Читать книгу Game of Spies: The Secret Agent, the Traitor and the Nazi, Bordeaux 1942-1944 - Paddy Ashdown, Paddy Ashdown - Страница 19

The cold of January 1942 held on tenaciously into February and March. The vines of the Médoc and the plane trees of Bordeaux remained stubbornly and unseasonably bare.

These had been frustrating months for Friedrich Dohse. Constrained by the passive obstructionism of his boss, Herbert Hagen, and open hostility in KdS Bordeaux, he was also held back by the fact that, until a special decree was issued by Hitler on 1 June 1942, the Gestapo (soon to be rechristened, in French argot, ‘La Georgette’) were not formally permitted to operate in France.

But Dohse was not a man to waste time. Using the skills he had learnt in the criminal police in Hamburg, he spent the first few months of 1942 gathering information, creating a filing system and recruiting staff to his new department. Here too he had to cope with interference from his German intelligence colleagues – in this case the Abwehr, who made determined attempts to poach his new recruits; things got so bad that he finally had to ban their officers from all contact with his team.

Despite these impediments, over the next months Dohse managed to recruit forty-eight German officers, who, supported by about twenty French assistants (including interpreters, typists, cooks and clerks), would form the base of his organisation. Amongst these, three were of particular note.

Rudolf Kunesch was an Austrian Wehrmacht soldier drafted into KdS and, though senior to Dohse in rank, was assigned to be his deputy. This clumsy arrangement meant that Dohse could not give Kunesch direct instructions, except through Hagen. While Dohse himself normally initiated operations, it was Kunesch who frequently commanded them, leaving his ‘chief’ to attend only in the technical role of ‘observer’. Tensions were not improved by the fact that when prisoners were brought in, it was Kunesch, not Dohse, who interrogated them first. Overweight, balding, thick-lipped, an energetic drinker, with a face straight out of a 1930s gangster film, Kunesch was regarded as ‘brutal and stupid’. His heavy-handed approach stood in sharp contrast to Dohse’s preference for more subtle techniques. These differences, exacerbated by the lack of clarity about their relative seniority, meant that relations between the two men were very often strained to the point of open warfare – though there is no record of Dohse ever complaining about his deputy’s brutal methods.

Kunesch was in due course supported by his ‘chief torturer’, Anton Enzelsberger. Known as ‘Tony the Boxer’, Enzelsberger had been heavyweight boxing champion of Austria. With only one working eye (ice blue) and a shaven head, Enzelsberger was as close as one could get to the caricature of a dyed-in-the-wool, hatchet-faced Nazi thug. He was also a regular soldier, untrained in police skills, and had been released from a sentence for murder when Hitler annexed Austria. Kunesch, Enzelsberger and their subordinates preferred torture to all other means of extracting confessions from their subjects. Among their favourite instruments of persuasion were a rubber cosh (Kunesch was known as ‘the cosher-in-chief’); a whip similar to a cat o’ nine tails; and an arrangement consisting of two braziers backed by a reflector, in front of which prisoners were placed to slowly roast like pieces of meat on a barbecue.

Another new recruit was forty-two-year-old Marcelle Louise Sommer. Born in the Swiss Romande, Marcelle Sommer had been interned with her mother by the French during the First World War and spoke flawless French. She spent some years between the wars working first at a department store in Paris and then in – and very probably spying on – the Michelin factory in Clermont-Ferrand. Hated and feared in equal measure, she became known locally as the ‘lioness of the Gestapo’. Though she had started as Dohse’s personal assistant (and had been one of those the Abwehr had tried to poach), she quickly rose to become head of Department IV’s intelligence section. Tall, imposing and statuesque, even without the high heels she habitually wore, she was the mistress of one of Dohse’s section chiefs (and one of his few close personal German friends), SS-Obersturmführer Schöder. Dohse trusted Sommer completely and gave her full autonomy to run her own network of French agents, which included many women and prostitutes employed as agents provocateurs.

Dohse’s personal assistant was twenty-five-year-old Claire Keimer, whose blonde tresses and Wagnerian proportions soon became well known in Bordeaux. Intelligent, quick-witted, ambitious, fluent in French and a natural in the spying business, it was not long before the two became lovers. Her role, however, extended well beyond being Dohse’s mistress, for over time she also became his chief confidante and adviser – often attending his interrogations and participating in conferences to decide strategy and policy.

