Voices from the Dark Years (61 page)

Charles Krameisen
was at first disbelieved, until the bodies began to emerge from the wells at Guerry. Accorded French citizenship in recognition of his suffering, Krameisen may have spent time in an insane asylum, but his grandson communicated with the author in February 2014 to say that he led a normal life afterwards.

Joseph
Kramer
was condemned and hanged by a British court at Hassel on 13 December 1945.

Inspector Henri
Lafont
was, like Bonny, betrayed by Joanovici and shot at Montrouge on 27 December 1944.

General Heinz
Lammerding
was never brought to trial, despite abandoning an alias to live as a civil engineer under his true name in Düsseldorf. He died on 13 January 1971 at Bad Tölz, Bavaria.

Pierre
Laval
cabled the Spanish government on 17 April 1945: ‘It is neither the statesman nor the friend who is asking your help, but simply the man. I ask you in my own name, as well as in that of my wife and my faithful friend Maurice Gabolde, for permission to enter Spain and await better days. Today it is a tired and worn-out old man who is writing to you, and in memory of our long friendship, I thank you in advance.’
⁵
Returning from Spain to give evidence at Pétain’s trial, he was tried by a court that refused to hear his defence. He was shot in Fresnes prison on 15 October 1945.

Joseph Lécussan
and other
miliciens
involved at St-Amand-Montrond were shot in 1946.

Jean
Leguay
, the key planner of the
rafle
of July 1942, pursued a successful post-war career with the perfumery company Nina Ricci in the US and later in France. He was never prosecuted before his retirement in 1975, but subsequently became the first
collabo
to be indicted for crimes against humanity, dying on 3 July 1989 before being brought to trial.

Jean
Mayol de Lupé
, the aging chaplain of the LVF, was arrested by the Americans in March 1945 and condemned by a French court on 14 May 1947 to fifteen years’ imprisonment and confiscation of his property. Released in May 1951, he retired to Lupé and died there in June 1956.

Bernard Ménétrel
, Pétain’s doctor, was imprisoned in Fresnes on his return to France in May 1945, but released for health reasons in 1946 and died accidentally the following year.

Karl
Oberg
was condemned to death in Germany, but returned to France for a second trial with Knochen in October 1954. His death sentence in 1954 was commuted to twenty years’ imprisonment. In 1965, he was granted a presidential pardon and returned to Germany, where he died the same year.

François
Papon
succeeded in the civil service until 1981, when evidence linked him with Jewish deportations from the Gironde
département
. Accused in January 1983, he displayed scant respect for the court or his judges and exploited his poor health to delay hearings. Sentenced to ten years in prison for his role in sending 1,560 Jews of all ages to their deaths, he was released after three years thanks to a specially introduced law of March 2002 permitting liberation of prisoners whose health was endangered by incarceration. Of nearly thirty prisoners over 80 years of age in French prisons, Papon was the second to be released. On 25 July 2002, the European Court of Human Rights declared his trial to be ‘inequitable’.

Philippe
Pétain
returned voluntarily to France in April 1945, by then partially incontinent and not truly lucid. He was sentenced to death on 15 August for high treason and aiding the enemy, but de Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Transferred to a military prison on the island of Yeu, Pétain survived to die aged 95 in 1951.

Dr Marcel Petiot
was identified and arrested at a Paris Metro station on 31 October 1944. He defended himself vigorously to the examining magistrate, claiming to be the head of fictitious Resistance network ‘Fly-Tox’, but no
résistant
had ever heard of him. His story of having provided false medical certificates for STO evaders likewise rang false when he could not name a single man helped in this way.

The mystery of the burning bodies in the rue Lesueur was unravelled when it was discovered that Petiot had been arrested on 23 May and spent the eight missing months in Fresnes prison for allegedly helping people escape from France – which posed the question why he had not come forward at the Liberation to claim his reward as a patriot. Petiot’s military discharge papers of 1918 recorded signs of mental disturbance, which had not prevented him from qualifying as a doctor. So popular was his first practice at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne in Burgundy that he had been elected mayor in 1927 – until dismissed for petty theft and shoplifting, and suspected of drug trafficking. After that, he fled to the anonymity of Paris, opening his consulting room near the Opéra in 1933.

Police investigations connected numerous missing persons with Petiot. When more than forty suitcases filled with men’s and women’s clothing were found at the home of a friend of his, the truth at last came out. Telling Jews threatened with deportation to come to the apartment in rue Lesueur with only their most precious possessions, he gave them a lethal injection under the pretence that it was a sedative – and banked the proceeds. Charged initially with twenty-seven murders, of which he admitted nineteen, he eventually confessed to having killed sixty-three people in this way and was found guilty on 132 of 135 indictments. Sentenced to death, he called across the courtroom to his wife, ‘Avenge me!’ He was guillotined on 25 May 1946.
⁶

Louis
Petitjean
was arrested by his colleagues in February 1944 for helping refugees and escaping Allied aircrew and other Resistance activities. He was unable to obtain his release until May 1945, even though the superior officer who had him arrested was himself sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour after the Liberation. Reinstated in the RG, Petitjean lost fifteen months’ seniority and pension rights for the time spent in jail.
⁷

Police-Gestapo co-operation
, according to an interview Knochen gave to
Historia
magazine in 1972, was crucial after the Wehrmacht’s refusal to round up Jews because the task would otherwise have been impossible. Around 30,000 police worked directly for the German security organisations: in Marseille, 1,000 French supported a German staff of fifty; in St-Étienne there were 344 French for only ten Germans.

