The Second World War Page 59

  An even more murderous element in the civil war developing in Yugoslavia came from the virulently anti-Serb and anti-semitic Croat Ustaše. The Croat state of Ante Paveli was a loyal ally of the Germans, and the Ustaše brought a reign of terror to the region. Well over half a million Yugoslavs were killed in the factional fighting between rival forces during the war.

  Other German massacres followed further skirmishes, including several thousand Serb civilians shot to meet the reprisal quotas. Some German officers began to see the stupidity of their policy, which targeted only the people who had not fled and who therefore had nothing to do with the attacks on their men. After some 15,000 people had been killed, and with few Jews and ‘Gypsies’ left to shoot, the reprisal quotas started to dwindle, without the knowledge of Berlin.

  The drastic reduction in the numbers of their imprisoned hostages began in March 1942, when a large gas van arrived in Belgrade. Some 7,500 Jews in the camp at Semlin were asphyxiated while being driven through the Serbian capital to a mass grave dug by a shooting range on the edge of the city. The German ambassador was deeply embarrassed by the conspicuous way in which such measures were carried out, but on 29 May 1942 the head of the security police felt able to boast to Berlin that ‘Belgrade was the only great city of Europe that was free of Jews.’

  Warfare in Yugoslavia became increasingly cruel as the Germans launched one offensive after another into the Bosnian mountains. Partisan wounded taken by German troops were crushed to death with tanks. Tito organized his forces into thousand-strong brigades, but was wise enough not to attempt conventional military tactics. Discipline was strict, and no fraternizing was allowed between the men and the large number of young women fighting in their ranks. By the autumn of 1942, Tito’s partisans had virtual control in their mountainous region extending across western Bosnia and eastern Croatia, and he set up his headquarters in the town of Biha, after expelling the Ustaše.

  Having recognized the royalist Yugoslav government-in-exile in London, the British provided aid to Mihailovi, who was its appointed representative. Moscow did not object, since it too formally recognized the Yugoslav government. But during 1942 Ultra intercepts and other reports indicated that Tito’s forces were attacking the Germans, while the tniks waited. Attempts by SOE liaison officers parachuted in to persuade the rival resistance movements to work together had little success. So as Allied interest in the Mediterranean increased, once the Germans had been vanquished in North Africa, the British made contact with Tito.

  The Germans, afraid of a landing in the Balkans and determined to protect the coast and secure their mineral supplies, launched new offensives with their own forces and Italian troops. Tito conducted a fighting retreat into Montenegro, narrowly avoiding encirclement on the Neretva River. With his forces largely intact, and soon with British aid parachuted in or landed on secret airstrips, the strength of Tito’s partisans grew rapidly. Mihailovi, abandoned by the Allies after failing to carry out specifically requested actions, was bound to lose the parallel civil war.

  Albania, to the south, was still occupied by Italian troops. Abbas Kupi, a supporter of King Zog who had fled when Mussolini invaded the country in 1939, started resistance on a small scale in the spring of 1941. Once the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Albanian Communists led by Enver Hoxha began their own much more aggressive campaign in the south. As in Yugoslavia, the British decided to aid the Communists on the grounds that they were fighting harder. Little support was provided to Abbas Kupi, to the disgust of the British SOE liaison officers, and eventually Hoxha’s Communists were able to eliminate their rivals.

  Greece was of much greater interest to the British. Churchill was a firm supporter of King George II and was not prepared to surrender the country to the Communist EAM-ELAS guerrilla movement. Embarrassingly for the British, however, many monarchists collaborated with the Germans and Italians out of a mixture of anti-Communism and opportunism. The authoritarian rule of General Metaxas had exacerbated anti-monarchist feelings, and the small Greek Communist Party rapidly extended its influence.

