Klaus Barbie Read online

  Although separated in age by nine years, Henry and Alfred were known as ‘the twins’. Before the war, as the ‘Boorn Brothers’, they had been acrobats in a circus, travelling around Europe with their parents, wives and children. This happy way of life was brought to an abrupt end when, in 1942, the ship carrying both their families to safety was torpedoed by a German submarine and they were all drowned. Not surprisingly, the Newton brothers were keen to exact revenge. Under the code names ‘Auguste’ and ‘Artus’, their SOE mission was to train French groups in sabotage. Their vendetta went sour from the outset.

  Their own account, written by Jack Thomas and published in 1956, reflects their considerable bitterness. Called No Banners, it is filled with colourful descriptions of their successful exploits against the jackbooted Hun, their bravery and unquestioned patriotism at the risk of a horrible death. There was no reason for Jack Thomas to query the Newtons’ account because it had been completely accepted by SOE officers after the war. It is, however, as will be seen, seriously flawed. The purpose of exposing these flaws is not to undermine the undoubted courage of the brothers but to reveal the methods and style of Klaus Barbie.

  According to the Newtons in this account, the reception party on the landing field greeted them with insults. Surprised and despondent, they spent their first night uncomfortably in a farm house, where their money was ‘stolen’ before daybreak. They were then dispatched with little kindness to Lyons to await their contact, Vomécourt, whom they knew under the code name ‘Walter’. That meeting was arranged to take place four days after their arrival. The rendezvous was a Lyons restaurant, where to their obvious discomfort four Germans, described by Thomas as ‘Gestapo agents’, were eating at the next table.

  ‘Suddenly a waiter bawled from the middle of the floor: “Messieurs ‘Auguste’ et ‘Artus’, si’l vous plait.” With beads of cold sweat breaking out on their faces, Henry and Alfred sat motionless. They did not need to turn their heads to know that the four Germans had stopped eating, that their ears were pricked for just what might come next.’ The waiter loudly told the two that he had a message from ‘Walter’ that he could not make the meeting. Thinking on their feet, the brothers managed to persuade their German neighbours that the whole episode was a sexy joke.

  The brothers met ‘Walter’ a few days later. They were shocked by his contemptuous manner. The French, he told them, needed money and arms, not more Englishmen to fight the Germans. At the end of this harangue, Alfred claims to have cautioned him quietly about his poor security, especially at the restaurant.

  ‘It might interest you to know,’ said Alfred, ‘that one of the gentlemen in question – the one in the light-cream trench coat, the owner of the Alsatian dog – was Herr Barbe [sic], Sturmbannführer Barbe, the local Gestapo chief.’

  ‘I know him,’ ‘Walter’ said. ‘That doesn’t stop me going about my business.’

  This was June, a full five months before Barbie arrived in Lyons. It is the first of many distortions in the brothers’ account.

  The brothers and Vomécourt were never able to reconcile their differences after this first argument. The brothers doggedly tried to build a network but say they were frustrated by ‘Walter’ who, until the last weeks of their operation, kept them away from Stonehouse who was supposed to transmit their messages to London. It is a curious complaint because Stonehouse is quite emphatic: ‘I never met the Newton brothers again after we arrived in France, and as far as I remember, it wasn’t my job to be their radio officer.’

  Despite these problems, the brothers did build up the GREENHEART network, basing it partly in Le Puy, a small town nestling in high, rolling hills a hundred kilometres south of Lyons, and partly in Borne, a small village outside Le Puy, the area for the parachute drops. They arranged a few drops and organised some limited sabotage missions, but they still felt aggrieved at being undervalued and undermined, and were furious that their French associates continuously broke all the most fundamental rules of security. After the war, they expressed exasperation at the desperately isolated struggle they undoubtedly endured in the early days when the Resistance was still surviving its baptism of fire.

  The condition of the Resistance in Lyons was critical: it was fragmented, militarily weak, politically divided, and cut off from Britain, its only sure supplier of material. It seemed to be suffocating at birth. The SOE’s task was made increasingly easier as the French began to realise that the Germans were draining their country systematically of its food and its industry; but the Resistance still lacked a national leader in France itself.

