Modern tyranny is terror management.
—TIMOTHY SNYDER
In January 1943, two months after the Germans had invaded the so-called “Free” Zone, thereby occupying all of France, a gutsy professional, the police chief of a district in the southern city of Toulouse, wrote the following statement to the prefect of the département:
I refuse—and the responsibility is completely mine—to persecute Jews, who, in my opinion, have the same right to life and happiness as M. Laval himself.
I refuse to drag French workers by force from their families. I hold firmly to the idea that it is not our duty to deport our compatriots, and that any Frenchman complicit in this infamy, even should his name be Philippe Pétain, acts as a traitor.
I stand by each and every word that I have used.1
Our souls stir at such courage. But being moved diminishes the cost that such a letter to his superiors would have incurred. If he were lucky, only Commissaire Philippe’s job would be in jeopardy. He would have been immediately relieved of his duties, and probably of his pension. His family would have consequently suffered because of his actions. At worst, he would have been arrested, publicly humiliated, perhaps even jailed. He would not have been sent to Germany or executed, for he doubtless had many supporters among his men and in the community. Still, displays of this sort of public courage were rare among French police officers, who rounded up—and this is no exaggeration—more than 90 percent of the Jews, communists, and other “undesirables” targeted by the Occupational Authority and the Gestapo during the war years.
In his examination of guerrilla (now called asymmetric) warfare or military engagement, the political theorist Michael Walzer makes exquisite distinctions between those who refuse to accept the terms of a treaty or armistice and the expectations of a victorious army. There was a major moral and military conundrum at the various stages of the resistance by French civilians to occupying forces between 1940 and 1945. The distinctions were muddied by the fact that so many different entities were “resisting” a common enemy, but they often also “resisted” the actions of their fellow combatants as well. Early in the Occupation, many French citizens thought that resistance, armed or not, would put them in danger from a nervous German army, one they hoped would soon leave their country. Does post-treaty resistance activity have an obligation to protect citizens who might be held hostage to that activity? Nevertheless, Walzer argues that “after national surrender, if there are still values worth defending, no one can defend them except ordinary men and women, citizens with no political or legal standing. [That] leads us to grant these men and women a kind of moral authority.” But he also recognizes that such acts almost always placed the resisters in jeopardy, for, in the rules of war, “resistance is legitimate, and the punishment of resistance is legitimate.”2
From June 1940 until November 1942, there were two “Frances”—the Occupied and “Free” (Unoccupied) zones. From the beginning, acts of resistance occurred in both, but retribution and punishment were harsher in the German zone. So we come to one of the most persistently unresolved conundrums of that period: if the law was the law, then how did L’État Français deal with French citizens who considered themselves just as patriotic as those who officially pledged loyalty but who disagreed with the state’s most egregious policies? Who was more loyal to France: Those who followed blindly the temporizing Pétain and his ill-advised armistice, or those who refused to admit obeisance to any dictatorial state? Those who continued to fight a foreign enemy, after what was effectively a surrender, or those who cooperated and accepted the Occupation?
Even with the exhortations coming out of Vichy that France was on its way to a resurgent, more virile, more productive, and stronger state, the facts on the ground were totally contradictory. And after the Germans invaded Vichy France in late 1942, following the Allied campaign in North Africa, the Germans were omnipresent. The swastika was flying over every official building and monument, a stark reminder of being on the losing side. From the beginning of the Occupation, the French recognized and accepted how organized, predictive, and confident the German bureaucrats were, especially those with whom they had regular interactions. Rules were rules. Follow the rules, and all would be fine. But there remained no clear order of the ever-changing rules and regulations, and disrupted lives could not remain orderly, even for those who strived to do so. Food became scarcer; automobiles were commandeered; daily restrictions on what to read, what to listen to, and what to see in movie houses began to encroach on the French citizen’s sense of independence and liberty. Sure, we support order, many French would say, but we support liberty as well.
Almost every historian of the period now agrees that the fact of resistance was as significant as its military performance, if not more so. When we consider only the successful bombings or sabotage, the assassinations or spying, we overlook the slow changes, as the Occupation seemed to go on forever, brought on by the stubborn recalcitrance of a defeated and nervous population. The Germans could not stop the news spreading of the dozens of wasplike attacks all over the Occupied Zone, no matter how small. Local gossip and other means of communication ensured that everyone knew which transformers had been ruined, or how many German soldiers had been injured in a rail attack, or how many pieces of glass had punctured tires at parking lots, or whose children had been arrested. Everyone in an urban neighborhood, or a small town or village, no matter their own political leanings, generally knew who the communists were, who the fervent Pétainistes were, and who the secret Gaullists were. They might even know who the local Maquis leader was. A sense of patriotic solidarity mixed with a fear of reprisal protected the identities of a lot of these folks. Such were the circumstances that faced those in authority as they tried mightily to keep a large, confused nation quiescent. More than a few would be betrayed by their neighbors, but the authorities could not rely only on personal antagonisms or rewards for denouncing malefactors.