  The Axis looting of the country, compounded by an incompetent Italian occupation, left the Greeks to suffer a terrible famine in the winter of 1941. The ruthless Communist leader, Aris Veloukhiotis, began to assemble a partisan force in the Pindus Mountains in 1942. His main rival was General Napoleon Zervas, a jolly, bearded character who formed EDES (the Greek National Republican League), a left-of-centre, non-Communist organization. Zervas’s forces were much smaller and concentrated in Epirus in the north-west. As Communist strength grew, they became isolated from the rest of Greece, while other small resistance groups, such as EKKA, were eventually taken over by the Communist-controlled EAM-ELAS.

  Two British SOE officers, parachuted into Greece in the summer of 1942, made contact after many difficulties with both Zervas and ELAS. Their main task was to organize an attack on the main railway line which brought supplies south from Germany for Rommel’s Panzerarmee in North Africa. They managed to persuade Zervas and ELAS to unite in an operation to blow up the great Gorgopotamos railway bridge. While the partisans assaulted the Italian positions at each end, a demolition team flown in from Cairo attached large charges of plastic explosive to the piers which supported the bridge. It was one of the most successful sabotage missions of the war, cutting the railway line for four months.

  In March 1943, German forces and the SS began rounding up 60,000 Greek Jews, mainly from the city of Salonika where their large community had existed for hundreds of years. Although they sheltered the few escapees, the Greek resistance were unable to stop the railway traffic taking them to concentration camps in Poland, where many were subjected to the most horrific medical experiments.

  After the rare example of co-operation between ELAS and EDES in the Gorgopotamos operation, SOE liaison officers found themselves in a minefield of political rivalries as Greece too became embroiled in a civil war between guerrilla groups. Zervas was much easier to work with, but the British had to arm ELAS as well for Operation Animals. This was a campaign of attacks in the summer of 1943 prior to the invasion of Sicily. Combined with the deception plan Operation Mincemeat, which consisted of dropping the body of what looked like a Royal Marines officer with important despatches off the southern Spanish coast, the objective was to persuade the Germans that the Allies were about to land in Greece. Like all effective campaigns of misinformation, it played to Hitler’s own idea of what his enemy’s intentions were and strengthened his belief that the British plan was to invade southern Europe via the Balkans. His Austrian background made him obsessive about the region. A panzer division and other forces were consequently diverted to Greece just before the landings in Sicily.

  The ELAS leadership were divided over how to deal with the British. They wanted the support and legitimacy which an alliance with the Allies would bring, but they were intensely suspicious of British motives. In August 1943 partisan delegates were flown out to attend a meeting in Cairo. The Communists, like most Greeks at the time, were opposed to the restoration of the monarchy. They argued that King George should not return to the country unless a plebiscite permitted it. The Greek government-in-exile and the British, at Churchill’s insistence, refused to accept this and unfairly blamed SOE for allowing such a political stand-off to develop. The ELAS partisan representatives returned with a grim resolve to defeat their rivals, establish a provisional government and pre-empt any British attempt to reinstall the monarchy.

  The resistance on Crete, however, presented few political problems. Most of the guerrilla leaders known as kapitans accepted British guidance and, although not monarchist, were strongly anti-Communist. Only insignificant groups in the east of the island supported EAM-ELAS.

  In France the vast majority of the country, including republicans, had welcomed Pétain’s armistice with relief. They had no idea that German plans at that stage were to reduce France to the level of a ‘tourist country’ and to take Alsace and Lorraine for the Reich, thus forcing
its men to serve in the German army.

  Keeping their heads down, the French carried on with their daily lives as far as was possible in the new circumstances, although this was extremely hard for the wives of the 1.5 million prisoners of war still held in Germany. The depredations of occupation, with the Germans taking a considerable proportion of French agricultural output for themselves, produced great hardship in the towns and cities, especially for those with no relations in the countryside. The average height of boys dropped by seven centimetres and of girls by eleven centimetres in the course of the war.