  On the clear, cold night of 1 January 1942, three parachutes floated down over a marsh east of Aries from an Armstrong Whitely twin-engined plane personally commandeered by the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden. One of his secret deliveries into France was Jean Moulin, code-named ‘Max’. His task was to convince all the different factions of the Resistance that they should unify under one leader, General de Gaulle.

  At the outbreak of the war, Moulin was Prefect of Eure-et-Loir, living in Chartres, a town south-west of Paris. At the time he was France’s youngest prefect, noted for his dark, handsome features, his charm, intelligence and administrative skills. Politically, Moulin was a fervent supporter of the Republic: left wing, but not an extremist or a radical; a man of principle. When the commandant of the newly-arrived German troops in Chartres ordered him to sign a declaration that a group of air-raid victims had been brutally massacred by dissident Senegalese soldiers, he refused. Jailed and brutally beaten, he cut his own throat with a piece of broken glass rather than face the temptation of conceding in the trial of strength the following day. It was 18 June, the same day that de Gaulle made his historic appeal to the French to rally to his flag.

  Moulin was taken unconscious to the local hospital but, after his recovery, was dismissed by the Vichy government because he was unwilling to collaborate with the Germans. In November 1940 he ‘retired’ to the south coast in the unoccupied zone and immediately began exploring the possibilities of escape to England to meet de Gaulle.

  For a year, while he waited, Moulin toured as much of France as possible, contacting members of the Resistance, most significantly Henri Frenay, the leader of ‘Combat’. They met in Marseilles, shortly before Moulin left for Lisbon to catch a plane to Britain. Frenay’s briefing on the state of the Resistance focused on its ambitions rather than its achievements, but Moulin already knew enough to impress the Gaullists in London who were in desperate need of inside information.

  De Gaulle saw immediately that Moulin was the first Frenchman to arrive from the occupied mainland with the qualities of leadership necessary to transform the fractious resistance movement into a cohesive force which could win the Free French in London the vital recognition of the Allied governments. Over eight weeks, Moulin was intensively briefed on de Gaulle’s policies, given basic training for fighting an underground war and provided with a completely new identity. When Frenay met him again in January, it was ‘a different Jean Moulin’. Besides a new moustache, he had a firm mission, with power and directives. Agnes Bidault witnessed that first reunion. ‘I remember him taking out of his waistcoat pocket a tiny note of paper, hidden in a matchbox. It was the directives for the Armée Secrete which could only be read through a microscope. It was something completely new for us all.’

  Moulin’s message to Frenay was simple and brutally blunt. Frenay could only hope to wage an effective campaign against the Germans if he was properly equipped with money, guns and, most important of all, radios. The only source was London and to tap that source Frenay had to be prepared to accept de Gaulle as leader.

  Within a few days, Frenay had agreed. Moulin immediately gave him 250,000 francs in cash, half of the funds he had brought from London. The two other groups did not come to heel so quickly. Both Lévy and Raymond Aubrac from ‘Francs-Tireurs’, and Astier from ‘Libération’ were willing, even keen, to talk to Moulin, but they were not convinced that money and supplies
alone could unite the three movements under de Gaulle. Only Moulin’s diplomatic skills could convince them that it was possible to work with Frenay and with the communists. According to Frenay, ‘From the first day, “Max’s” relations with the movements were excellent. At the time there was a lot of friction between us. Impartially, using considerable skill, he brought us all closer together without meddling in everyone’s internal affairs.’

  Frenay’s glowing post-war testimonial hides the bitter acrimony between himself and Astier, and between himself and Moulin, which continued during the months after Moulin’s return – damaging arguments which sometimes raged for hours without conclusion. Patiently and helplessly, Moulin watched the antagonists continue their blood-letting while he methodically organised radio receivers, safe houses, dead-letterboxes, links with de Gaulle in London and finance for each group. But by August even he could not conceal the problems created by the failure of the leaders to agree to unite under de Gaulle. There was an unmistakable crisis of morale. Potential recruits were often discouraged from joining the Resistance because of its splintered and argumentative leadership.