The main elements of Dohse’s staff assembled, he and Sommer set about creating a network of agents. Among the most important of these were 108 individuals each paid 5,000 francs a month (the equivalent of around £1,000 today), plus expenses. These included ‘agents of influence’ – senior officials in the French administration and police, key leaders in pro-Gestapo French paramilitary units – and undercover agents who were used to infiltrate Resistance groups and organisations. The financial resources available to Dohse’s section were, like those of all the German secret services, almost unlimited. French counter-intelligence at the time commented that ‘[German] officers, civil servants and agents … spend without limit and enrich themselves without scruple’. There was even a fixed tariff for information and betrayal:

denunciation of a Jew or a Communist = 1,000 francs

denunciation of a Gaullist = 3,000 francs

information leading to the discovery of a weapons cache = 5,000–30,000 francs (depending on the size of the horde)

One French collaborator, the appropriately named Johann Dollar, is calculated to have earned, in a single year, the equivalent (at today’s prices) of £18,600, for information passed to the Germans.

Dohse’s most important collaborator on the French side was the local police chief, Pierre Poinsot, the scourge of the communists in 1941. Now, as the head of the new Vichy French police brigade known as the Section des Affaires Politiques (or SAP), he also ran his own network of agents. Dohse made Poinsot a paid informer, supplementing his meagre French policeman’s salary with occasional bonuses (amounting on one occasion to 10,000 francs, accompanied by a further 20,000 to be distributed to his men). Poinsot and his unit, who soon became known as the ‘murder brigade’ for their habit of killing and extreme torture, now became, to all intents and purposes, an extension of Dohse’s Gestapo organisation. Poinsot reported to Dohse daily, arrested whoever Dohse wanted, tortured (or refrained from torturing) whoever Dohse wanted, and did nothing unless Dohse approved of it. On one occasion Dohse ‘interrupted’ one of Poinsot’s torture sessions on a young resistant: ‘I said to Poinsot “Enough! Get him dressed”,’ Dohse later claimed. ‘Then I put the young man in my car and sat him next to me. He was not chained or handcuffed. I said “Listen. Tell me the truth … or I will hand you back to the French police” … it was not a nice thing to do – but it was my job … I took the young man to my home and had him fed – and he gave me everything.’

It is fair at this stage to point out that, although torture, extreme brutality and executions were largely institutionalised among the Nazi security forces and Poinsot’s SAP, the Resistance were also not squeamish about using ‘enhanced techniques of persuasion’ and punishment. A female SOE agent connected with Bordeaux describes in a post-mission report how two newspaper journalists in Poitiers suspected of collaboration were executed by the local Resistance, one by being shot and the second by being first tortured and then killed using a metal file, with which he was stabbed more than twenty times.

In all, Dohse and Sommer recruited more than a hundred low-level French, Russian and Spanish agents scattered across the region. A headquarters for this spy network was established in the Place de la Cathédrale in Bordeaux. This was supplemented by the establishment of a number of safe houses around the city and by the formation of right-wing French paramilitary organisations, which provided Dohse with information and operational support as required. In due course, the French forces which Dohse could rely on also included the much-hated, black-shirted Milice française (‘French militia’). Raised with the help of the Germans in 1943, but not active in Bordeaux until the spring of 1944, this paramilitary force, created to fight communism and ‘terrorism’, was drawn largely from the ranks of the French fascists and the criminal fraternity.

In early May 1942, Dohse finally found a proper home for his now fast-growing unit. He requisitioned a large property at 197 Avenue du Maréchal Pétain, opposite the main KdS headquarters in Bouscat. The building, a substantial nineteenth-century château on three floors, stood in its own grounds and was protected by a low wall which supported a fence of robust cast-iron railings. Substantial wine cellars beneath the house were converted into prison cells and, when occasion arose, torture chambers. Dohse chose an airy room on the ground floor at the rear of the building, adjacent to a handsome glass veranda which gave access to the garden and stables, as his office. The stables, too, were converted for use as interrogation cells. The most notorious of these was christened the Chambre d’action. Above the door was a notice instructing ‘No water, no food’.