The Reich thought they had foreseen this situation. Before the war, the Germans, confident that they would be militarily occupying other countries, some for longer periods than others, had drawn up regulations that they believed could be applied universally, no matter the defeated nation. The official mantra from Berlin was that the German army should provide “order and security”—order in the civilian population and protection for the Germans assigned to occupation duties. However, France would prove to be an especially complex and demanding case. First, it was the most populous nation occupied. It was also a geographically large country, bordered by nonbelligerents (Switzerland and Spain), and thus porous; it had access to four strategic bodies of water: the English Channel, the North Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean. Finally, its western coast looked out to the British Isles, which at first had been the target of a planned German invasion; later the French coast became the first defense for an anticipated invasion from the British Isles. The armistice the Reich had signed with the French (Vichy) government had been constructed to address some of these problems, which was why the southern quarter of the nation was given over to French control (except for the far southeast, which was partially occupied by Italian forces), and the French fleet was assigned to protect the Mediterranean border from Spain to Italy. Still, problems of jurisdiction and responsibility confronted the Germans and their Vichy allies from the first days of the Occupation.
As soon as it was clear in the fall of 1940 that Operation Sea Lion (the invasion of the British Isles) was off, Germany began pulling its troops out of France in preparation for the still-secret invasion of the Soviet Union planned for June 1941. Suddenly, the German Military Command found itself severely undermanned for a complete and effective Occupation; it needed support—a great deal of it—from the French, specifically from the Vichy government. Thus began almost four years of three-dimensional checkers, if not chess, because the Occupying authorities found that they were competing with themselves. The German army resented any intervention from the SS and the Gestapo. Pétain’s government sought to maintain some judicial sovereignty, even over acts of sabotage against Germans, as well as against its own administration. And bureaucrats in both governments had to be in constant negotiation with their military or police opposites. Clarity of responsibilities was not a hallmark of the Occupation, however, and as a result, resistance members not only had to worry about being discovered or captured, but they had to be concerned too with who discovered them; they then had to worry about who would try them and convict them (for they were almost always found guilty). Not a few of the executions or deportations that took place during these dark years were the result of this administrative confusion.
* * *
Show trials have been centerpieces of totalitarian regimes for centuries. The public presentation of “justice” for acts against the state has at least two motivations: first, to instill caution, if not fear, in any citizen who thinks that the security apparatus is not monolithic; and second, to assure a beleaguered population that the established government will protect them against “bandits,” “terrorists,” “anarchists,” “communists,” and so forth. The illusion of process, carefully enunciated, is meant to ensure that citizens know that their leaders are well organized and that rules are well delineated. Consequently, intense preparations were made—through propaganda, the (often state-controlled) medium used to bring the theater of the proceedings and their verdicts (almost always “guilty”) into the daily lives of cowed citizens.
The official trials of clandestine actors during the Occupation, some handled by the Vichy state, some in civilian courts, and others within the German military justice infrastructure, tended to group together workers (mostly communist) and foreigners (mostly Jewish immigrants of the last few years). The idea was to continue the existing German propaganda efforts against the Bolsheviks and the Jews and to show that the undereducated lower classes were being duped into fighting for de Gaulle and Stalin. Of course, another reason for the regular interference of the Germans in the trial, sentencing, and execution of troublemakers was to remind L’État Français that they were not doing the job as thoroughly as their masters would like.
Three significant show trials have remained key moments in the memory and history of the Resistance. They were all military trials; though “public” and apparently transparent, friends and relatives of the accused could not attend. Sympathetic journalists were invited, however, with the understanding that they would spread the stories through Parisian and local newspapers, along with unflattering photographs of the accused. The judgments, for the most part, were known before the defendants arrived in the courtroom. The jailers ensured that the perpetrators appeared destitute, unhappy, and foreign (unshaven, mussed hair, careless clothing). Contrary to German expectations, the youthfulness of many defendants would inspire a deeper anger among the French.
A vast roundup of Jews, including French citizens, occurred in July 1942. Gentile French were appalled at the sight of innocent children, mothers, and grandmothers being loaded into trucks and buses to be taken to Drancy; this did not fit into the historical tableau constructed by their forebears depicting France as the guardians of citizens’ rights. As direct evidence of cruelty by the Germans and Vichy mounted, their attempts to maintain order and peace by slowing down the robust execution of “hostages” did not mollify an increasingly suspicious public. Finally, by late 1942, more and more French learned, as many Jews had discovered earlier, that there were death camps throughout eastern Europe. No one could comprehend fully the massiveness of this program and the furnaces burning twenty-four hours a day to remove the evidence, but enough rumor had been substantiated to cause suspicion and anxiety among a populace tired of what seemed to be an Occupation without end.*
The trials, then, were another propagandistic antidote to the threat of a more vigorous resistance to the Occupation. Since the point was both to spread the word that the Occupying Authority was serious about attacks against its personnel and to pretend to a judicial objectivity that such retribution was within the international rules of warfare, the trials had to be held in large auditoriums to accommodate the dozens of journalists from across France enjoined to attend. Numerous German officers were ordered to witness the proceedings. Families were not permitted to see the prisoners before or during their trial, nor, for the most part, after their guilty verdicts.
Such a veneer of legality was maintained regarding all of the Occupier’s repressive measures. The Germans repeatedly redefined what constituted “terrorism” or “acts against the Occupier,” ensuring that each offender had a trial, whether captured by the French and turned over to them or discovered by the Germans themselves. Initially, the Wehrmacht had left these trials up to the civil courts of Vichy France, but as it became clearer that their penalties would not be as harsh as the German ones, the military took over the judicial arraignment and trials of French résistants. Often families did not learn of the execution or imprisonment of their sons and fathers until they read their names in announcements posted in newspapers and on the walls of cities.
