Vichy government and began looking elsewhere for an organisation which would give him the opportunity to resist the German occupation, whilst remaining true to the right-wing authoritarian France in which he believed.
Sometime in 1941 Grandclément began to get involved in Resistance activities, working at a senior level in two relatively minor covert organisations. It was the beginning of a new enthusiasm in his life. But it was not enough. He needed something larger to match his talents.
In September 1941, a school teacher from Bordeaux set up a local branch of an underground organisation called the Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM). The OCM’s roots lay in a group of eight French ex-army officers who had set up a minor escape line to London in August 1940. By 1942 the organisation had expanded from these small beginnings into a vast, hierarchical, rambling movement made up chiefly of ex-army officers, intellectuals and government servants, covering the western half of the German occupied zone. Its activities included gathering intelligence, organising arms depots, managing escape routes, minor sabotage, setting up Maquisard units and hunting down collaborators.
This was the kind of secret network that immediately appealed to André Grandclément’s sense of scale, romance and adventure – and these were his kind of people, too: ex-military, Catholic, conservative, strongly anti-communist and in many cases anti-Semitic as well.
Jean Duboué and Léo Paillère, the neighbours from the Quai des Chartrons who were by this time sending regular secret intelligence reports to London, were also early members of the OCM. Indeed from late 1941 Paillère was its chief of staff in southwest France. But in 1942 he was arrested and imprisoned for six months for black-market offences involving no less than 1.5 million francs’ worth of Armagnac and illegally distilled eau de vie. The regional OCM was left without a leader. OCM’s national head in Paris, Colonel Alfred Touny, sought a replacement and solicited the advice of two key southwest OCM members, both of whom just happened to be close to André Grandclément. One was his old Jesuit College friend, Marc O’Neill; the other, his uncle, General Paul Jouffrault (who was already head of the OCM in the Vendée). Both agreed that André would be perfect as the new head of the southwest chapter, which covered a vast swathe of France, from the Loire valley to the Pyrenees.
This was a fateful and extraordinary decision. For, apart from high-level family connections and an ex-school friend in the right place at the right time, André Grandclément, though a good organiser and a patriot, was temperamentally completely unsuitable for the task with which he was now entrusted. For Grandclément, however, his moment had arrived at last. Here was a role worthy of his talents as a mover of men and a shaper of events: a position of truly national importance. And if the Allies landed in 1943, as everyone believed they would – possibly even nearby, in the Gulf of Aquitaine – then here was a role which would assure him a place in history, too. What would his father, the admiral, think of that!
In the spring of 1942, as Roger Landes was busy training as a spy, and Friedrich Dohse was setting up his counter-espionage department in Bouscat, André Grandclément, the thirty-three-year-old insurance salesman, was given the leadership of the largest and most powerful Resistance organisation in southwest France. The change in him was immediate and dramatic. ‘With Lucette on his arm, André Grandclément was now a man who was utterly content and sure of himself,’ wrote one close observer. ‘He was no longer the insurance agent always complaining about life’s unfairness and injustices … Now he was living another life, with entirely new aims. Now he was fighting for his country and need no longer concern himself with such petty matters as finances and money. The transformation in him was complete – both morally and physically.’
5
The cold of January 1942 held on tenaciously into February and March. The vines of the Médoc and the plane trees of Bordeaux remained stubbornly and unseasonably bare.
These had been frustrating months for Friedrich Dohse. Constrained by the passive obstructionism of his boss, Herbert Hagen, and open hostility in KdS Bordeaux, he was also held back by the fact that, until a special decree was issued by Hitler on 1 June 1942, the Gestapo (soon to be rechristened, in French argot, ‘La Georgette’) were not formally permitted to operate in France.
But Dohse was not a man to waste time. Using the skills he had learnt in the criminal police in Hamburg, he spent the first few months of 1942 gathering information, creating a filing system and recruiting staff to his new department. Here too he had to cope with interference from his German intelligence colleagues – in this case the Abwehr, who made determined attempts to poach his new recruits; things got so bad that he finally had to ban their officers from all contact with his team.
Despite these impediments, over the next months Dohse managed to recruit forty-eight German officers, who, supported by about twenty French assistants (including interpreters, typists, cooks and clerks), would form the base of his organisation. Amongst these, three were of particular note.
Rudolf Kunesch was an Austrian Wehrmacht soldier drafted into KdS and, though senior to Dohse in rank, was assigned to be his deputy. This clumsy arrangement meant that Dohse could not give Kunesch direct instructions, except through Hagen. While Dohse himself normally initiated operations, it was Kunesch who frequently commanded them, leaving his ‘chief’ to attend only in the technical role of ‘observer’. Tensions were not improved by the fact that when prisoners were brought in, it was Kunesch, not Dohse, who interrogated them first. Overweight, balding, thick-lipped, an energetic drinker, with a face straight out of a 1930s gangster film, Kunesch was regarded as ‘brutal and stupid’. His heavy-handed approach stood in sharp contrast to Dohse’s preference for more subtle techniques. These differences, exacerbated by the lack of clarity about their relative seniority, meant that relations between the two men were very often strained to the point of open warfare – though there is no record of Dohse ever complaining about his deputy’s brutal methods.
Kunesch was in due course supported by his ‘chief torturer’, Anton Enzelsberger. Known as ‘Tony the Boxer’, Enzelsberger had been heavyweight boxing champion of Austria. With only one working eye (ice blue) and a shaven head, Enzelsberger was as close as one could get to the caricature of a dyed-in-the-wool, hatchet-faced Nazi thug. He was also a regular soldier, untrained in police skills, and had been released from a sentence for murder when Hitler annexed Austria. Kunesch, Enzelsberger and their subordinates preferred torture to all other means of extracting confessions from their subjects. Among their favourite instruments of persuasion were a rubber cosh (Kunesch was known as ‘the cosher-in-chief’); a whip similar to a cat o’ nine tails; and an arrangement consisting of two braziers backed by a reflector, in front of which prisoners were placed to slowly roast like pieces of meat on a barbecue.
Another new recruit was forty-two-year-old Marcelle Louise Sommer. Born in the Swiss Romande, Marcelle Sommer had been interned with her mother by the French during the First World War and spoke flawless French. She spent some years between the wars working first at a department store in Paris and then in – and very probably spying on – the Michelin factory in Clermont-Ferrand. Hated and feared in equal measure, she became known locally as the ‘lioness of the Gestapo’. Though she had started as Dohse’s personal assistant (and had been one of those the Abwehr had tried to poach), she quickly rose to become head of Department IV’s intelligence section. Tall, imposing and statuesque, even without the high heels she habitually wore, she was the mistress of one of Dohse’s section chiefs (and one of his few close personal German friends), SS-Obersturmführer Schöder. Dohse trusted Sommer completely and gave her full autonomy to run her own network of French agents, which included many women and prostitutes employed as agents provocateurs.
Dohse’s
