Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (36 page)

When the Vichy administration crumbled away after the invasion, rather than allow a power vacuum in which gun law predominated, Guingouin effectively became the one-man government of a large slice of the Limousin in central France. His printed communiqués, signed in his own name as ‘Prefect of the Maquis’, fixed agricultural prices and banned black marketeering. The penalty for transgression was not a fine, but a bullet. Guingouin also used traditional trade unionist methods to slow down industrial and agricultural production in the area and thus delay fulfilment of the last spate of German requisitions, rather than inciting obvious sabotage which invited reprisals. Even the millers – traditional enemies of the peasants who grew the grain – were forced to pay reasonable rates and produce a flour of better quality than the Vichy standard, which by this time included various additives, including sawdust. In the Limousin dialect of Occitan, they said, ‘
Que lo Maquis qui nos baillen lou po blanc!
’
– ‘It took the Maquis to deliver us white bread!’

Guingouin was one of only twelve PCF members later honoured with the title Compagnon de la Libération – in his case for disobeying party orders to attack the German garrison in Limoges in July 1944 because he judged it pointless to ‘liberate’ the city for a few hours and then retreat, calling down severe reprisals on the population, as happened in Tulle. Events nearly overtook him nevertheless after American Flying Fortresses made a major airdrop of arms on 14 July in the wild scrubland and forests of Mount Gargan, a chunk of the Massif Central near Limoges that rises to 2,000ft.

As in the Vercors, the drop was clearly visible to German forces in the area – in this case a 2,500-man mobile armoured anti-partisan column commanded by monocled Lieutenant General Otto-Ernst Ottenbacher, plus 2,300 assorted other German and Milice units. On 18 July a battle commenced in which Guingouin commanded his private army of 3,500 men, including Vichy units that had changed sides to fight with the Maquis. By the end of the afternoon the Germans had succeeded in breaching the FTP lines and followed up this advantage in the following days.

In six days of fighting, Guingouin lost thirty-eight dead, fifty-four wounded and five men missing in action against an alleged casualty total of 342 killed and wounded on the German side. Although the FTP were forced to withdraw, they did so successfully, and melted away into the countryside, taking with them the arms dropped on 14 July.

On 4 August, after learning that the Gestapo were intending to execute all their partisan prisoners before withdrawing, Guingouin disposed his considerable forces around the town and attempted to negotiate the surrender with the officer commanding the garrison, Major General Walter Gleiniger. It comprised 1,400 men including 19th SS Police Regiment, eleven squadrons of the GMR and 300 Milice. On 17 August 1944 the Milice drove away from Limoges, fleeing the Allied advance. On Saturday 19 August Limoges was paralysed by a general strike. Knowing that the town was surrounded by several thousand FFI, Gleiniger indicated that he was ready to negotiate – but not with ‘terrorists’.

A solution was found when M. Jean d’Albis of the Swiss Legation offered his services as intermediary. On the night of 20 August the GMR decided that the war was over and came over to the Maquis en masse. On hearing this news, General Gleiniger was overwhelmed. In the afternoon of Monday 21 August he, his deputy Lieutenant Colonel von Liebich and Captain Noll met at d’Albis’ home with representatives of the FFI and an inter-Allied mission. Present were Major G.M.Staunton
¹
of SOE, American Captain Charles E. Brown and representatives of the FFI and Free French forces. Their presence enabled Guingouin to tell the German commandant that failure to surrender meant that the town centre would be bombed flat by the Allied air forces.

The meeting broke up after two and a quarter hours of discussions with an agreement to reconvene for the signature of the capitulation document at the German HQ in the Hôtel de la Paix at 2030hrs. On the German side, that was just a device to gain time. In the Hôtel de la Paix Captain Noll gave the Allied team the dramatic news that Gleiniger and von Liebich had been abducted by the SS, who had succeeded, despite numerous FFI ambushes and roadblocks, in breaking out of Limoges with the majority of the garrison some time after 1815hrs. That their escape went unnoticed was due to many FFI men deserting their posts in order to join a parade celebrating the liberation of the town. Noll was then informed that the act of capitulation was without effect and that the FFI would force a surrender of those remaining. At 2210hrs Noll, twelve other officers and 350 men were taken prisoner.

Wild rumours circulated – and continue to be believed – to the effect that Gleiniger had committed suicide or that he had been assassinated by the SS before their withdrawal. In either case, where was the body? The truth was that Gleiniger was present in the convoy that left town with the SS, but not as their prisoner. On the road to Clermont-Ferrand the convoy had been ambushed and the civilian car near the head of the column in which Gleiniger and von Liebich were riding was machine-gunned with both men killed. There is some doubt of what happened to the general’s body, which was recorded as being buried in the town cemetery of Guéret and later removed to the German military cemetery at Berneuil, near Saintes in south-west France, together with the remains of three other German soldiers killed in the ambush.

In Limoges, de Gaulle’s wish that France should be seen to be liberated by Frenchmen came true. It is for this reason that Guingouin is remembered every 16 August when wreaths and bunches of flowers are placed at the war memorial in the Orsay gardens, from where a procession of local notables, ex-servicemen and people of all ages walk to the prison and the prefecture before ending at the Hotel de la Paix on the Boulevard du Fleurus, where the surrender of the German garrison was not
signed nearly seven decades before.