Seven young men—whose mug shots reveal an impassivity that belies the fervor of their “crimes”—were arrested in November 1941, delivered almost immediately to the Germans, and remained in limbo for more than six months as the Occupying Authority twisted and turned bureaucratically in a search for the most efficient and successful means of confronting what they saw as an increasingly well-organized resistance. Fernand Zalkinow, a nineteen-year-old Parisian, worked as a furrier’s assistant; his parents were arrested with him and died in Auschwitz. Robert Peltier, age twenty and also from Paris, was a sheet-metal worker. Tony Bloncourt was born in Haiti of French parents; he was a twenty-year-old student. Another student, Christian Rizo, age nineteen, studied at the Sorbonne; he had participated in the November 11, 1940, march up the Champs-Élysées. The youngest detainee, Pierre Milan, was a seventeen-year-old telegraph operator. Roger Hanlet, at nineteen, was a printing mechanic, and Acher Semahya, a Greek Jew born in Salonika, the oldest detainee at twenty-seven, was a mechanic. I mention their biographical data in addition to their names to give some substance to this group of young men: they ranged from the upper and lower socioeconomic classes, and they included intellectuals as well as workers, foreigners as well as Parisians. These seven represented a cross-section of the types of young people who would make up the majority of those executed by the Germans during the Occupation.
To hold such a trial in the halls of the eminent Palais-Bourbon, the last site of the government of the Third Republic, was a striking decision.* (The government of L’État Français remained in Vichy, despite Pétain’s repeated requests to the Germans to be allowed to move back to Paris, or at least to Versailles.) The building then, as now, was filled with décor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: walls, ceilings, and accoutrements were gilded, red, and white. The majestic residence of the president of the former Chambre de Députés in the Hôtel de Lassay was attached to the west of the main building; this is where the trial was most likely held, according to the journalists who were present (though some doubt remains about their memories). Why here? We cannot know for certain. Perhaps the idea was to humiliate further the seven ragged young men who were dragged before a formally dressed military court and to remind the public that their great history was on the verge of being smudged by Jews and communists.
Writes the historian Éric Alary:
If the German judicial procedure followed in the trial of the seven young communists did not differ from that generally followed in Occupied France, the site of the trial, the Palais-Bourbon, was on the other hand, exceptional, as would be the choice of La Maison de la Chimie, on April 15, 1942. In fact, in order for the trial to have the maximum impact, sites as important and as symbolic were necessary, especially to accommodate the greatest possible number of journalists.3
Found guilty, the seven young men were soon executed at the infamous clearing at Mont-Valérien, where many others had preceded and would follow them. To add to the tragedy of this penalty, only five firing posts were set up, so two of the young men had to watch their brothers die before themselves being tied to the bloody stakes.
There is another point about this trial that must not be overlooked. The seven young communists or communist sympathizers had been discovered, trailed, and arrested by the French police, the infamous Brigades spéciales, not the German authorities, though they operated under German orders. It was they who turned the youngsters over to the Germans and then washed their hands of the results.
This trial revealed three significant facts about the Resistance against the Occupation. First, it detailed what had only been bruited among the noncommitted French, namely, that there was an organized Resistance taking seriously its duty to rid France of the Occupier. Second, even though the Germans thought that the young men’s affiliation with the French Communist Party would be good propaganda, instead the trial brought direct attention to that organization’s stealthy and important work in resisting. And last, the relationship between the French police and the German authorities was shown to be intimate and firmly entrenched.
The second public trial that drew much attention was held a month later, and at another well-known site: La Maison de la Chimie on Rue Saint-Dominique in Paris. The massive former mansion had been selected after the Great War to be a sort of club where scientists could meet and discuss their research. Not as ostentatiously decorated as the Palais-Bourbon, the building still reflected the grand history of a once-dominant culture and nation. Again, the mixture of the classes and religious origins of the “guilty” was noticeable. When the names were published, some French felt relief that most of the names sounded “foreign.” Others may have noted instead the unity of differences among them.
The defendants had been living in Paris when captured, but had come from all over France to join the movements and networks that operated in and around the capital. Of the twenty-seven defendants, seven were younger than twenty; eight were between twenty-one and twenty-five; eight were between twenty-six and thirty-five; and only four were older than thirty-five. Again, for reasons that can only be inferred, youths had been specifically targeted by French and German police, a pattern that runs through the thousands of arrests that took place between 1940 and 1944. All except three of the twenty-seven would be executed: the men were shot, and the women were sent to Germany, where they were beheaded.*
Of course, the judged were not “innocent” under German military law: they had been quite active in the recruitment of other clandestines and were caught with arms, with supplies and machinery for printing tracts, and with notebooks of addresses and meeting places. Some had tried to assassinate German officers, but the “crimes” of most of them had been nonviolent; nevertheless, they had been grouped together because of their friendship or their knowledge of the others. The most casual resister was often defined by his or her acquaintance with the most violent.
Three of the defendants survived the war: the two who were found “innocent” but sentenced to hard labor in Germany for five years, and young André Kirschen, who was barely sixteen and thus, under German military law, could not be executed. He too was sent to Germany.* The rest of the prisoners had already figured out that they were to be executed, but did not know in what manner and when it would take place (though probably right after the trial). Remembers Kirschen,
This is how I felt, and I think it was the same for the other accused [who had been kept separated while awaiting the trial]. Still, our presence in that great room, with the swastika flag hanging behind the judges, did represent a momentary distraction. We thought that at least they would remove our handcuffs, which held our hands behind our backs, and which we had worn day and night in the cells; but that was hoping for too much. They only freed us for the few minutes when we were individually brought before the tribunal.4
Kirschen recounted that, for the most part, the military court’s “trial” was monotonous, held mostly in German, and obviously concerned with justifying its actions as consistent with international rules of war. Their assigned lawyers barely spoke with each defendant and were clearly present as window-dressing only. The defendants could not exchange anything but glances with their fellows. At the end of each day of the weeklong sham, they were led, incommunicado, back to their individual cells at La Santé prison.
