sentences were considered outrageously inadequate, yet in Alsace there was public indignation that the malgré-nous conscripts should be sentenced at all for obeying German orders, no matter what they had done. Since the accused had spent eight years in custody, the Alsatian conscripts were released immediately, as the judges had known would be the case when passing sentence. All the Germans, except the man sentenced to death, were liberated a few months later. The two death sentences were commuted and both men were released in 1959.
Pierre Seel survived Natzwiller and tried unsuccessfully to live down the stigma of being a ‘notorious homsexual’ by leading an outwardly normal married life. But his past caught up with him, he was rejected by his family and eventually ‘came out’ by writing his memoirs.
Heinz Stahlschmidt was given French nationality and lived in Bordeaux under the name Henri Salmide. He married his fiancée Henriette, but had to wait fifty years for the city to thank him. On 20 May 1994 Mayor Jacques Chaban-Delmas awarded him the Bordeaux medal. Six years later, his heroism was officially acknowledged by the nation when President Jaques Chirac invested him with the Légion d’Honneur on 14 July 2000. Stahlschmidt/Salmide died during the writing of this book, in June 2006.
Paul Touvier, head of the Lyon Milice, went undercover in 1944 after releasing a few prisoners and making deals with the Resistance, hoping to be left in peace to spend the money he had amassed through extortion. Sheltered on religious premises and with false papers, he enjoyed contact with his family and was married in church, fathering two children by his second wife.
Condemned to death in his absence at Chambéry on 10 September 1946 for complicity in the murders of Hélène and Victor Basch and seven Jews machine-gunned at Rillieux, Touvier was arrested after participating in several armed hold-ups in Paris the following year. In an attempt to save his own skin, he betrayed other members of his gang of former collabos. Sentenced to die by firing squad at Lyon, he ‘escaped’ en route and was sheltered by another succession of priests and religious houses, even living in his home town of Chambéry under an assumed name for some time.
After the 1967 Statute of Limitations annulled Touvier’s sentences, he tried, with help from Church dignitaries, to regain his civil rights in order to inherit property and was pardoned by President Pompidou in 1971. An article in L’Express and legislation regarding crimes against humanity caused him to go underground once again in convents and monasteries where he was visited by his wife and children. The perseverance of gendarme Jean-Louis Recordon finally tracked Touvier down to the priory of St-François in Nice, where he was arrested on 24 May 1989 after the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchainé made it impossible for the government not to arrest him. Thanks to an able defence by a Catholic barrister, the first case was withdrawn, but Touvier was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment at the Yvelines Assizes Court in 1994. He died in Fresnes prison aged 81 and was honoured with a Requiem Mass, at which the eulogy praised a ‘sensitive and delicate soul … whom God would pardon as earthly Justice had not’.10
Xavier Vallat was tried in 1947 for his conduct as General Commissioner of Jewish Questions and his part in drafting the Second Statute of the Jews. Unrepentant, he accused prosecutor Kriegel-Valrimont of being racially disqualified to appear in a French court. Sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, Vallat was released from prison with ‘national indignity’ two years later. He then became a passionate Zionist in the belief that the existence of a Jewish state was the way to rid France of Jews permanently.
Otto Von Stülpnagel committed suicide while awaiting trial in Paris Cherche-Midi prison on 6 February 1948.
P.G. Wodehouse was released from German detention before his 60th birthday and allowed to live in Berlin in return for making several indiscrete, but not treacherous, broadcasts over Nazi English-language radio. Sent back to France in September 1943 to avoid the Allied bombing of the German capital, he was briefly imprisoned after the Liberation, returned to his US home and was knighted in 1975, a few weeks before his death, aged 93.
1. Amouroux La Vie, Vol. 1, pp. 134–9.
2. Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich, p. 206.
3. Interview with Mittre in Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich, p. 217.
4. Obituary notice in The Guardian, 3 December 2005.
5. Quoted on www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WW laval.
6. Thornton, The Liberation of Paris, pp. 63–8.
7. Undated newspaper cutting loaned by Françoise de Monbrison.
8. Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich, p. 149.
9. Nossiter, France and the Nazis, pp. 272–3.
10. For further details, see http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Touvier.