  Small resistance groups began to publish underground newspapers towards the end of 1940, in many cases inspired by de Gaulle’s broadcasts from London declaring that the fight continued. They included people from different backgrounds and parties. At this stage, few acts of overt resistance against the Germans took place. Only after the invasion of the Soviet Union were armed attacks carried out by followers of the French Communist Party. Having lost face and many members during the Nazi–Soviet pact, it now began to develop an effective underground organization.

  The German military occupation since 1940 had been comparatively correct, but the move towards total war and the Communist assassinations of German officers and soldiers meant that the SS started to take control. In May 1942, Heydrich travelled to Paris to install Gruppenführer Carl-Albrecht Oberg as chief of SS and police. Hitler had treated France better than most conquered nations, for the practical reason that if it policed itself in the German interest it saved the Wehrmacht a large occupation force. Yet Pétain’s hope of uniting his badly bruised country under the authority of his État Français could not be maintained for long.

  Defeat had exacerbated the irreconcilable divisions in French society. Even the pre-war right split in different directions. A very small minority, shamed by the defeat, wanted to resist German domination. Fascist Germanophiles, on the other hand, despised Pétain, feeling that his cautious collaboration was insufficient. Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français, Marcel Déat’s Rassemblement National Populaire and Eugène Deloncle’s Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire supported the idea of the Nazis’ New Order in Europe in the belief that France could become a great power again alongside the Third Reich. They were even more deluded than the old marshal, since the Germans never took them seriously for a moment. They were, at best, the Nazi equivalent of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’.

  Infighting between the zealots of the extreme right was matched by the rivalries on the German side. Otto Abetz, the francophile ambassador in Paris, was generally derided by leading Nazis, especially Göring. The SS and the military were frequently at loggerheads, and Paris attracted a plethora of German headquarters and administrative offices, all following their own policies. The centre of occupied Paris was forested with their signposts symbolically pointing in all directions.

  SS Gruppenführer Oberg was, however, extremely satisfied with the assistance he received from Vichy’s police. The Third Reich lacked manpower at that stage of the war on the eastern front, and Oberg had fewer than 3,000 German police for the whole of occupied France. René Bousquet, the secretary-general of police appointed by Pierre Laval, was an energetic young administrator, not a right-wing ideologue. Like the young technocrates who were quietly reorganizing and strengthening Vichy’s system of government, Bousquet believed strongly that the État Français should keep control of security matters if it were to have any meaning at all. And if that meant exceeding his powers when it came to rounding up foreign Jews for deportation, then he was prepared to ignore Pétain’s instructions that French police should not be involved.

  On 16 July 1942, a total of 9,000 Parisian police under the orders of Bousquet launched dawn raids to seize ‘stateless’ Jews in Paris. Some 28,000, including 3,000 children who had not been asked for by the Germans, were held in the stadium of the Vélodrome d’Hiver and at a transit camp at Drancy on the outskirts of Paris before being sent on to death camps in the east. Further round-ups followed in the unoccupied zone in the south. Oberg was more than satisfied with Bousquet’s efforts, even if Eichmann was still disappointed.

  The arrival of an American army in the Mediterranean, and the clear indication that the Axis would be defeated, encouraged a rapid growth in the resistance. The German takeover of the unoccupied zone and the assassination of Darlan at the end of 1942 also had a major effect. At the end of January 1943, the Vichy regime, in an attempt to tighten its grip, established the Milice Française, a paramilitary force led by Joseph Darnand. The Milice attracted a mixture of extreme right-wing ideologues and anti-semites, arch-reactionaries often from the impoverished provincial nobility, naive country boys attracted by the power of guns, and criminal opportunists lured by the promise of looting the houses of those whom they arrested.