Before the final sentencing, André was told that, because of his age, he would be sentenced to only ten years at hard labor. That sentence, he felt, was a disappointment. While his brothers were pledging to the judges that they would “die as buddies” (copains), he believed that somehow he was less virtuous for having been spared execution. He would be judged as not up to their courage.
The newspapers headlined the results of the trial, with varying emphases, for all of France to read:
Twenty-five communists given the death penalty:
They were the perpetrators of several terrorist attacks.
The terrorist assassins were paid by Moscow!
Twenty-five Bolsheviks given death penalty!
Two years later, after a long hiatus, the last of these significant showcase trials was held. It would become the best known, or at least the group executed would be, because of a propaganda poster that backfired on the Germans. The Francs-tireurs et partisans–main d’oeuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI; Irregulars and Partisans–Immigrant Workers) was a group of mostly immigrants who had joined forces with the communists in 1942–1943 and raised havoc in the mid- to late fall of 1943. The most active of the armed sections was led by an Armenian poet and refugee named Missak Manouchian, and the names of his group of twenty-four clandestines read like a League of Nations phonebook. For example, the names of those who were twenty-five or younger (half the group) were Coarec, Della Negra, Elek, Fingercwajg, Fontano, Gedulgig, Goldberg, Luccarini, Rayman, Salvadori, Wajsbrot, and Witchitz. They were ideal subjects for a public trial, for they could be made to represent the foreign-Jewish-communist “terrorists” that the Germans and their Vichy allies continued to place at the center of their propaganda.*
The group had been followed for months by the Brigades spéciales in one of its most successful filatures, or shadowing schemes. Beginning in late 1942, the communist-led group, which included French men and boys but was primarily composed of immigrants from eastern Europe, including young Jews, made several violent attacks on German matériel or on German personnel themselves. They were a tight band with a clandestine hierarchy whereby each member knew only two other members of the wider network. The network was quite successful for about a year, even while being carefully monitored by the police, because sympathizers offered them help: finding temporary planques, or bolt-holes, supplying them with cash, allowing them to hide material in innocuous apartments, keeping the neighborhood’s eyes on police and Gestapo patrols, and quietly passing messages. These and other activities, more and more frequent as the Occupation continued, allowed the FTP-MOI group to move quietly and effectively through the populace.
But the tenacious French police finally prevailed. The trial, another example of the German preoccupation with “legality,” was not as public as the first two, though compliant journalists were invited. Nor did it last long; the verdict was so obvious that the judgment took only a quarter of an hour. The judge was direct in his justification for their condemnation:
It is clear that the Jews who have dragged France into the war have not renounced their activity, and consider this nation favorable to its propaganda. Bolshevism and its allies are working to increase France’s problems under the pretext of striking against the German Army. In the majority of cases, Jews or communists are the leaders of terrorist organizations, working for England and the USSR.5
The men were all shot a week after the verdict, again at Mont-Valérien. The only woman among them, Olga Bancic, was sent to Germany, where she was beheaded a few months later.
The best known of this group, besides its leader Manouchian, was a boy of seventeen named Thomas Elek. Like Guy Môquet, Elek was one of the many youngsters to whom many French looked to lead them. His comrades called him “Bébé cadum,” after a popular gentle soap formulated for the soft skin of infants. His photographs show a smooth face surrounded by curly blond hair and bright, light eyes. Hungarian-born and Jewish, he had immigrated to Paris with his mother, Hélène, when he was five; she eventually opened a restaurant on Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, just down the road from the Panthéon. Frequented by Germans during the Occupation, for she spoke excellent German and served familiar eastern European dishes, the Fer à Cheval (Horseshoe) was also a meeting place for young members of the underground. Maroussia Naïtchenko, André Kirschen, and others met there frequently, sharing space with German soldiers.
