Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass Read Online Free PDF Page A

Gérard Chauvy published Aubrac, Lyon 1943 repeating the accusations against Lucie and Raymond Aubrac, who sued for slander and demanded the withdrawal of the book. The Aubrac couple assembled a number of eyewitnesses to the events of 1943, including the man who organised the raid on the prison van, all of whom testified that Chauvy had never bothered to interview them. The tribunal imposed fines of 60,000F on him and 100,000F on the publisher. Their appeal being rejected, the fines were raised to a global sum of 400,000F.
    Lucie Aubrac wrote several books about the Resistance and naturally did everything to refute Barbie’s story, but some people in France choose to believe Barbie rather than credit her with the rescue of her husband. Which account is the truth? After the liberation, de Gaulle’s priority was to restore the shattered morale of the French nation, so many heroes and heroines were created to bolster ‘the legend of the Resistance’. Lucie Aubrac was one. It is hard to credit the account of a sadistic torturer and murderer like Barbie, as manipulated by the Francophobe Vergès, but was he telling the truth or simply attempting to besmirch the record of real French heroes and heroines?
    The Resistance numbered many women in its ranks. Some, like Aubrac, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who ran the Gaullist HERISSON network, the feminist Bertie Albrecht and Danielle Casanova, who died in Auschwitz, are famous. There were also thousands of other women who played their parts, exploiting the advantages of their sex. This became increasingly important as time passed and controls tightened up in both zones, since women per se were not perceived as being dangerous by the predominantly male German security forces. Women’s potential for resistance activity was likewise underestimated by the Vichy Milice, whose members had grown up in the ultra-chauvinist pre-war Third Republic, under which women had no rights to sign contracts, own property, vote or hold public office – rights that would not be granted to Frenchwomen until after the liberation.
    Notes
1 US casualties amended by the Statistical Services Center, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 7 November 1957, as quoted in Encyclopaedia Britannica 2002 Deluxe CD-Rom edition.
2 Diamond, H., Women and the Second World War in France , London, Longman, 1999, p. 60.
3 Lazare, L., La Résistance Juive en France , Paris, Stock, 1987, p. 105.
4 Guillemin, H., Parcours , Paris, Seuil, 1989, p. 400.
5 Doenitz, K., Memoirs , London, Cassell, 2000, p. 409.
6 Pryce-Jones, D., Paris in the Third Reich , London, Collins, 1981, p. 120 (abridged).
7 Lagarrigue, M., article in Arkheia , No. 17–8, Montauban, p. 11.
8 Amouroux, H., La Vie des Français sous l’Occupation , Paris, Fayard, 1961, Vol. 2, p. 58.
9 Also spelled Natzweiler in German.
10 Paris, E., Unhealed Wounds , New York, Grove Press, 1985, pp. 98–9.
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    PUTTING THE DIRT IN ‘DIRTY WAR’
    The concept of SOE stems from the very first days after the invasion of France in May 1940, when the Chiefs of Staff minuted the British War Cabinet that, should the French army and Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force be defeated, Germany might in turn be brought down in the long run by economic pressure and a campaign of industrial unrest in the conquered territories. This was followed by Anthony Eden, then War Minister, forwarding a proposal for an organisation to train agents and execute irregular warfare in German-occupied Europe with special emphasis on France, where any re-invasion of the Continent was almost bound to take place.
    The new prime minister, Winston Churchill, was delighted and decided that the enterprise should be independent of the three services. The new organisation was, in the words of Hugh Dalton, Minister for Economic Warfare, to be free of:
… the British Civil Service [and] the British military machine. [It must] coordinate, inspire, control and assist the nationals of the oppressed countries,