A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead Page A

occupied, who, revolted by German brutality, would become gradually more sympathetic to the Resistance. As Pétain remarked, ‘From various parts of France, I begin to feel an unpleasant wind getting up’.

CHAPTER FOUR
    The hunt for resisters
    Until the summer of 1941, the German soldiers stationed in France had felt relatively safe. The country they had overrun with such ease seemed to them for the most part to tolerate their presence, even to enjoy profiting from the occupation, though many ordinary people were increasingly looking away when walking past in the streets. But now, in the wake of the attack at the Barbès métro station, soldiers were advised not to go out after dark alone and never to leave their vehicles unattended. Von Stülpnagel, while continuing to argue that repression of all resistance should be left chiefly in the hands of the remarkably co-operative French police, at the same time sent out a secret communiqué to the German military commanders of the different occupied regions of France.
    The war against the communists was reaching a critical stage, he said, and the job of the Germans was to make certain that the French operated against them with the utmost severity. ‘Judge quickly, harshly and surely,’ he instructed the Wehrmacht military tribunals. On 13 September, an old friend of Charlotte Delbo and Georges Dudach, the architect André Woog, was guillotined in the courtyard of the prison of La Santé, along with two other ‘militant communists’. He had been picked up for distributing anti-German tracts. There had, to date, been thirty-three executions of communists and ‘enemies of the Reich’; the youngest was a boy of 19, the eldest a man in his seventies.
    From Berlin, Hitler continued to urge more frequent and tougher reprisals, not only in France but throughout the whole of occupied Europe, especially against the Communists, who continued to be widely blamed for the rising number of armed attacks. Though Germany had eight and a half million men under arms, more soldiers were needed to control France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark and the Balkans; there was heavy fighting in the western desert and along the eastern front. Acts of resistance could not be allowed to distract German soldiers who might otherwise be engaged in active service. On 28 September, in clear violation of Article 19 of the Third Tokyo Convention of 1934, which had spelt out without ambiguity that hostages should never, under any circumstances, be either physically punished or put to death, a Code of Hostages was issued to the French people. It breached both clauses.
    ‘Pools’ of Frenchmen, whether detained by the Germans or by the French for supposed communist or anarchist actions—espionage, treason, sabotage, armed attacks, assistance to foreign enemies, illegal possession of weapons—were to be held in readiness as hostages against attacks on German soldiers. In numbers proportionate to the crime, these hostages would be executed. Fifty to a hundred Frenchmen would be shot for every German killed. Since very few of these men were tried before a court, there could be no knowing whether they were guilty or not. Military commanders in the various regions were instructed to keep up-to-date lists of the names of those available. Where there were not enough, more were to be sought among university teachers and students, as well as among Gaullists, now also recognised as threats to the security of the German occupiers. Notables , prominent people, briefly regarded as suitable hostages, were discarded in favour of ‘anti-Germans’, principally communists, who remained the people most loathed by Vichy, and ‘intellectuals’, those who had used their pens to diffuse communist ideas. Fathers of large families were ‘generally’ to be spared.
    Some members of the early Resistance had been troubled by the ferocity with which the Germans responded to their attacks, fearing that, by resorting to arms and