At the start, Dohse was assiduous when it came to protecting his back, making a point of taking the train to Paris to brief Bömelburg almost every weekend. He also acted as secretary and translator to a Franco-German body based in the French capital called the Cercle Européen. This discussed a future united Europe formed around an axis between Germany and France. As time passed, however, Dohse felt secure enough to visit Paris less and enjoy southwest France more.

In the second week of April 1942, a mini-heatwave hit Bordeaux, bringing spring to the city in a rush. The vines in the Charente and the Médoc flowered early and the restaurants threw open the doors they had kept firmly closed all the long bitter winter and spilled out onto terraces and pavements in gay profusion.

On 1 May, Dohse’s obstructive boss, Hagen, was posted to Paris. His replacement was a thirty-three-year-old ex-judge from Frankfurt called Hans Luther. Though Luther was punctilious and sociable, Dohse did not have a high opinion of his new commander, whom he regarded as lazy and ‘just an administrator … not qualified for this kind of post … he just gave the orders, that was all’. However, with Hagen gone and a chief who seemed more interested in having a good time than interfering, Dohse’s life became much easier. He was by now beginning to be recognised by fellow Germans in KdS Bordeaux as an effective, even if not likeable, colleague, while at the same time enjoying a certain notoriety – popularity, even – among the local population.

Dohse at this stage could do more or less as he pleased. He moved his personal accommodation out of the Bouscat Gestapo colony and took up residence in a small town villa at 145 Route du Médoc, in the northwest of the city, which he shared with three colleagues. Here he held frequent dinners, inviting many of his French friends as well as those closest to him among the German contingent in the KdS. Soon the villa, permanently guarded by two French policemen, became something of a hub of social activity in the city. Each morning if the weather was fine, Dohse’s personal chauffeur would collect him in an open-topped car – invariably dressed in an elegant suit, set off with a fashionable tie – and carry him in state on the short journey to his office in Bouscat. At lunchtime his habit was to be driven to his favourite restaurant, where he would enjoy a glass or two of champagne and a convivial lunch with his French friends.

Around this time Dohse seems to have copied his patron in Paris, Bömelburg, acquiring, probably through requisition, a large black Cadillac which he used for longer journeys. At weekends, he and Claire Keimer would frequently be driven to the little seaside resort of Pyla on the gulf of Arcachon, where Dohse took a villa; or, if he had business to conduct with German intelligence colleagues in Spain, he would drive with Claire to the picturesque Spanish coastal town of San Sebastián, which had by now become a hotbed of spying, centred on the British and German consulates and a restaurant called Casa d’Italia. Here all the resident spies gathered to drink and regard each other with suspicion and as much enmity as they could muster in such convivial surroundings. Dohse even boasted he had literally rubbed shoulders with ‘Mr Gutsman, my British opposite number’.

‘I liked the good life and had lots of parties. And I had a host of French friends – not collaborators … (just friends) with whom I had many good dinners at which not a word of politics was spoken,’ Dohse claimed after the war. ‘I did not want to die on the Russian front. Life in France was much more pleasant – much more fun. One was able to enjoy all the things one could wish for.’

‘Dohse loved Bordeaux,’ one observer wryly commented. ‘His table was refined, and his mistress, beautiful. Dohse was a happy man. And those are the most dangerous.’

At this point in the war, danger seemed rather far away to Friedrich Dohse and his German compatriots in Bordeaux. True, in mid-1941, agents parachuted in by London had attacked and destroyed a power station in the Bordeaux suburb of Pessac. But the damage had been slight, the interruption of power short and, apart from a dozen German soldiers shot for their failure to protect the installation, little of consequence had resulted from the British raid. On 23 April 1941, for the first time, a British parachute drop of weapons was discovered near the little village of Cestas, fifteen kilometres southwest of Bordeaux. This caused much astonishment among the locals and dramatic reports from the local French police. There had also been RAF bombing raids on the port of Bordeaux – but these had been infrequent, haphazard and poorly targeted, often killing many more French civilians than German personnel and causing damage to many more residential properties than military installations. If anything, the raids served to fuel anti-British sentiment in the city.

Leaving aside the regular drives against the communists (there was one in June 1942, following Poinsot’s success in turning a senior communist), things on the security front were quiet and life for Bordeaux’s occupiers rather congenial.

