Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [37]
The nominal leader of Sigmaringen’s equally nominal administration was Fernand de Brinon, a failed aristocrat whose Jewish wife had been made an ‘honorary Aryan’. Brinon had been Vichy’s ambassador to Paris, an extraordinary yet significant paradox for Pétain’s French State. The tricolour was raised over Sigmaringen to a roll of German drums and a milicien guard of honour presenting arms. The French State exchanged ambassadors with that other puppet-theatre of the absurd, Mussolini’s Salo republic.
General Bridoux, the equivalent of Minister of War, was put in charge of recruiting French prisoners to fight in the SS. The ‘Minister of Information’ was Jean Luchaire, a newspaper magnate, who was accompanied by several mistresses and his three daughters, one of whom was the film star Corinne Luchaire. In the library, intellectuals of the arch-right such as Alphonse de Châteaubriant and Lucien Rebatet met and squabbled. Céline managed to avoid them. He had found lodgings down in the town with his wife, Lucette, and there he reverted to his profession of doctor.
News of the Ardennes offensive in December produced an outburst of almost hysterical optimism in the castle. Some people declared that they would follow the German army back into Paris by the New Year, not knowing that Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s tanks had run out of fuel. When the scope of the disaster was finally revealed, the only hope left was the promise of Hitler’s secret weapons. For the more realistic, their nightmare was of falling into the hands of French colonial troops, the Senegalese or goums. Céline, despising all around him, set off northwards with his wife, a journey through the terrifying death throes of Nazi Germany, until they reached Denmark, where he was imprisoned.
As for the wives and children of the miliciens who had sought refuge in Germany, their fate was little better. Far from being treated as allies, they were locked up in conditions comparable to the worst internment camps. At Siessen, sixty children died of malnutrition. The least fit of the men were transported for forced labour. The remaining 2,500 were transferred to the grandly designated Charlemagne Division of the Waffen SS. In March 1945, this formed part of Himmler’s Army Group Vistula, and was smashed in Pomerania when Marshal Zhukov’s tank armies cleared his Baltic flank before the assault on Berlin. Fewer than 1,000 of them managed to slip westwards, trudging through snow-covered pine forests in the rear of the Russian advance.
The remnants of the Charlemagne Division were transferred to an SS training camp north of Berlin to recover. And it was there, in April 1945, that 100 volunteers commanded by Captain Henri Fenet accompanied General Krukenberg through the Soviet encirclement of Berlin to take part in the final battle for the Reich capital. With the suicidal bravery of the damned, they stalked Soviet tanks with Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons amid the ruins. Along with some Danes and Norwegians from the SS Nordland Division, they faced the Red Army’s final assault in the barely recognizable landscape of what had been the government district around the Reich Chancellery. On 29 April, the eve of Hitler’s suicide, a brief candlelit ceremony took place in an underground station while the battle still raged overhead. SS General Krukenberg presented the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross to former milicien Eugène Vaulot