  The creation of the Milice reignited the latent civil war between ‘les deux Frances’ which had existed since the revolution of 1789. On one side were the Catholic right-wingers who loathed freemasons, the left and the Republic, which they called ‘la gueuse’, or ‘the slut’. On the other stood republicans and anti-clericals who had voted for the Popular Front in 1936. Yet many French under the occupation defied generalization. There were even bien pensant left-wingers who denounced Jews, and black marketeers who saved them, not always for a price.

  Operation Anton, the German occupation of southern and eastern France, also prompted many who had half-heartedly supported Pétain to change sides. The only senior officer in the 100,000-strong Army of the Armistice to oppose the German army was General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, a flamboyant leader who was flown out by the Allies and later became the commander of the French First Army. Many other officers went into hiding and joined a new movement, the ORA, or Organisation de Résistance de l’Armée. Reluctant to support de Gaulle, they acknowledged only General Giraud at first.

  Predictably the French Communist Party was deeply suspicious of such late turncoats, part of what they called ‘Vichy à l’envers’, or ‘Vichy back to front’. Other officers and officials escaped to North Africa, where Admiral Darlan’s regime was known as ‘Vichy à la sauce américaine’. When François Mitterrand, a Vichy official who later became a socialist president of the Republic, arrived in Algiers, General de Gaulle regarded him with distrust, not because he had come from Vichy, but because he had arrived on a British aeroplane.

  De Gaulle resented any British interference in French affairs, especially SOE’s support for French resistance groups. He wanted all resistance activity to be subordinated to his own BCRA, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action, and was most put out that SOE’s F Section, which was directed by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, had developed almost a hundred independent circuits on French territory.

  The Foreign Office had originally instructed F Section to steer clear of the Free French in London. F Section was keen to do this, partly for reasons of security–the Free French were notoriously lax and their primitive code system was an open book to the Germans–but also because it soon came to see how dangerous political rivalries in France could become. As one senior SOE officer later observed, the great advantage of SOE remaining above the fray while controlling the arms supply was its ability to reduce the threat of civil war when liberation finally came.

  SOE also set up Section RF, which worked closely with the BCRA, providing weapons and aircraft, and had its offices near the Bureau’s headquarters in Duke Street north of Oxford Street. The head of the BCRA was André Dewavrin, better known by his nom de guerre of Colonel Passy. His organization was originally split between the intelligence side and its ‘action service’, which dealt with armed resistance. Passy was alleged, but never proved, to have been a member of the virulently anti-Communist Cagoule, although he certainly had one or two cagoulards working for him. The coal cellar in the Duke Street headquarters had been converted into cells where French volunteers suspected of being Vichy spies or Communists were held and interrogated by Capitaine Roger Wybot. Word of torture
and suspicious deaths emerged, to the anger and embarrassment of SOE. On 14 January 1943 the security service chief Guy Liddell wrote in his diary, ‘Personally, I think it is time that Duke Street was closed down.’

  De Gaulle’s determination to unite the resistance under his command strengthened, even though as a lifetime career officer he had little confidence in irregulars. If the resistance in France acknowledged his primacy, then the British and especially the Americans would have to take notice. Apart from networks such as the Confrérie de Notre-Dame, run by Colonel Rémy (the nom de guerre of the film director Gilbert Renault), there were few which were naturally Gaullist. But groups such as Combat founded by Henri Frenay gradually acknowledged the need to work together. The Communists, on the other hand, distrusted de Gaulle, whom they presumed would turn into a right-wing military dictator.

  In the autumn of 1941 Jean Moulin, who had been the youngest prefect in France in 1940, appeared in London. Moulin, a natural leader, impressed both SOE and de Gaulle, who immediately recognized him as the man to unify the resistance. On New Year’s Day 1942, Moulin returned to France with de Gaulle’s ordre de mission appointing him delegate-general. His task was to reorganize as many of the networks as possible into small cells which ran less risk of being infiltrated by agents of the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst (or SD), the SS counter-intelligence service often confused with the Gestapo. The resistance was not to attempt open warfare, but to prepare for the liberation of France by Allied forces.