But beneath this seemingly placid surface, things were changing. By the middle of 1942, OCM, now numbering some 800 Resistance fighters and 100 officers, had expanded to cover almost the whole of southwest France, from the Charente region west to the Pyrenees and from the Aquitaine coast south to Toulouse. Among the local Resistance organisations which had by now been fully subsumed into the OCM was the Duboué–Paillère network centred on Duboué’s Café du Commerce at 83 Quai des Chartrons. This group had grown too, and by this time consisted of fourteen active units with, between them, eight parachute sites in the area. Its new recruits included nine living along the Bordeaux waterfront. Two of these were Marcel Bertrand and his wife, who ran the Café des Chartrons at the Bacalan end of the quay. Duboué used the Bertrand café as his chief clandestine ‘letterbox’ through which he passed his reports and messages to London and to other members of his group.

Meanwhile, the new head of OCM Southwest, André Grandclément, had also been busy – recceing potential parachute drop sites, overseeing the hiding of arms, establishing escape routes, issuing orders, setting up a hierarchy of command and devising a system of secret communication. The pity was that, in almost every other way, the OCM was not secret at all. Its existence was by now widely known of and boasted about in the Bordeaux area. Grandclément’s meetings – which tended to be a cross between a meeting of the golf club committee and a cocktail party – were held regularly and in the same place – at 34 Cours de Verdun, the home he shared with Lucette. Worst of all, members of the OCM could and did belong to other Resistance organisations as well. This meant that if one secret organisation was penetrated the rot could quickly spread to endanger all of them.

In the spring of 1942 an event occurred which made it explicitly clear to the German authorities that this burgeoning underground activity was not just a local matter: London, too, was getting involved in Bordeaux.

On the morning of Sunday 3 May 1942, the weather in Langon, a market town bisected by the demarcation line in the Gironde, was as bright and glorious as a spring morning could be. At 8.38, the regular Sunday morning country train from the small market town of Luxey, seventy kilometres south of Bordeaux, puffed slowly into Langon station, which stands astride the main junction between the rural lines which serve south Gironde and the express line from Toulouse to Bordeaux. Among the passengers who climbed down onto the platform and lined up to have their papers checked was a smartly dressed man who had joined the train at 0549 that morning at the tiny railway halt in the village of Sore, twenty kilometres away. He was young and handsome, with a round face enlivened by alert brown eyes and a small, rather unkempt moustache. He carried a rucksack and a small brown suitcase and, despite the warm day, wore a navy gabardine mac, a suit (light grey with white and blue stripes), a short-sleeved pullover, a shirt, tie (blue, with red and white spots), blue socks and dark brown shoes. When his turn came, he stepped forward and handed his papers to the German customs official for inspection. The official studied them carefully and, finding something out of place, ordered the young traveller to step into the customs office for further enquiries and a search of his luggage.

It may have been Henri Labit’s suitcase which attracted the unwelcome attention – for at this stage of the war SOE was in the habit of issuing the exactly same make and colour of cheap cardboard suitcase (and, for that matter, the same make of pyjamas) to all their agents – something which the Gestapo had already spotted. Karl Schröder, the head of the small German section at Langon, opened Labit’s case to discover a radio transmitter. Labit’s response was instantaneous. He pulled a Colt automatic out of his pocket, shot Schröder dead, wounded three other guards in the room and made a run for it. Some of the wounded men gave chase, firing after the fugitive. The local gendarmes were called in. Someone reported that they had seen a man running near the town cemetery. The area was quickly surrounded and the young man was spotted leaning, seemingly wounded, against a wall with his Colt in his hand. Before the pursuers could get to him, he collapsed. By the time they reached him, his lips were blue and white foam was frothing from his mouth.

Henri Labit (alias ‘Leroy’), twenty-one years old and originally from Bordeaux, had been trained by SOE and parachuted into France the previous day with false identity papers in the name of ‘Gérard Henri Laure’. Rather than be captured, he had swallowed the ‘L’ (for ‘lethal’) cyanide tablet, which he had been given before leaving London. The Germans stood to attention alongside the young man’s body as he passed through his last agonising convulsions.