  De Gaulle’s solution, which he communicated to Moulin in October, was to set up a co-ordination committee to which all three movements would affiliate. Ostensibly they would retain their separate identities. Both to ease Moulin’s task and to prove where the real power lay, de Gaulle sent his envoy twenty million francs to distribute amongst the Resistance leaders. Within days the three agreed to de Gaulle’s proposal. It was the first step towards unity and, more importantly, de Gaulle had imposed his leadership on the movement. With his envoy now firmly in control, not only money, but arms and equipment were parachuted into France. Each shipment increased Moulin’s power and influence just at the time when the potential threat to the Resistance capital of France from the Germans became fact.

  ‘Operation Attila’, the German army’s plan for crossing into Vichy France, was implemented on 11 November 1942, just three days after the Allied landings in French North Africa. General von Rundstedt noted in his diary that the French army was ‘loyal’ and ‘aided our troops’, and that the French police were equally helpful. Eighty SS officers arrived in Lyons the same day. Thirty were dispatched to outlying areas. The others, including Barbie, stayed in the city.

  Surprisingly, the Gestapo had not decided in advance where to site their headquarters. It was only four weeks later that the fifty-strong SS team moved into sixty rooms on the second and third floors of the Hotel Terminus next to the Perrache railway station. Their living and sleeping quarters were on the second floor. Twenty rooms on the third floor were reserved for interrogation. The prisoners were to be brought daily from Montluc prison. According to the official French police investigation conducted after the war, the rooms at the Terminus were not specially equipped with torture equipment. That would only come in June 1943 when the Gestapo, clearly suffering from an increased work load and insufficient space, moved into the vast Ecole de Santé Militaire on the Avenue Berthelot.

  The first SD commander for Lyons and the region was Rolf Müller, but he transferred in early 1943 to Marseilles. His position was temporarily filled by Fritz Hollert who was noticeably disgruntled when he was replaced that summer by Dr Werner Knab, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer born in Munich. Knab changed the whole tone of the Lyons SS team. He arrived directly from Kiev in Russia where he had been a commander of the area’s SS and SD forces. During his posting he had been a Gestapo chief and an active member of Einsatzgrüppe C, a squad of elite SS men organising and carrying out the mass murder of tens of thousands of Jews, gypsies, communists and whomever else the Nazis considered undesirable. These murderous duties, according to a 1943 report recommending him for promotion to colonel, he carried out with, ‘quite extraordinary skill’. A thin, impenetrable, ambitious officer, he spoke both French and English, having spent four and a half months in London and Stratford-upon-Avon. He arrived in Lyons without a scruple for human life and with complete dedication to his cause. In Barbie he found a very willing subordinate and disciple.

  Rolf Müller assumed total responsibility for security over the city and region. He allowed none of the usual arguments to arise (as had arisen in Paris during the early days of German occupation of France) between himself and the Wehrmacht about who was in control. When arguments did later develop, they concerned the degree of ruthlessness necessary to suppress the Resistance.

  The SD in Lyons was organised into six sections. Section I, under Lieutenant Kassler, was officially responsible for management and trusteeship of seized goods. (According to a French police investigator, Kassler left France at the end of the war with at least twenty-five million gold coins, while other subordinates left with millions-of-dollars-worth of jewels and securities.) Section II was a small legal department, while section III tried to control the French economy, and especially the black market.

  Section IV, the Gestapo, was headed by Barbie himself. He divided his own department into six sub-sections specialising in the resistance and communists, sabotage, the Jews, false identity cards, counter-intelligence and the intelligence archives. At the beginning, about twenty-five German officers worked directly under him. Twelve months later, as the Gestapo set up branches in other towns in the region, the number of officers under his direct orders increased. His leadership was efficient, dynamic and totally uncompromising. To the amusement of other Gestapo officers, Barbie was an outright ‘workaholic’.

  Barbie’s domain outside Lyons covered 15,000 miles stretching from the north of the Jura mountains along the Swiss border, and south down the Rhône into the Hautes-Alpes. When Italy withdrew from the war in September 1943, Barbie immediately became responsible for Grenoble and another 3,000 square miles. With frenetic energy he often crossed his ‘official’ boundaries to operate also in Marseilles and Dijon. Overall, his territory was a mixture of long plains and rugged, wooded, mountainous areas with inaccessible villages and isolated farms. Potentially it was a troublesome area, but for the moment most of the French were still happy to be safe from the ravages of war. The single-minded twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant had as much power as a medieval tyrant. His rule was uncontrolled and unlimited. It was in fact a return to the Dark Ages, only Barbie did not even feel answerable to God.