From the beginning of his involvement in clandestine activities at the age of fifteen, Thomas had acted, with increasing violence, against the Occupier. Given his physiognomy, he was never suspected of being Jewish by the prejudiced, nor was his mother, but his horror at what was happening to his fellow Jews gave him the courage to act. For three years, first acting alone, then as a member of Manouchian’s group, young Thomas was an indefatigable courier, saboteur, and, eventually, killer. When he was finally captured, the police at first thought he was too young to be jailed, but upon arrest, he hid neither his Jewishness nor his role as a clandestine. Not unlike Guy Môquet two years earlier, he would become a visible example of the pitilessness of a police force that executed baby-faced resisters. In a semibiographical novel about Elek, his nephew Thomas Stern describes his uncle’s appearance in the photographs of the German police:
In your stare, Thomas, directed outside of the photograph, toward us, dead and alive, there seems to flow a dreamy sadness that comes from the depths of eternity. It’s the last glance you offer before leaving us. Soon afterward, there will be the dark circles of the rifles and the fixed stares of those who are aiming at you, without seeing your eyes, in order to kill you. . . . Your stare creates a channel into the impassable swamps of horror. It carries the light of a desperate clarity, one incapable of being extinguished.6
The most important legacy of this specific roundup and semipublic trial was the immense propagandistic benefit the Germans incorrectly claimed they had gained. They produced perhaps the most famous visual of the Occupation, the “Red Poster” (l’Affiche rouge), so-called because of its use of red ink in the depiction of the accused and their crimes. A photographic collage of scenes of sabotage and assassinations, overlaid with the images of dark-skinned, bearded men, the poster was sent all over France to be displayed in public spaces and reproduced in newspapers. “Here are your real enemies,” the poster screamed, “not the German army, but these foreigners, Jews, and communists who will not let matters rest.” But the response, at least as we know it through oral reports and clandestine newspapers, especially this late in the Occupation (February 1944), belied the German premise. By March and April, the clandestine newspaper of the MOI-FTP had concluded that the “campaign of xenophobia” had backfired: “We can say that this spectacle of a trial against the [Manouchian group] has produced results contrary to the ends that the Nazis had hoped for. Many Frenchmen, who might have allowed themselves to be fooled by these xenophobic campaigns, have now understood that the immigrant workers are brothers in the struggle.”7
The outcome of these trials was the same as with all of the repressive measures established by the Germans and their Vichy allies—the arbitrary selection of hostages, the murder of young men, the imprisonment of girls and young women, the reward incentives, the continuing claim that if the French helped the Germans their loved ones who were POWs could be released, the networks of informants, torture, arbitrary arrests of family members, and so forth. Nevertheless, they never succeeded in crushing—and perhaps could never have crushed—a disorganized resistance, defined often by the youth of the cadres’ members, much less an organized one.
* * *
A German Catholic priest, Franz Stock (a member of the Wehrmacht), had been commanded to be present at the executions held in the prisons in and around Paris. His Journal de guerre, divided into three parts, appeared in French in 2017. The first part is the journal he kept, day by day, while he was in Paris between 1940 and 1944; it describes his duties as chaplain to prisoners, both German and French. The second part deals with his own imprisonment after the war, when he was held by the Allied forces in Cherbourg; the last part describes his work in a seminary for German POWs. Stock was deeply Catholic and had been in Paris since 1934, as the rector of a small German Catholic center. He was fluent in French, loved France, and thought, as did many French and German intellectuals of the period, that Europe would be made safer if France and Germany could live together. When Germany invaded Poland in late 1939, Stock was called back home to Germany, where he remained for a few months before returning as a member of the German Occupation of “the City of Light.”
It was November 13, 1940, when Father Stock was first sent to visit prisons, then filled with hundreds of young school kids who had been rounded up two days before, following the first major protest against the Germans. He writes to his superior: “Two weeks ago I received the order to care for a large prison in [Suresnes], and I will receive clearance to care for the Wehrmacht prison in Paris [the Cherche-Midi]. Since all prisoners are French, my knowledge of the language will be very helpful. . . . This new field of work will bring many new opportunities.”8 The naïveté of this observation would be shattered soon after his work began.
At first, he did not keep a journal, but when his duties became much more demanding, he began taking notes in earnest. One of the prisons he visited most often was Fresnes, on the southern outskirts of Paris. Conceived as a model penitentiary at the end of the nineteenth century, the massive building was no longer in the best condition by 1940. The Germans had immediately requisitioned it to detain Allied spies, British airmen, saboteurs, and high-ranking military officers. Survivors remember it as overcrowded, badly heated in the winter, and stifling in the summer. Cells often held more prisoners than they had been sized for; one survivor remembers that, when a new prisoner was brought in, or when a priest came in, the opened door would spill some inmates into the corridor, who were then beaten back by truncheon-carrying guards.
All prisons are porous: information can, with some imaginativeness, both escape and enter. In these penitentiaries, new prisoners brought the latest rumors from the outside—about other roundups, other resistance movements and actions, the progress of the war against the Germans. And lucky prisoners could sneak messages out to their friends and relatives through bribed guards or complicit men of the cloth. Inside, all sorts of methods were found to pass on information between and among prisoners. Morse code was used on plumbing pipes, some of which were wide enough to carry voices into neighboring cells, and with help from complicit guards, written correspondence could help organize groups within the prison. One of the most disturbing messages that could come from the outside was that a major attack by the Resistance had taken place. Knowing the protocol that for each German soldier attacked or killed, twenty-five, fifty, or even a hundred prisoners might be executed, the inmates remained silent until further word. Those who had been sentenced to only a few months or a year were especially anxious, for they were hostages just as much as those who had already been condemned to die. And of course Jews and communists knew that they were first on any list because of who they were or what they believed.
