known in Bordeaux. Intelligent, quick-witted, ambitious, fluent in French and a natural in the spying business, it was not long before the two became lovers. Her role, however, extended well beyond being Dohse’s mistress, for over time she also became his chief confidante and adviser – often attending his interrogations and participating in conferences to decide strategy and policy.
The main elements of Dohse’s staff assembled, he and Sommer set about creating a network of agents. Among the most important of these were 108 individuals each paid 5,000 francs a month (the equivalent of around £1,000 today), plus expenses. These included ‘agents of influence’ – senior officials in the French administration and police, key leaders in pro-Gestapo French paramilitary units – and undercover agents who were used to infiltrate Resistance groups and organisations. The financial resources available to Dohse’s section were, like those of all the German secret services, almost unlimited. French counter-intelligence at the time commented that ‘[German] officers, civil servants and agents … spend without limit and enrich themselves without scruple’. There was even a fixed tariff for information and betrayal:
denunciation of a Jew or a Communist = 1,000 francs
denunciation of a Gaullist = 3,000 francs
information leading to the discovery of a weapons cache = 5,000–30,000 francs (depending on the size of the horde)
One French collaborator, the appropriately named Johann Dollar, is calculated to have earned, in a single year, the equivalent (at today’s prices) of £18,600, for information passed to the Germans.
Dohse’s most important collaborator on the French side was the local police chief, Pierre Poinsot, the scourge of the communists in 1941. Now, as the head of the new Vichy French police brigade known as the Section des Affaires Politiques (or SAP), he also ran his own network of agents. Dohse made Poinsot a paid informer, supplementing his meagre French policeman’s salary with occasional bonuses (amounting on one occasion to 10,000 francs, accompanied by a further 20,000 to be distributed to his men). Poinsot and his unit, who soon became known as the ‘murder brigade’ for their habit of killing and extreme torture, now became, to all intents and purposes, an extension of Dohse’s Gestapo organisation. Poinsot reported to Dohse daily, arrested whoever Dohse wanted, tortured (or refrained from torturing) whoever Dohse wanted, and did nothing unless Dohse approved of it. On one occasion Dohse ‘interrupted’ one of Poinsot’s torture sessions on a young resistant: ‘I said to Poinsot “Enough! Get him dressed”,’ Dohse later claimed. ‘Then I put the young man in my car and sat him next to me. He was not chained or handcuffed. I said “Listen. Tell me the truth … or I will hand you back to the French police” … it was not a nice thing to do – but it was my job … I took the young man to my home and had him fed – and he gave me everything.’
It is fair at this stage to point out that, although torture, extreme brutality and executions were largely institutionalised among the Nazi security forces and Poinsot’s SAP, the Resistance were also not squeamish about using ‘enhanced techniques of persuasion’ and punishment. A female SOE agent connected with Bordeaux describes in a post-mission report how two newspaper journalists in Poitiers suspected of collaboration were executed by the local Resistance, one by being shot and the second by being first tortured and then killed using a metal file, with which he was stabbed more than twenty times.
In all, Dohse and Sommer recruited more than a hundred low-level French, Russian and Spanish agents scattered across the region. A headquarters for this spy network was established in the Place de la Cathédrale in Bordeaux. This was supplemented by the establishment of a number of safe houses around the city and by the formation of right-wing French paramilitary organisations, which provided Dohse with information and operational support as required. In due course, the French forces which Dohse could rely on also included the much-hated, black-shirted Milice française (‘French militia’). Raised with the help of the Germans in 1943, but not active in Bordeaux until the spring of 1944, this paramilitary force, created to fight communism and ‘terrorism’, was drawn largely from the ranks of the French fascists and the criminal fraternity.
In early May 1942, Dohse finally found a proper home for his now fast-growing unit. He requisitioned a large property at 197 Avenue du Maréchal Pétain, opposite the main KdS headquarters in Bouscat. The building, a substantial nineteenth-century château on three floors, stood in its own grounds and was protected by a low wall which supported a fence of robust cast-iron railings. Substantial wine cellars beneath the house were converted into prison cells and, when occasion arose, torture chambers. Dohse chose an airy room on the ground floor at the rear of the building, adjacent to a handsome glass veranda which gave access to the garden and stables, as his office. The stables, too, were converted for use as interrogation cells. The most notorious of these was christened the Chambre d’action. Above the door was a notice instructing ‘No water, no food’.
At the start, Dohse was assiduous when it came to protecting his back, making a point of taking the train to Paris to brief Bömelburg almost every weekend. He also acted as secretary and translator to a Franco-German body based in the French capital called the Cercle Européen. This discussed a future united Europe formed around an axis between Germany and France. As time passed, however, Dohse felt secure enough to visit Paris less and enjoy southwest France more.
In the second week of April 1942, a mini-heatwave hit Bordeaux, bringing spring to the city in a rush. The vines in the Charente and the Médoc flowered early and the restaurants threw open the doors they had kept firmly closed all the long bitter winter and spilled out onto terraces and pavements in gay profusion.
On 1 May, Dohse’s obstructive boss, Hagen, was posted to Paris. His replacement was a thirty-three-year-old ex-judge from Frankfurt called Hans Luther. Though Luther was punctilious and sociable, Dohse did not have a high opinion of his new commander, whom he regarded as lazy and ‘just an administrator … not qualified for this kind of post … he just gave the orders, that was all’. However, with Hagen gone and a chief who seemed more interested in having a good time than interfering, Dohse’s life became much easier. He was by now beginning to be recognised by fellow Germans in KdS Bordeaux as an effective, even if not likeable, colleague, while at the same time enjoying a certain notoriety – popularity, even – among the local population.
Dohse at this stage could do more or less as he pleased. He moved his personal accommodation out of the Bouscat Gestapo colony and took up residence in a small town villa at 145 Route du Médoc, in the northwest of the city, which he shared with three colleagues. Here he held frequent dinners, inviting many of his French friends as well as those closest to him among the German contingent in the KdS. Soon the villa, permanently guarded by two French policemen, became something of a hub of social activity in the city. Each morning if the weather was fine, Dohse’s personal chauffeur would collect him in an open-topped car – invariably dressed in an elegant suit, set off with a fashionable tie – and carry him in state on the short journey to his office in Bouscat. At lunchtime his habit was to be driven to his favourite restaurant, where he would enjoy a glass or two of champagne and a convivial lunch with his French friends.
Around this time Dohse seems to have copied his patron in Paris, Bömelburg, acquiring, probably through requisition, a large black Cadillac which he used for longer journeys. At weekends, he and Claire Keimer would frequently be driven to the little seaside resort of Pyla on the gulf of Arcachon, where Dohse took a villa; or, if he had business to conduct with German intelligence colleagues in Spain, he would drive with Claire to the picturesque Spanish coastal town of San Sebastián, which had by now become a hotbed of spying, centred on the British and German consulates and a restaurant called Casa d’Italia. Here all the resident spies gathered to drink and regard each other with suspicion and as much enmity as they could muster in such convivial surroundings. Dohse even boasted he had literally rubbed shoulders with ‘Mr Gutsman, my British opposite number’.
‘I liked
