Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (37 page)

In Cahors, a picturesque tourist town in south-west France, the last Germans drove away on 17 August 1944. Hard on their heels, the FFI took over the town and the whole Lot
département.
As reported on the front page of
Le Partisan
of January 1945:

Two days after the liberation of Cahors, the Resistance disinfected [sic] the town. Fifteen traitors, guilty of the most serious and monstrous accusations, atoned for their crimes in the cemetery.

Behind that bald statement the truth is both simpler and more complicated. The simple reason for the executions is that a communist teacher named Maurice Faurant and fellow members of the PCF posing as the Front National had grabbed the reins of power in the FFI of the Lot. Being a stranger to the region, Faurant wished rapidly to acquire authority, and the best way to do that was to execute, with a semblance of justice, a number of people suspected of collaboration. The complicated side of the bloody equation is that sixty-nine men and thirty women accused of various crimes were arrested by the FFI and vilified by the euphoric crowds celebrating their liberation in the town as they were marched off to the prison known as Le Château du Roy.

The unluckiest fifteen were hauled before a court where ‘evidence’ against them was heard in a commotion recalling the crowds howling for the blood of the nobility during the French Revolution. Most were not allowed to utter a word in their defence, nor to question their accusers before they were judged guilty. So blatant was the fake trial that the prison staff refused to hand over the illegally condemned prisoners to the FFI until obliged to do so at gunpoint. The fifteen were then driven to the cemetery and shot between the graves.

Among the fifteen, only one had served in the Cahors Milice. Two others had been members of the Service de l’Ordre Légionnaire. Two more had been members of a right-wing organisation called Collaboration and two had been members of another pro-German party led by Jacques Doriot, formerly a prominent communist. But if those six were guilty enough to be shot, why were not all the former members of all the collaborationist parties been rounded up and shot? At least one of the fifteen was afterwards proven to have been accused by a father and son who were themselves guilty of denunciations to the Gestapo and were making sure that he was killed before he could tell what he knew about them. Most of the condemned had never even figured in the lists of ‘those to be punished after the liberation’ which had been published in the clandestine Resistance publication
Le Lot Résistant.
³

So it was all over France: thousands of hasty executions of people, some guilty and others patently not deserving their fate. This extra-judicial purge, as it is officially called, was said by Minister of the Interior Adrien Tixier in November 1944, when Alsace and Lorraine were still occupied, to have caused 100,000 deaths. That statistic is now thought to be a wild exaggeration. A Parliamentary inquiry in 1952 differentiated between 8,867 people killed for collaboration and 1,955 killed during this period for reasons that were never clearly established, making a total of 10,822 executions not sanctioned by law. Historian Robert Aron believes this is a severe underestimate and stands by a figure of 30,000–40,000.
⁴
The currently accepted statistic is that at least 8,775 Vichy
collabos
were killed without trial.

The judicial purge which followed involved more than 300,000 accusations heard in duly constituted courts, which handed down 97,000 convictions ranging from five years’ deprivation of civil rights to banishment, usually for a year, from the
département
in which the convicted person had lived to the death penalty. To be judged
interdit de séjour
in one’s home
département
was not only a punishment, but also a way of removing the guilty from contact with those they had wronged and thus avoiding illicit retribution.

Official figures list between 767 and 791 death penalties handed down by the courts and 769 imposed by courts martial. This brings the total to somewhere between 10,000 and 11,000.
⁵
The two most famous cases involved Marshal Philippe Pétain and his prime minister, Pierre Laval. Pétain was condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by de Gaulle in view of his advanced age and senility and because of his undeniable services to France in the First World War, for which he won the honorific ‘The Hero of Verdun’. Laval escaped to Spain, but was such a hot potato that Franco sent him back to the US zone of Germany, where he was arrested and handed over to the French authorities. His trial in October 1945 was a travesty, in which he was frequently prevented from putting his case forward because of his brilliant record practising law before becoming a politician. Condemned for treason on 9 October, he was shot a week later.

During the occupation, the head of the vast Renault motor empire Louis Renault had used his factory to repair and produce vehicles for the German forces under the control of Daimler-Benz. He could hardly have refused, since the factory in western Paris was equipped and staffed to make tanks and trucks for the French army. Arrested in 1944 as a collaborator, he was so savagely attacked in jail by PCF prisoners that he died before being brought to trial. His commercial empire was nationalised as additional punishment for the Renault family.

It is impossible to estimate how many thousands of
collabos
were beaten up, threatened or robbed during this unhappy time of purges, legal and otherwise. De Gaulle’s post-war government and its successors, however, understandably thought it imperative to weld into a composite nation a population deeply fragmented by the political schisms of the 1930s and the years of the occupation. They thus gave amnesties in 1947, 1951 and 1953 to many people convicted and imprisoned for crimes committed during the Vichy years. Meanwhile, they had been locked away, not just in prisons but also in the same concentration camps used by the Vichy government for its victims, under the same conditions of malnutrition, inadequate sanitation and medical care, and discomfort.

