at the gaming tables (enough to have a fur coat made up in Paris and sent to his wife in Elmshorn).
What Bömelburg taught Dohse during their escapade of the summer of 1941, and in the months which followed at BdS Paris, is that counter-espionage is an art in which the techniques of subtlety and persuasion are more important, and usually more successful, than those of brutality and threat. Dohse was neither squeamish about torture, nor morally opposed to it. He argued that ‘enhanced interrogation’ – a euphemism used by the Nazis which is still in active use today – could be ‘necessary … in situations where the lives of German soldiers were at imminent threat’. Dohse had, moreover, no qualms at all about leaving brutality to others if it meant that he could use the techniques of persuasion, personal charm and the disarming power of an act of kindness to better effect. In his own words: ‘I didn’t need to dirty my hands – others did that.’ Later, after the war, Dohse was to invest this way of working with moral principle, claiming that it was all intended to ‘humanise’ (his word again) the struggle against Resistance ‘terrorists’.
What, above all, Dohse the interrogator learnt from Bömelburg was the importance of knowing his subjects and their psychologies, weaknesses and desires, the better to turn them to his purpose. As one commentator later put it, Dohse ‘did not terrify, he demobilised’.
Neither these more subtle skills – nor Dohse’s habit of easy superiority, nor his elegant style of dress, nor his cultivated tastes, nor his pragmatic, non-ideological approach to his task; nor his Francophilia, nor his preference for French company over that of many of his German colleagues (he was referred to disparagingly as ‘half French’); nor the high level of protection he enjoyed in Paris made the young, pushy, newly arrived Gestapo officer at all popular amongst his more hardline colleagues in Bordeaux. He was, in many ways, a man apart amongst the more traditional Nazis who dominated the German security structures of the time. His loyalty to the German cause was unchallenged – and unchallengeable – at this stage of the war. His pride in his professionalism as a police officer, his sense of personal honour and his duty of loyalty to his superiors made it easy for him to be ambivalent to the excesses of National Socialism. Nazi politics and prejudices held no interest for him, beyond the point that they were necessary for the pursuit of his ambition and his ability to serve his country. Dohse was not intelligent in the intellectual sense of the word. But he was wily and clever and quick to win people to his point of view. Nor was his spirit a heroic one. He liked Bordeaux because it was congenial, and because he liked France. But he liked it most of all because it was not the Russian front.
Dohse’s arrival in Bordeaux in January 1942 coincided with the centralising of the city’s security structure – chiefly the SS and the police – into the one new grouping known for short as ‘KdS Bordeaux’. The organisation would eventually grow to around a hundred German officers, assisted by a large number of French men and women in various supporting roles. They were housed in four large requisitioned residential properties in what was virtually a KdS colony, stretching along a 200-metre section of the Avenue du Maréchal Pétain in the northern Bordeaux suburb of Bouscat. The new office was split into seven departments: I: Administration; II: Liaison with the French authorities and Jewish matters; III: Political affairs (also including Jewish matters); IV: Intelligence-gathering and the suppression of the Resistance; V: Economic crime and the black market; VI: Internal security; and, last but not least, Department VII: Archives and Records. The site also boasted a canteen converted from an old casino, indoor and outdoor recreation areas and staff accommodation.
When Dohse arrived, the commander at KdS Bordeaux was twenty-nine-year-old SS-Sturmbannführer Herbert Hagen, a close friend of Adolf Eichmann’s. Dohse was given command of Department IV: ‘Intelligence and the suppression of the Resistance’. His remit was the elimination of all threats to German troops, organisations and installations, and his department was the largest and – by common acceptance – the most important of the newly fledged organisation.
This irked his new colleagues even more. Before the formation of KdS Bordeaux, security in the region had been more or less the exclusive preserve of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). Now the long-established SD officers would have to share the role with the uppity Gestapo man with well-connected friends in Paris. To make matters worse, Dohse’s initial role in Bordeaux was hazy. He was not at first sent to the city as a member of the KdS, but as a kind of liaison officer, representing the security police structures in the French capital. The fact that Dohse, a mere detective superintendent, was of more junior rank than most of the KdS section heads added insult to injury. Hagen – who despite being eight weeks younger than Dohse was the overall head of KdS – initially assigned only translation work to the unwelcome new arrival, and had him billeted in a pokey little bedroom which he had to share with a Spanish agent. ‘I took the first train to Paris [to tell Bömelburg] that this would not do,’ Dohse later explained. Things changed immediately. The Gestapo officer was, albeit with bad grace, given accommodation suitable to his status, his own office to work in and the space and support he needed to begin assembling his new department.
It was a demonstration to all that the young interloper’s power did not lie in his modest rank, but in the fact that Bömelburg was his high-level protector in Paris. It was because of this, as one colleague later said of Dohse, that ‘everyone in KdS feared him’.
4
André Grandclément was born with everything – except steadfastness of purpose, good judgement, and a father who loved him.
Captain Raoul Gaston Marie Grandclément, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, was serving as a staff officer to the French Second Naval Squadron in Rochefort-sur-Mer, 150 kilometres northwest of Bordeaux, when his son, André Marie Hubert François, was born in the local hospital on 28 July 1909.
In his father’s absence (the future admiral was posted to Morocco two years after André’s birth), the boy was brought up by his mother, Amélia, the daughter of a colonel of infantry. When André was seven, Amélia died and his father married again. Care of the young boy passed to his stepmother, Jeanne, who he loved greatly. The couple lived in a grand house in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris, an area famously known as ‘the invisible ghetto’ because of the many members of the French establishment who lived there. Often criticised as being immune and insensible to the social upheavals that rocked France in the 1930s, the prevailing culture of the invisible ghetto during André’s early years was one of conservatism, a firm belief that national order depended on the preservation of the national hierarchy, and a fierce and unshakeable belief, come what may, in La gloire française.
André, like many of the sons of France’s military, was sent to the Franklin Jesuit College just a few hundred metres from his home. Here the values of the invisible ghetto were as much part of the curriculum as the rote learning of mathematics, foreign languages, French history and literature. It was at Franklin that the young Grandclément met and befriended a fellow student, Marc O’Neill. Descended from one of the ‘Wild Swans’ who had fled an oppressed Ireland in 1688 and subsequently fought for revolutionary France in the eighteenth century, O’Neill would, in the years to come, show that the family instinct for fighting oppression had not diminished in the intervening centuries.
In what was to become something of a pattern in André Grandclément’s young life, he failed to finish his studies at Franklin College, leaving at the age of twelve to join his father, now an admiral and Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur, who had been posted to command a French naval division in Syria in 1921. Admiral Grandclément had won acclaim in the First World War, including two terms as naval attaché to President Raymond Poincaré, and in action at the battle of Verdun, where he was wounded while ‘showing the greatest dynamism and a superb disregard
