Saumur: Chronicle of an occupied Town (Narrator-VO)
Narrator (V.O)
1. In 1940, when the French armies were in retreat, Colonel Michon and the cadets of the Cavalry School of Saumur decided to resist the advance of the German army…
2. But the cadets were defeated, Saumur bombarded, and the German occupation began.
Alain Jacobsone:
The reason for the rapid collapse of the French armies is still debated in France. The French army was well equipped, despite what has been said. The problem was its defensive strategy, a hangover from 1914-1918. But the troops themselves, and Saumur is an excellent example, fought well and the French sustained enormous losses in the campaign for France.
Jeannine Bourdin:
I have a traumatic memory. I was 13 when my parents decided to go back to Saumur, though my father had no illusions about our German conquerors. We crossed the demarcation line, which cut France in two. The cars stopped, German soldiers were letting them through one by one. My father did not want to go back to the occupied zone, because he thought the Germans would arrest us. And it was only 1940 …I remember my poor mother saying” What choice do we have? We’ve got the house in Saumur- you’ve got your job.. You know the sort of things women say.
Pierre Habert: son of Marcel Habert, Resistance fighter and deportee
In 1940, when France collapsed, we followed the crowd; we left the hotel with all the family, because the fifth column had done its work and everyone was frightened. One morning, we were overtaken by the Germans.. My parents said there was no point going any further, and when we arrived back here at the hotel one afternoon we opened the door and saw a German flag on the window, the big red flag with the swastika. That was our first contact with the Germans, that swastika at the hotel. As we were going in, we saw the Germans, who had occupied the hotel, as its owners were not there. They were having a great time, they had taken over the whole hotel.
Robert Gildea, Professor of History at Oxford University:
When the Germans arrived in 1940, many French people were afraid there would be atrocities. There had been many stories of atrocities in the First World War—children hacked to bits, etc. Despite the exodus, despite the French people’s flight before the German armies, nothing happened. Most people said that they behaved properly.
Jeannine Bourdin:
At first the occupation wasn’t so bad, as far as I can recall. But it was only the beginning—the Germans were trying to be nice; and besides, I suppose they were still consolidating their grip over the occupied countries.
Johannes Vandenrath, former member of the Wehrmacht:
I think there was some sort of general instruction to behave properly towards the French and most German soldiers did so, as far as I could tell.
Robert Gildea, Professor of History at Oxford University:
So life carried on more or less as before, and I would even say that the country benefited from the Germans’ presence, because the Germans were ordering French companies to produce armaments; their policy was that France should not become like
Poland, that they should treat the French well so that they would work well for Germany.
Narrator (VO):
3. The Germans were very strict about security. They confiscated all weapons, even hunting rifles, and requisitioned private houses.
Elyane Barreau, Saumur resident:
They’d make a chalk mark on the door and tell you that you had to put up a German. And my mother said that she would never, ever put up a German, and she never did. She even went so far as to take the keys out of our car and put them in her pocket, and told them: “Come and get them!” My mum was not frightened of the Germans.
Michel Ancelin, son of the former public prosecutor and Resistance fighter Louis Ancelin:
From the day after the Germans arrived, it was absolutely forbidden to have any weapons, and if any Frenchman were found with a weapon he would immediately be sentenced to death.
Narrator (VO):
4. Marshal Pétain wanted to create a stronger society, more virile, more moral. And many French people saw him as the saviour of France.
Alain Jacobson
The people of Saumur were moderates; they never leant towards fascist solutions, but were happy with returning to tradition. In a way, politics hid behind the figure of the Marshal and his popularity.
Robert Gildea, Professor of History at Oxford University:
At that time, there was nothing unsavoury about collaboration; collaboration meant talking to the Germans in order to try to get prisoners of war released, make it easier to cross the demarcation line, reduce the amount of the daily tribute that France paid to Germany. So for many French the Vichy regime meant the possibility of making the occupation less harsh.
Jeannine Bourdin:
The awful thing about periods of occupation is that all human emotions are exaggerated: beautiful ones, ugly ones, and then all the unworthy ones—you know, the petty-minded feelings of people whose chief preoccupation was getting enough food, who told themselves: “Oh well, it will all be over one day”. Such people behaved, how should I put it, very “cautiously”.
Robert Gildea:
Most French people thought that the most important thing was to survive the occupation; nobody knew how long it would last. And the most dangerous thing to do, obviously, was to get involved, whether in the Resistance or as a collaborator. The best thing to do was not get involved, to carry on as normal.