Pierre
Pucheu
was displaced by Laval’s return to power in April 1942 and slipped through Spain to North Africa, hoping to change sides. Arrested in Casablanca on 11 August 1943, he was condemned to death by a military court and shot near Algiers on 20 March 1944.

Louis
Renault
surrendered himself in ill health to a judge on 23 September 1944 and was jailed at Fresnes. Beaten up during the night of 4 October by communist detainees, he died in hospital on 24 October 1944 from head injuries. In 1945 de Gaulle nationalised the Renault company. Not until 1967 were the family shareholders compensated. In contrast, the company Sainrapt et Brice was permitted to keep as legitimate earnings profits of 360 million francs from construction contracts for the Wehrmacht.
⁸

Heinz
Röthke
, who had declared that even a baby born in Drancy must be gassed in Auschwitz because it was a ‘future terrorist’, died peacefully in 1968 in Wolfsburg, where he had a legal practice.

SS Division Das Reich:
Of the hangings in Tulle, in which they participated
,
SS officer Wulf and Sargeant Hoff had ‘no recollection’ at their trial in July 1951. Sentenced to ten years and life respectively, they were freed the following year. Lieutenantt Schmald, who had made the selection of those to hang, was shot by the Maquis in August 1944, muttering,
‘Ich hatte Befehl’
(‘I was ordered to do it’).
⁹

The killers of Oradour
were tried – some of them – by the Haut Tribunal Permanent des Forces Armées sitting in Bordeaux from 13 January to 12 March 1953. Strangely, General Lammerding was not extradited to give evidence, although known to be practising as a civil engineer in the British Zone of Germany. Forty-three men were condemned to death in absentia, most of them having been killed during the subsequent fighting in Normandy. In the dock were seven Germans and fourteen Alsatians – one volunteer and thirteen conscripts. Whether for political reasons – Alsace had been German in 1944 but was part of France in 1953 – or for diplomatic reasons with the Cold War at its height, or because of a need to cover up the alleged Maquis atrocities, the sentences were not exemplary. The senior German accused was sentenced to death; four others were given forced labour of ten to twelve years; one was acquitted. The Alsatian volunteer was also sentenced to death; nine of the conscripts were given five to twelve years’ hard labour; the other four received five to eight years’ hard labour.

In the Limousin, the sentences were considered outrageously inadequate, yet in Alsace there was public indignation that the
malgré-nous
conscripts should be sentenced at all for obeying German orders, no matter what they had done. Since the accused had spent eight years in custody, the Alsatian conscripts were released immediately, as the judges had known would be the case when passing sentence. All the Germans, except the man sentenced to death, were liberated a few months later. The two death sentences were commuted and both men were released in 1959.

Pierre Seel
survived Natzwiller and tried unsuccessfully to live down the stigma of being a ‘notorious homsexual’ by leading an outwardly normal married life. But his past caught up with him, he was rejected by his family and eventually ‘came out’ by writing his memoirs.

Heinz Stahlschmidt
was given French nationality and lived in Bordeaux under the name Henri Salmide. He married his fiancée Henriette, but had to wait fifty years for the city to thank him. On 20 May 1994 Mayor Jacques Chaban-Delmas awarded him the Bordeaux medal. Six years later, his heroism was officially acknowledged by the nation when President Jaques Chirac invested him with the Légion d’Honneur on 14 July 2000. Stahlschmidt/Salmide died during the writing of this book, in June 2006.

Paul Touvier,
head of the Lyon Milice, went undercover in 1944 after releasing a few prisoners and making deals with the Resistance, hoping to be left in peace to spend the money he had amassed through extortion. Sheltered on religious premises and with false papers, he enjoyed contact with his family and was married in church, fathering two children by his second wife.

Condemned to death in his absence at Chambéry on 10 September 1946 for complicity in the murders of
Hélène and Victor Basch
and seven Jews machine-gunned at Rillieux, Touvier was arrested after participating in several armed hold-ups in Paris the following year. In an attempt to save his own skin, he betrayed other members of his gang of former
collabos
. Sentenced to die by firing squad at Lyon, he ‘escaped’ en route and was sheltered by another succession of priests and religious houses, even living in his home town of Chambéry under an assumed name for some time.

After the 1967 Statute of Limitations annulled Touvier’s sentences, he tried, with help from Church dignitaries, to regain his civil rights in order to inherit property and was pardoned by President Pompidou in 1971. An article in
L’Express
and legislation regarding crimes against humanity caused him to go underground once again in convents and monasteries where he was visited by his wife and children. The perseverance of gendarme Jean-Louis Recordon finally tracked Touvier down to the priory of St-François in Nice, where he was arrested on 24 May 1989 after the satirical weekly
Le Canard Enchainé
made it impossible for the government not to arrest him. Thanks to an able defence by a Catholic barrister, the first case was withdrawn, but Touvier was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment at the Yvelines Assizes Court in 1994. He died in Fresnes prison aged 81 and was honoured with a Requiem Mass, at which the eulogy praised a ‘sensitive and delicate soul … whom God would pardon as earthly Justice had not’.
¹⁰

Xavier
Vallat
was tried in 1947 for his conduct as General Commissioner of Jewish Questions and his part in drafting the Second Statute of the Jews. Unrepentant, he accused prosecutor Kriegel-Valrimont of being racially disqualified to appear in a French court. Sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, Vallat was released from prison with ‘national indignity’ two years later. He then became a passionate Zionist in the belief that the existence of a Jewish state was the way to rid France of Jews permanently.