Executions increased after 1941, and they affected almost everyone in the prison. Stock mentions that he witnessed young German soldiers with tears in their eyes as their brutal brothers beat men on the way to the execution field or who were present when some were allowed to see their wives and children for the last time. Sometimes those younger guards would be punished for showing such emotions. Recalled another survivor of German imprisonment:
A firing squad refuses to shoot a priest. The officer in charge approaches the priest, tied to the stake, and shoots him several times in the head. Then the officer orders the squad’s arrest. . . . Disobedience to a [German] officer normally merits the offender’s beheading. Franz [Stock] somehow gets [the charge of disobedience] dismissed [so that the miscreants might die as soldiers, not criminals]. A [Catholic] soldier . . . assists another priest in giving the condemned their last communion, then picks up his rifle, joins the firing squad, and shoots the Mass celebrants, fellow Germans.9
It is not easy to feel sorry for the German soldiers who did the killing, but certainly one of the most underreported phenomena of these years of brutal punishment is the psychic price paid by those who were carrying out the executions. The élan that had defined soldiers of the Wehrmacht in the first years of the war had weakened, especially with the news of the terrible destruction that British and American bombers were wreaking back home in the fatherland. With this decline, Stock noticed that younger Wehrmacht recruits began to desert; once captured, he had to give these Germans last rites just as he did for young Frenchmen. These few minor rebellions were quietly and quickly suppressed, and we are still left with little information on the personal toll of being an executioner. Some members of the execution squads were more often than not adolescents as young or younger than those they were shooting. We know that some officers felt that the executioners should have received battle pay, and they would often allow a stiff drink afterward, or between executions, but Stock mentions none of this. Other Germans would be executed for such offenses as falling for a prostitute, passing information to others, and remaining loyal to the German Communist Party even while in Nazi uniform. Stock’s most poignant feelings were for those young kinsmen who often refused his offers of consolation and forgiveness.
In his influential history of the Holocaust in the east, Christopher Browning details the psychological effect on members of the SS Einsatzgruppen who killed thousands of Jews in Poland by shooting them point-blank in front of pits where they would fall. He observes that “many of the perpetrators were young men” who had been indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda and had accordingly formed a moral shield for their actions.10 Yet, Browning argues, it was the social pressure of other recruits and their leaders that was more instrumental in these wanton murders. Despite those who had few problems with the massacres, there was “physical revulsion” and a “broad demoralization” that set in after repeated orders to execute prisoners, even the “guilty” ones. Courage does not always lead to consistent heroic action, but occasionally the horror of events evinces it, even among perpetrators of the horrors.11 Not unlike the young resisters we have been reading about, young Germans’ courage often manifested under such pressure, and their ability to turn away from their heinous duty was a sign of rare fortitude of character.
Stock’s personal story is riveting, for he managed both to stay loyal to his country of birth (though he had no admiration for Hitler and Nazism) while doing his best to reduce the terror imposed on French citizens by the Wehrmacht, and later by the Gestapo. He had a pass that protected him from searches as he visited the jailed at Fresnes, and the large Parisian prisons of the Cherche-Midi and La Santé, and even wounded prisoners in the Pitié-Saltpêtrière Hospital. What the guards and prison officials did not know was that Stock was adept at smuggling foodstuffs, writing materials, and books to the inmates; he did the same with messages from the prisoners and messages from their families. Never wearing his major’s Wehrmacht uniform when ministering, Stock always dressed in a black cassock (he became known among prison guards as the “black crow”) and refused to wear the boots of German officers for fear of intimidating the men he was to console. Considered benign by wardens and guards, he moved freely in the prisons and among the prisoners.
Stock spent final moments with some of the best-known victims of Nazi justice, such as Jacques Bonsergent, the first Frenchman executed in Paris, and Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, de Gaulle’s first spymaster. The work exhausted him; though only in his late thirties, he had a heart weakened by a childhood bout with rheumatic fever. Soon he had another Wehrmacht officer and priest join him, Major Theodore Leovenich, who began the same extracurricular actions as Stock. Eventually, Stock’s religious co-conspirator—who hid candy, notes, pencils, paper, indeed a whole variety store, in his large empty pistol holster—was exposed by a prison snitch, fired as chaplain, and sent to the Eastern Front. His fate remains unknown. Stock found himself once again alone in his work.
Stock believed that anyone who died without the Catholic sacraments was doomed to purgatory at best, and hell at worst. So his job was not only to relieve the condemned of their anxieties about dying but to assure that their afterlife would be as bountiful as that of any dedicated Christian. (Stock was confident that he was saving souls; his sadness at not being able to convert, even at the last moment, Jews and communists is evident in his writings.) The Frenchmen with whom Stock spent time, especially the youngest ones, thinking of their mothers’ deep faith, would confess their sins, and some would ask for last communion. Not a few asked to be rebaptized. Stock would often receive or visit with the families of the young men who had been shot, reassuring them that their sons had died as Catholics.
Yet in his entries, he avoids questioning why so many civilians, a good number of them in their teens and early twenties (he mentions their youth several times), were being stood up against poles driven into the ground and shot by five to twelve German soldiers. Possessing such a journal meant that Stock had to be continuously aware that it could be found or seized by police authorities, so he maintained his studiously objective “descriptions.” There is never even a hint of criticism of the authority that would put young men to death for minor acts of sabotage, never a whisper of embarrassment that he was working for such a bloodless—and bloody—regime. For instance:
We left for Fresnes at 6 a.m. Five Jews shot in reprisal for attacks: the Commandant of Paris requested that I attend. Ordinary people. Buried in the Nanterre cemetery. . . . [Visited first] at the Cherche-Midi, death sentence for possession of arms, 22-year-old Catholic, confessed and took communion calmly; then departure for La Santé Prison, where two terrorists [here, he uses automatically the German term for the prisoners], condemned to death for some time, were totally distant.12
All the same, some of his jottings do reveal a sensitive man, one who admired courage and sensed the presence of God in the prisons of Paris. He respectfully lets us know, in some detail, which resisters raised their hands in a communist salute, which ones sang “La Marseillaise” as they died, and which refused to be tied to the post or to wear a blindfold. He describes, for instance, the execution of twenty-one prisoners on April 17, 1942:
Friday, April 17, 1942
21 EXECUTIONS
Morning, visit to Fresnes [largest prison in Paris region]. The communists and terrorists [here he uses the official terminology] condemned Tuesday must be shot in the afternoon. After a brief lunch break, go to La Santé. . . . 21 shot. In their cells, useless attempts at getting them to accept help from a priest! Not one wants anything. The young ones speak about the ideal for which they are ready to die, communism. . . . They [arrive at] the execution site, singing the first verse of La Marseillaise.13
Reading entries that relentlessly recount fear, anxiety, sorrow, and death, one can perhaps gauge his charity and compassion between the lines of this journal of wasted blood and indifferent murder.