Notes

1
Interview in broadcast of France 3 Limousin, date unknown.

2
Obituary notice in
The Guardian
, 3 December 2005.

3
Article by Professor Cécile Vaissié in
Arkheia
, Nos 23–4, pp. 46–71.

4
Extracted from Aron, R.,
Histoire de l’épuration
, Fayard, Paris, 1967–75.

5
Statistics compiled by the Comité d’histoire de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale and its successor, L’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent.

PUNISHING THE WOMEN

One ‘crime’ not listed as such in the French legal code, but for which a particularly savage punishment was reserved all over France during the period of the purges, was
la collaboration horizontale
– in other words sexual relations between a French girl or woman and a German serviceman or civilian. Particularly savage treatment was reserved for wives of POWs absent in Germany who had found a German boyfriend, perhaps to guarantee extra food for themselves or their children. Prostitutes who had had a few German clients were usually left alone as that was ‘business as usual’. Other women who had worked for the Germans as cooks, waitresses, washerwomen or housekeepers were presumed by jealous neighbours to have given their bodies to their employers in return for favours, and fell victim to vigilante squads of men who rounded them up for ritual humiliation.

There were also many thousands of women who had genuinely fallen in love with a German during the four long and grim years of the occupation, and many of these liaisons had produced babies. These women were subjected to the humiliation of having their heads shaven in public, with swastikas painted on their scalps or breasts before they were driven on trucks or dragged on foot through the streets of their home towns, sometimes naked but always surrounded by a jeering crowd. Many were forced to hold their babies and young children in their arms during the ordeal.

Because none of them were actually reported killed and because often local police or gendarmes did not want to admit they had been present at these scenes – either to ensure things did not go too far or for personal reasons – no official statistics are available. Another reason is that the French nation regards the love affairs that produced
les fils de Boches
– the Krauts’ kids – as a ‘national shame’ or pollution of the race. It took more than fifty years before researcher Fredéric Vergili broke the taboo in 2000 by publishing a book about it.
¹

The liberation of France lasted eleven months, from 6 June 1944 to the signature of the unconditional surrender by General Alfred Jodl on 7 May 1945 in Rheims, after which the last German pockets of resistance at Dunkirk and elsewhere in France also surrendered. Vergili concluded that the most conservative estimate from documented cases was that more than 20,000 women were publicly shamed in this period, with the head-shearing and humiliation reaching a peak in August and September 1944. Months later, some Frenchwomen who had been volunteer workers in Germany had their heads shorn on return to their home towns.

Who were these women? The majority were aged between 17 and 34, but cases were recorded as young as 15 and as old as 68.
²
Many of their lives were irrevocably shattered in a few minutes by the razors, scissors or clippers wielded by their tormentors in these public humiliations. They came from all walks of life, although the rich were usually able to buy their way out of trouble.

Mademoiselle Z
³
was sentenced by a purge court to ten years’ deprivation of civil rights for ‘passing intelligence to the enemy’. Today, her daughter speaks out at the monstrosity of the sentence:

My mother was seventeen years old! What political motive could she have had? She was condemned for bearing a German’s child. After five years in Troyes prison and at the camp of Jargeau where they put all the unlicensed prostitutes, when she came out, she was completely unstable. Her life was ruined.
⁴

As another of the ‘children of national shame’ said:

If it had been a one-night stand, there was always the traditional way out of the problem. In those days, single mothers left the baby on the doorstep of an orphanage, a convent or the local presbytery. But our mothers chose to keep us, so we must have been conceived in love.
⁵

Certainly Anne S. showed devotion for Günther, her German MP lover, throughout the four years of their relationship. As the daughter of a railway worker she repeatedly travelled free by train to wherever he was posted in France. During the liberation he was taken prisoner and imprisoned in a POW camp near Lyon. To help the father of her child, she persuaded her brother-in-law, who had made false ID papers for
résistants
during the occupation, to make papers for Günther, but he broke a leg while escaping. This accident led to Anne being sentenced to six months in prison, during which time her only joy was to see through the bars of her cell once a week the sight of her small son being carried in his grandmother’s arms along the street outside the prison. Anne’s mother paid the owner of the local paper not to report the affair and shame the family, but he printed it all the same.
⁶

Anita A. brought up her German lover’s child in an abusive household. Married after the war to an alcoholic ex-
résistant
who knew of her ‘shame’ and used it as his excuse to beat and humiliate her regularly, Anita accepted the abuse as atonement and spent hours on her knees in the bedroom praying for forgiveness. Only after the husband committed suicide in 1999 did her daughter find on going through family papers that her own birth certificate bore the stigmatic ‘Father unknown’
.
Among her mother’s papers were dozens of exercise books filled with the repeated phrase ‘I must atone, I must atone’.
⁷

After the capitulation of the La Rochelle pocket on 7 May 1945 the little seaside resort of Fouras on the Atlantic coast saw thirty or so local women dragged by neighbours to the picturesque Victorian bandstand where concerts had been given for summer visitors before the war. Renée X. was cleaning the tables in her aunt’s restaurant, which had been requisitioned by the Germans to serve as an officers’ mess, when four male neighbours with guns forced her to accompany them to the bandstand. There, she was prodded up the steps to where the women were kept waiting. They were, in her words, ‘like sows in a market pen’ except that sows do not get spat on or have fists shaken in their faces.