Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [184]
General Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich (Military Governor in France), gave orders for the arrest of the Gestapo, SS and SD in Paris. The Wehrmacht in France was supporting the installation of Colonel-General Ludwig Beck as Germany’s new head of state. Beck planned to make an offer of peace to the Allies. Unfortunately for the conspirators, Hitler survived the explosion. The Gestapo officers the army held under arrest in Paris turned around and arrested their jailers later that night. Stauffenberg was executed immediately after his assassination attempt, and most of his comrades were soon hanged with wire nooses or committed suicide. Stülpnagel was ordered back to Germany, and he attempted to kill himself. When he recovered in August, he too was put to death.
Stülpnagel had been an acquaintance of Charles Bedaux, providing the engineer with authorization and supplies for his African pipeline. Other Bedaux friends in the German administration had also been involved in the coup. One was Dr Franz Medicus, who fled when it failed. Another, Joseph von Ledebur, escaped across the border to Spain and onto Argentina. Oddly, Dr Keller, the psychotic Nazi who had proposed to André Enfière that Bedaux should mediate between Germany and the Allies, had also been involved in the plot and had to leave France. Medicus and Keller had been attached to the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris’s military intelligence branch. Abwehr plotters against Hitler included Canaris himself, Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law, Hans Dohnanyi. All three were arrested, tortured and sent to concentration camps for subsequent execution.
It was only after the failure of the 20 July plot that Charles Bedaux’s son, Charles Emile, now serving in the US army, learned that the band of anti-Hitler conspirators were called the Schwarze Kapelle, the Black Orchestra. During their intimate conversations at El Biar in 1943, his father had said to him gravely, ‘It is better that you don’t know what I have done to deceive the Germans. Just remember the words Schwarze Kapelle. I shall say no more.’ That may have been what Edmond Taylor of the OSS meant when he wrote that he arrested Charles Bedaux in Algiers to halt ‘the nightmare of a shadowy yet tightly organized international conspiracy working for a compromise peace’.
FORTY-SIX
Slaves of the Reich
ONE OF THE PRISONERS AT NEUENGAMME when Sumner and Phillip Jackson arrived was Michel Hollard, the head of France’s Agir Resistance network. Hollard had done more than anyone else to tell the Allies the secrets of the V-1 rocket. The Gestapo captured him and subjected him to the baignoire, a torture that would later be called ‘water-boarding’, in which he was forced backwards into a bath of water and held under for varying periods. His repeated half-hour sessions, dunked and dragged up from the water, left him vomiting and sick. He did not betray the other members of his network, and he was transferred to the Fresnes prison in Paris and then to Compiègne. The SS took him to Neuengamme, where he became prisoner Number 33,948, in early June 1944. Sumner and Phillip met Hollard shortly after their arrival. Hollard told his biographer of ‘a remarkable American called Jackson, formerly a doctor at the American Hospital at Neuilly’. Jackson, like Hollard, had helped the Allies to eliminate much of the V-1 threat when he passed along the plans that Erich Posch-Pastor had brought to his office. The American and French résistants became friends, surviving twelve-hour days at hard labour in the Walther small