Little Maurice, 21 years old, came in an ambulance, and was the only believer. Confessed earlier and took communion. Was with him in ambulance—he had tried to escape and fell off the walls of Santé, breaking a leg and vertebrae, lying down, encased in plaster. Had the soul of a child, but he never lost his smile, despite his suffering. . . . He hid his pain, didn’t let out a single moan. He was shot, alone, the last one. When his sentence was read, he said “That’s fair.” I went to his side, [to give him the] last benediction, “Adieu”! Then he gave a good handshake to Ernst, the guard who had carried him on a stretcher every day during the trial, saying “merci, Ernst, and au revoir.”14
Stock was a deeply Christian man who managed somehow to separate his status as a Wehrmacht priest from his pastoral service. Whether or not that conflict caused him angst or regret or self-doubt, we do not know, for all we have are the dry accounts of his diary entries. Stock was nothing if not a proper German soldier. In his daily notes, there is a macabre juxtaposition of the quotidian and the exceptional, the events, meetings, and meals that he had every day recorded alongside the details of his almost normalized attendance at the murder of so many youngsters. Still, despite his Wehrmacht role, Stock recognized the humanity of the “terrorists,” the “communists,” and, of course, the Jews (though, as noted, their defiant refusal to convert upset him).
From time to time, Stock does express incredulity about the courage of his charges. Why, he wonders, if a person has nothing else to lose, including his life, would he not take the famous wager of Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century philosopher and theologian: I am not ready to say I believe, but just in case I am wrong and there is an afterlife, why not live—and die—as if there were? Nothing lost, and a lot to gain. But Stock fails to pierce the indomitable spirit and idealism of most of these young people. Even if they wanted to tell their parents that they were believers, that they had died with the rites bestowed upon them, many of them had higher ideals that they did not have the time or means to explain to others. These were the ideals that had encouraged them to resist in the first place: a sturdy belief in the difference between right and wrong; a desire to protect those who were not able to protect themselves; a sense of solidarity with their generation; anger at those, both domestic and foreign, who had betrayed them; and a deeper, more profoundly felt patriotism than what they had been taught in their schools or by their elders. We have few such powerful witnesses as Stock of the methods used by the Germans to cow civilians, nor of the courage of the condemned.*
After the Liberation, the very success of Franz Stock’s attempts at keeping the survivors informed about those executed drew attention from the Free French Army, which wanted to garner the important information they thought he held. Rather than congratulate him on his courage, they sought to plumb the secrets he held. The result was one of those horribly comic moments in history when the tables are not only turned, but so are the chairs:
They demanded information [about what had happened in] the Parisian prisons, the tortures, . . . etc. Above all, they demanded he provide names: [of] those executed; [of] their betrayers; [of] prison administrators, guards, etc. “They tried to force me to return to Paris with them,” Stock writes, “under pretense of informing the families of those executed as well as serving the best interests of humanity by helping them track down the ones responsible for these crimes.” . . .
[He] coldly advised his questioners that whatever information he might possess, he had gained because he was a priest. Under no circumstance would he allow himself to be used as an instrument of revenge. Furious, the interrogators . . . returned to Paris leaving [a] quietly defiant, stubborn Westphalian POW.15
After the war, Stock would continue to work with young Germans, veterans of the Wehrmacht who wanted to become priests. He fostered an attitude of rapprochement between Germans and the French, but with his damaged heart, his work continued to exhaust him. He died from exhaustion at the age of forty-three and was buried in France. In 1963, his body was exhumed to be entombed in a new, small Catholic church near Chartres. Religious and political leaders of France and Germany came to pay their respects, and the last letter that Pope John XXIII sent before his own death was one honoring Father Stock’s work. Students of the Vatican predict that, like John Paul himself, Stock will eventually be beatified.
Stock was a German, a soldier, and a priest, and at any given time one of these identities would dominate. He ran the danger of being discovered, removed from his duties, or transferred, but he was never really threatened by the prospect of prison, execution, or excommunication. So why celebrate, whether officially and unofficially, this man’s actions during the long Occupation? Because his example shows the complexity of the reactions of many German soldiers and bureaucrats to the nasty repression enforced by their comrades-in-arms. They might not have put their lives on the line—Stock, for example, might have deeply believed that, as their belt buckles bragged, Gott mit uns (God is with us)—but thousands went up to that line and ignored the brutish orders of their superiors. Besides, Stock has provided us with one of the most precise chronicles that we have from the German side of the processes of imprisonment and execution of those who resisted. Objective to the point of blandness, uncritical of his comrades, his journal nevertheless opens a door to the intimacy of death, the last act of resistance on the part of young French patriots.
* * *
Avoiding execution after arrest and judgment was not, for many, a respite. Deportation and internment in concentration camps in Germany or Poland were executions under another name. In such places, there were worse enemies than beatings and insults: freezing temperatures, meager rations, physical exhaustion, untreated illness, and constant fear required a concentration of luck, inner strength, and human solidarity that could be far more demanding than even the most courageous acts of resistance against an armed enemy.
