* The others were Fernand de Brinon, Vichy’s Ambassador in Paris to the German authorities, and Joseph Darnand, head of the Milice. The death penalty for Pétain was not carried out because of his age.
* Already in 1943 Isaac Schneersohn in Grenoble had begun creating in secret what became the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC) with the specific purpose of documenting the seizure of Jewish goods to support restitution claims once the war was over. For a fuller account see Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Sarah Gensberger’s Nazi Labour Camps in Paris: Austerlitz, Lévitan, Bassano, July 1943–August 1944 Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2011.
* See also Annette Wieviorka who wrote about the disparity in the way resistance fighters and holocaust victims were commemorated in France in Déportation et Génocide: Entre la mémoire et l’oubli.
* This continued into the late twentieth century in the face of neo-Nazis or Holocaust-deniers. Germaine Tillion and Anise Postel-Vinay gave written testimony in 1984, four decades after they had been there, that there had been a gas chamber at Ravensbrück at least from late January or early February 1945 to late April that year, published in Les Chambres à gaz, secret d’Etat, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1984.
* Shortly after she returned to Paris in the summer of 1946 Bucher was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer and died in October that year.
* Robert Maxwell became one of the world’s most successful media moguls. He drowned in 1991, having possibly committed suicide.
1946
PARIS ADJUSTS
On 9 January 1946, a bitterly cold day, Vera Atkins, an elegant woman with a mysterious past, arrived at Bad Oeynhausen in the British Zone of Allied-occupied Germany. She was determined to secure justice for a small group of women who had given their lives to free France. Atkins, born in Romania in June 1908 as Vera Rosenberg, and briefly educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, was conducting exhaustive investigations into the fate of ‘her’ women agents, of whom thirteen had been reported missing behind enemy lines, never to return. Thanks to her pre-war contacts with diplomats from many countries, and a talent for languages, Atkins had been taken on in 1941, aged thirty-three, to work as a British intelligence officer with SOE’s F Section, successfully concealing both that she had Jewish roots and that she was not a British national. Atkins’s job was to recruit and train the agents, assess their suitability and create cover stories for them. She had forged especially close personal relationships with many of the young women agents before they were dropped into France, sometimes giving them intensely personal good-luck tokens, and usually being the last person they saw before boarding the plane for France.
Immediately after the Liberation of Paris, in August 1944, she and Maurice Buckmaster, her boss, had made a brief visit to Paris, staying at the less than impressive H?tel Cecil in the Rue Saint-Didier, where they were soon apprised that de Gaulle, determined to create the illusion that France alone had organized its own liberation, was ignoring any contribution SOE might have played in the victory. Vera recognized, in the fetid atmosphere of accusation and counterclaim, in which French security police had taken control of the few German records which had been salvaged, that she was unlikely to discover any significant information in Paris itself and returned home to build up files. Among the information she soon received after this trip was news of one of the SOE women, Cecily Lefort, whose poor French accent had always worried Vera, giving an address for her in a camp at Ravensbrück in Mecklenburg, north of Berlin. It was the first time Vera had heard the name Ravensbrück. In fact, Cecily Lefort, who had been ill almost from the time of her arrival in the camp, had been gassed at Ravensbrück in February 1945. Later, Vera learned from witnesses that, just days before her death, Cecily had received a letter from her French husband seeking a divorce. She did not spare Dr Lefort her views of his behaviour.