Note

1
Real name Philip (or Philippe) Liewer.

THE SAVAGE REVENGE

ROUGH JUSTICE

Nobody talks now of
l’épuration
– the purge that followed the liberation. During research for this book, the author asked a woman whose mother was sent to a concentration camp and whose father and his friends never returned from death camps in Germany why no one had ever attacked the neighbour who betrayed them to the Gestapo. She replied simply, ‘We had had enough of all the killing. We wanted to get on with our lives.’

But some wanted vengeance and could not wait for the due process of law to be re-established. This is an eyewitness account by Claude François, a printer’s apprentice in Limoges who later became a journalist:

The prison gates opened and the prisoners were replaced by alleged
collabos
. One shopkeeper was a Pétainist who had been in the habit of giving the Hitler salute every time he met a German. He was dragged out of his house and taken to the prison. That is a distance of about half a kilometre. All the way, a furious crowd of people spat on him and kept pushing and shoving to try and get a blow in. It was a horrible sight.

Jacques Valéry was a 15-year-old runner for the Resistance. He recalls the same day:

All the buildings that had been used by the Milice, the Gestapo and the Service d’Ordre Légionnaire were invaded and pillaged, and all the papers thrown out of the windows. It wasn’t done by the Maquis because they wanted to keep these documents and use them to identify the
collabos
. The FFI had warned when it entered town that it wanted no excesses, but you have to remember the brutality of the Milice, the Gestapo and the GMR. There were 250 GMR men in Limoges. Okay, so the FFI persuaded them to change sides, but just a few months earlier they were tracking down
résistants
and some of them kicked their prisoners’ head in. It’s not easy to forget that sort of thing.

Résistant
Nestor Spel had this to say:

In the prefecture, we found more than 10,000 denunciations of
résistants
and Communists, but husbands also betrayed the lovers of their wives and wives betrayed their husbands. And there were hundreds of applications to become ‘guardians’ of confiscated Jewish property. When you think of all those documents, you can’t say that the revenge was terrible. In the mood of that time, if no one had stopped us, there would have been many more executions.
¹

Lawyers, priests, shopkeepers and politicians were dragged out of their homes or shot in them without trial. One 18-year-old boy, who was suspected of betraying a Maquis band wiped out by the SS, was tied behind a car and dragged along for miles until multiple injuries caused his death. In some cases, men accused and killed by one Resistance group were given an honour guard from another group at their funeral. In an attempt to stop this sort of impromptu vengeance, many of whose victims were later exonerated, Guingouin arranged with the officer commanding the FFI to install throughout the five
départements
of the region temporary tribunals to judge accused collaborators. Jacques Valéry said, ‘It was an
attempt
to restore order.’

In legal terms, even the tribunals had the air of revolutionary committees. They consisted of three FFI men or officers – the oldest was often no more than 21 years old – advised by other FFI officers, a lawyer and a representative of the Comité Départementale de Libération (CDL). Since lawyers had continued exercising their profession under Vichy, few of them were accepted as suitable defence counsel. Of forty-one practising in Limoges, the tribunal accepted only four at first. Later fourteen were ‘approved’ and allowed to practise again. Three verdicts only were handed down: acquittal, death and execution within twenty-four hours or imprisonment ‘until a judgement can be made after the complete liberation of France’.

The tribunal in Limoges was afterwards alleged not to have been free of personal vengeance. One shopkeeper, spoken for by members of the CDL, was found innocent, but shot all the same. A prostitute accused of having slept with 100 Germans retorted that she had also French clients and even one Chinese man. She was also shot. Another prostitute, known to her clients as ‘Big Marcelle’, showed a certain
sangfroid.
Claude François recalls her asking the firing squad for five minutes to do her make-up so she could leave this life looking her best. A number of
maquisards
were also judged and shot after being found guilty of rape and/or obtaining money at gunpoint.

Not until the end of October were the military tribunals stood down after the restoration of a civil judiciary. It seems from the latest researches that approximately 250 people were executed in the Limoges area in addition to all those simply shot out of hand in the first days of the liberation of the area.

Guingouin was elected Mayor of Limoges by its grateful population in 1945, despite the PCF leadership and his old comrades in the region doing 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 named by the Marxist periodical
Le Populaire du Centre
in the context of its denunciation of ‘the killers of the Resistance’ as ‘Colonel Masakrov’, who allegedly had killed personal enemies during the liberation.

While in prison, on Christmas Eve 1953 Guingouin survived a murder attempt by former party comrades, as a result of which he was released in June 1954, when his physical condition gave cause to consider him in danger of dying. Not until 1998 did PCF General Secretary 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.’
²

Charles Guingouin died of natural causes in 2005 and was buried in St-Gilles-les-Forêts, the scene of his ‘liberation’ of the ration cards sixty years earlier.

As each
département
of France was painfully released from the German yoke, the Gaullist enforcers of law and order who replaced Vichy’s judges repeated that any idea of vengeance on
miliciens
,
police, gendarmes and other functionaries tainted by their activities under the occupation must be left to the courts to decide. By then, it was often too late because so many people had been tortured and imprisoned, or seen their loved ones thus treated or killed during the German occupation. There were countless executions after kangaroo courts by groups of
maquisards
or no trial at all. In addition, many individuals settled private accounts during this period, knowing they were unlikely to be exposed. It was not difficult in a country in turmoil, with a total war still being waged on its soil, to find a weapon and shoot a personal enemy dead in the night.