After months of imprisonment in and around Paris, Jacques Lusseyran was finally sent to Konzenstrationlager Buchenwald, a massive collection of prison camps created by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. Buchenwald was near Weimar, in eastern Germany; one of the country’s cultural capitals, Weimar was where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had lived and written his scientific treatises, poetry, plays, and novels.* The camp was on a high hill, where it was more vulnerable to the harsh winters of that part of Germany; Lusseyran’s most frequently mentioned concern was the snow, rain, and bitter cold that surrounded the camp for six months a year. He estimated that of the two thousand French men and boys sent to Buchenwald between January 1944 and the camp’s liberation by the U.S. army in April 1945, only thirty had survived. Unbelievably, the blind young man was one of them, though he had barely escaped death during the first months, so shocked was his system by the cold, the disease, and the slow starvation. He noticed too that boys and young men between the ages of twenty and twenty-five seemed to die as rapidly as the elderly. He suggests that the reason was the shock to their systems of such a sudden change in nutrition and exposure. Lusseyran himself had turned twenty only four months previously.
Lusseyran’s guardian angel helped him on his first day. Each new inmate had to report his status to the record-happy SS bureaucracy. The clerks who took down the information were often inmates themselves. When asked by a Polish census-taker what his profession was, Jacques answered: “Student at the University of Paris.” The clerk lowered his voice and whispered in German: “Don’t let them know you are an intellectual. They hate intellectuals.” Stubbornly, but cannily, Jacques instructed that his form show: “Profession: interpreter of French, Russian, and German,” despite the fact that he knew no Russian (though he would quickly pick up the rudiments of the language within a few months). As it turned out, the life of prisoner number 41978 was most likely saved because of this fortuitous encounter.
The early weeks were probably the worst of Jacques’s incarceration. First, he found that though his blindness kept him from being sent out daily on back-breaking work commandos, his fellow prisoners would steal his food or hide it from him. Without the reliable protection of his old friends, he was often pushed and shoved to the back of any line, whether for food or a comfortable place to sleep. Lusseyran had been assigned to the “Invalids Block,” where those the Germans could not work to death were housed:
The one-legged, the one-armed, the trepanned, the deaf, the deaf-mute, the blind, the legless . . . , the aphasic, the ataxic, the epileptic, the gangrenous, the scrofulous, the tubercular, the cancerous, the syphilitic, old men over seventy, boys under sixteen, the kleptomaniacs, the tramps, the perverts, and last of all the flock of madmen. They were the only ones who didn’t seem unhappy.16
They all shared a common trait: not one was whole. Yet slowly, Jacques’s belief in having an inner sight, gifted to him by his blindness, enabled him not only to survive but to become the same type of leader in camp as he had been as a seventeen-year-old Resistance organizer. He recited poetry—Rimbaud, Baudelaire—to inmates who did not understand French and inspired his new comrades—Russians, Poles, and others—to sing, dance, and laugh. “To forget was the law”—that is, to repress the restrictions and cruelties of the camp was the best way to remember past days of song and gentle revelry.
His reputation as a clear-spoken, direct, and transparent promoter of temporary happiness was augmented by his role as a trusted “spreader of the word.” His German allowed him to listen carefully to the radio transmissions from Berlin that came across the loudspeakers, the same speakers that ordered the inmates to fulfill their minutely regulated tasks. He combined what he could gather from reading between the scripted lines of the radio broadcasters—what was omitted as much as what was said—with the news that came almost daily into the camp with the arrival of new internees. He interviewed newcomers, trying to coordinate stories, news, and rumors, and he recruited Dutch, Polish, Russian, Czech, and Hungarian native-speakers to spread his “newscast.” (At one point he was stunned to learn of the Normandy invasion only a few weeks after it had happened, not from the Germans but from a new inmate.) In this way, information about the slow disintegration of the German front and the impending arrival of the American army reached the prisoners. Though the Germans tried to empty the camp with hastily prepared “death marches,” eventually the inmates took matters into their own hands and attacked the few guards who remained, knowing that there would be massive Allied help coming up the road to Buchenwald.
And so Lusseyran survived. But the drama was not finished; after the camp was liberated, the inmates still had to wait, once again, to be counted and interrogated. Prisoners died daily, from overeating, from the shock of freedom, and from illnesses too far along for medical intervention. The retreating camp guards had poisoned the food stock, and starvation began to take lives:
[Those] days . . . were days of stupefaction. We were drunk but with an evil drunkenness. . . . One doesn’t pass over, all at once, from the idea of death to the idea of life. We listened to what they [the Americans] were saying to us, but we asked for a little time to believe in it. . . . Where was the joy of freedom, the joy of living? The camp was under an anesthetic, and it would take hours and hours to lay hold on life. Finally, all of a sudden, it burst upon you; blinding your eyes, stronger than your senses, stronger than reason. It came in great waves, every wave hurtling as it came in.17
* * *
We are left with nagging questions about those who did not resist the Occupying Authority: How many Frenchmen who assisted in the punishment and murder of their own fellow citizens would live long lives of guilt, fearful at any moment that someone would remember them or point them out? How many accepted responsibility for their lapses in acting with common humanity? We write of the heroes and the villains, but what of the other victims—those caught in between absolute evil and ethical beneficence? Ever since the end of World War II, the French have struggled with such questions. Perhaps they—and we—always will.