Among the incriminating papers found on the dead man’s corpse was a letter from a certain ‘Ginette’. No address was given, but there was reference to a pharmacy in Bordeaux. The Gestapo eventually narrowed their search down to a young girl called Ginette Corbin, the daughter of Charles Corbin, an ex-pharmacist turned wartime policeman, who, unknown to the Germans, was also active in the local Resistance. Ginette Corbin was Henri Labit’s cousin, and it seems clear that the letter was intended as a device by which Henri Labit could make contact with Charles Corbin and then, through him, with the Resistance in Bordeaux.

Ginette and her mother were taken to Dohse’s headquarters and interrogated. They initially denied all knowledge of Labit, until, confronted with the letter found on Labit’s body, Ginette blurted out that she was trying, for personal reasons, to hide that she was, in fact, engaged to Labit. It was a complete invention intended to avoid having to reveal that the Corbin family were, in reality, related to Labit. But it worked. Ginette and her mother were released. Next, the Germans arrested and interrogated Henri Labit’s mother, Henriette, insisting that the dead man was her son. She too denied any relationship. So she was taken down to the cellars of the château and shown the body of her son hanging on a meat hook. Mme Labit coldly examined the cadaver and declared she did not recognise the young man.

The orders given to Henri Labit before he left London were to establish a Resistance network in and around Bordeaux, identify parachute sites where weapons could be dropped, and reconnoitre amphibious landing grounds on the beaches south of the Gironde estuary. His mission was the first in a planned programme of British/French expansion into the whole of the German occupied zone, with special emphasis on Paris and Bordeaux.

On 20 April, an SOE radio operator with orders to open up wireless communications from Tours, 250 kilometres northeast of Bordeaux and also in the occupied zone, was landed on the south coast of France. He arrived in Tours on 23 June and was joined three weeks later by an ex-RAF officer called Raymond Henry Flower.

Quite why the tremulous and easily frightened Flower was sent to France as leader of a delicate and dangerous mission is difficult to understand given his SOE training reports: ‘no powers of leadership, very little initiative’, ‘lacking in strength of mind and body’, ‘very slow mentally and an uneducated type of brain’, ‘… probably only useful in a minor capacity, under sound leadership’.

Ten days later, on the night of 29/30 July, a forty-five-year-old grandmother called Yvonne Rudellat was secretly landed on a beach near Cannes, with orders to make her way to Tours. Attractive, physically tough, with greying tousled hair, Rudellat had moved to London before the war and worked as, among other things, a shop assistant and the club secretary at the Ebury Court Hotel and Club, near Victoria, where SOE had found and recruited her. At Tours, Rudellat was to act as courier to Raymond Flower’s circuit, codenamed ‘Monkeypuzzle’. Another person who joined Monkeypuzzle at about this time was a locally recruited Frenchman called Pierre Culioli. Of Corsican-Breton extraction, twenty-eight-year-old Culioli – described as having ‘cold grey eyes behind his spectacles … resolute mouth … deeply cleft chin’ – was small of stature and slight of frame. This, together with the Hitler moustache he grew, half as a joke and half as hirsute protection against German inquisitiveness, resulted in him being nicknamed ‘Adolphe’ by his Resistance colleagues.

Culioli and Rudellat, both strong characters, were ordered to work under the nervous Flower. Their task was to prepare parachute sites and receive the agents London now planned to drop in to create two new secret organisations in the German-occupied zone: the ‘Scientist’ network in Bordeaux and a new network in Paris, which was to be codenamed ‘Prosper’. Given the mix of personalities, relations within Monkeypuzzle were never going to be easy. In due course, they would become literally murderous.

The day after Yvonne Rudellat landed from a felucca (fishing vessel) off the Côte d’Azur, two of Roger Landes’s fellow spy students from Wanborough Manor, Claude de Baissac and Harry Peulevé, were back in Orchard Court, Portman Square, receiving their final briefing before being parachuted into France.

De Baissac, the ‘natural leader’, was given the key role of heading up the Scientist network in Bordeaux; Peulevé was to be his radio operator. After parachuting in, their orders were to make their way first to Gaston Hèche’s restaurant in Tarbes and thence to Bordeaux, where they were to ‘investigate the possibilities of the Duboué organisation’. Their primary task was to plan, organise and carry out sabotage attacks on the blockade-runners and the submarine pens in Bordeaux harbour.