  The SD’s section V, the Kripo, investigated crime. Not surprisingly, it was the smallest of the sections. Section VI was responsible for espionage, intelligence and infiltration. Elsewhere in the German Reich, it would have reported directly to Schellenberg’s Amt VI in Berlin, but there are doubts about this in Lyons. After the war, the Allies, anxious to exploit the expertise of German intelligence, exonerated many Amt VI officers as being less criminal than the rest of the SS. Under Kommandant Talmann and August Moritz, section VI in Lyons not only exploited the enormous amount of information offered by collaborating Frenchmen, but also unhesitatingly encouraged the murder of anyone considered to be an enemy of Germany or of Vichy France.

  Gestapo rule over Lyons in the first weeks was hesitant. Despite German penetration of the city over the previous months, the SS lacked sufficient information to make more than a few arrests. Barbie correctly assessed that, despite the sincere offers of help made by René Cussonac, the pro-German Lyons police chief, the city’s force was considerably weakened by the inclusion of Resistance sympathisers in its ranks. Over the months he built up a cadre of trustworthy Frenchmen, of whom he said twenty-five years later, ‘Without them I could never have done my job so well.’

  Of the five SOE networks operating when Barbie arrived, including the Newton brothers’ GREENHEART, only PIMENTO, which was organising resistance among railway workers, was to survive his immediate onslaught. As will be seen, his treatment of those British SOE agents whom he captured reveals that he made a sharp distinction between the British and the French. Barbie’s earliest successes were against the SOE.

  Under the armistice agreement, the German military were not allowed to operate in the unoccupied zone
but this ruling had been blatantly ignored by the Germans – especially by the Abwehr and Gestapo. German agents had operated throughout the zone, using false papers provided by the Vichy government and getting help from the Vichy police.

  The greatest danger to the SOE had been an elite SD squad based in Charbonnières, west of Lyons, and working under the cover of the armistice commission, which specialised in monitoring illegal radio transmissions. Several months before the Germans crossed into Vichy France, a squad of disguised Abwehr radio-detection vans had efficiently pinpointed the small but careless group of British radio officers who had been sent to the Lyons area by Baker Street.

  On 24 October 1942, a clear two weeks before the Germans officially crossed into unoccupied France, Brian Stonehouse realised that he had been detected. He was still resolutely tapping a long message to London when the Vichy police burst into his room. The subsequent interrogation was conducted by both German and French officers. ‘Everything was so confused that I stupidly confessed that I was a British officer, but I wasn’t tortured even after Barbie arrived in the city.’

  Soon after, Peter de la Chêne of the NEWSAGENT network was arrested. Interrogated but not tortured by Barbie, he revealed nothing and was sent to a concentration camp. His fellow radio operator, Robert Burdet, for whom Barbie offered a six-million-franc reward, quickly left the city and escaped through Spain. Harried by the Gestapo, Virginia Hall and other members of the group disappeared into the countryside and the network was destroyed.

  HECKLER’s radio operator, André Courvoisier, was Barbie’s next victim. His department’s handling of the arrest was an exceptional piece of carelessness, with none of the hallmarks of skilled police investigation.

  For three weeks Courvoisier had suspected that he was being followed. Bicycling home on 27 February 1943, he saw the dreaded black Gestapo car. He passed his house and only returned late that night when the car had gone. Taking his radio set and five revolvers he hid them immediately in a locker in his factory. Disregarding basic security rules, he then returned home where he was arrested by the Gestapo at 7.00 the following morning. There had been no time to destroy the papers which listed the members of the whole network and the hiding places of spare radio sets – clearly incriminating evidence, but completely overlooked by Barbie during his search. Hours after Courvoisier’s arrest became known, Resistance sympathisers were able to destroy the paperwork and hide the radios in fields outside the town. Courvoisier, meanwhile, was taken to the Hotel Terminus, interrogated and severely beaten, losing many of his teeth. Despite the appalling pain, he stuck to his cover that he was an escaped prisoner of war. In between interrogations, he worked in the kitchens at the Montluc prison, and it was here in early April, as he took food to prisoners in their cells, that he met Henry Newton.