Alain Jacobson:
But adopting a “wait-and-see” policy does not mean that you’re indifferent to what’s going on, that you’re pro-German. This wait-and-see attitude on the part of the people of Saumur went hand in hand with hostility to the German occupation; they could not stand the Germans being there.
Narrator (VO):
5. Despite the restrictions, everyday life carried on.
Elyane Barreau, Saumur resident:
You couldn’t go out after the curfew. I worked between the bridges, and I was always being stopped by a German on the bridge demanding to see my papers. And then there was the shortage of food; you had to get by as best you could. If you lived in the country it was alright, but for people in the towns it was a different matter; you had to queue to get shoe coupons, fabric coupons, and coupons for heaven knows what else.
Johannes Vandenrath:
The shortage of provisions in Angers wasn’t as bad as in other towns, maybe because more supplies had been put aside, and there were also restaurants where you could get a really good meal right up to 1944.
Geneviève Fougeray:
There was nothing to sell, there were no goods, but we had a nice garden and I had some rabbits. And who killed the rabbit? Me! When the rabbit was strung up, how I cried and cried! I couldn’t eat rabbit for at least 25 years after that.
Pierre Habert:
But we still managed to go out and have fun, to find entertainment. I remember there was a man who played the accordion. We would go dancing in the cellars and barns of the surrounding farms. The point of departure was the market place that you can see opposite the hotel. He would come on Sundays—on a bike, of course, as there weren’t any cars—with his accordion in a wooden box on top of his luggage rack. Only he knew where the dance was to be held, and he would show us the way to the farms, where we would spend the afternoon dancing to his accordion.
Narrator (VO):
6. The Germans had to deal with a huge number of prisoners of war.
Silvère Vesnier:
The Germans found themselves having to deal with this enormous number of prisoners, since they hadn’t expected victory to come so quickly. Over a million French soldiers, perhaps even as many as two million were taken prisoner. The Germans didn’t have the facilities in their country to accommodate them. There’s another point that’s very important, especially for Saumur: the prisoners came from the French colonies. And because of the Nazi doctrine that the white man was superior to the so-called inferior races, they didn’t want to send the blacks to their own country, as they were afraid of racial contamination.
Geneviève Fougeray:
The people were taken off the train in Saumur and made to walk across the whole town to the Cavalry School, where they were imprisoned. They were hungry, they had travelled from Germany with nothing to eat or drink. I put together a parcel of various different things, including some sugar, and the Red Cross then distributed the contents.
Alain Jacobson:
The first act of resistance was to help the numerous prisoners in Stalag 181, which the Nazis established at the cavalry School. This was a fairly unfocussed resistance, which initially took the form of the citizens’ showing solidarity when the convoys arrived at the premises, but an escape network was then set up, both on the inside, at the School and on the outside, by civilians and clergymen, who transported the escapees to the demarcation line.
Geneviève Fougeray:
Sister Agnes was a nun from the convent of the Good Shepherd who took in washing, and she would go to the former Cavalry School to collect the soldiers’ dirty linen. On such occasions, she would do her best to smuggle some of the prisoners out. She must have hidden the prisoners in the baskets. They used to say that the Germans would stick their bayonets into the baskets, but I don’t know if that’s true.
Silvère Vesnier:
The astonishing thing about Stalag 181, its defining characteristic, is that there were so many escapes—according to the Saumur writer and Resistance fighter Mr Marnot, nearly 1500 people escaped. 1500 escapes from a facility that did not even last two years is a huge number. The Germans couldn’t figure out where all these people went. So they presumed that there were accomplices. There were, of course, accomplices.
Michel Ancelin, son of the former public prosecutor and Resistance fighter Louis Ancelin:
One night, 40 Senegalese escaped through the Saumur sewers; most of them emerged close to the clinic on the rue Seigneur. Some locals would ask my father to hide them for a night of two until they could get them to the escape network, which then took them to the Free zone.
Narrator (VO):
7. The German reaction was to impose a fine on the city, but since there was no proof, they withdrew it.
Alain Jacobson:
The reactions of the Germans were rather moderate, because the city, despite the escape network and the escapes from the Cavalry School, seemed to them to be basically calm. The occupation was easy—one might even say pleasant.
Johannes Vandenrath:
We had quite a lot of free time, and I would go for many trips into town, normally with a friend. I often went to the theatre and the opera. I went to the movies every week, and we would swim in the Maine in our swimming trunks.
Narrator (VO):
8. But for the Jews of Saumur, the Nazi regime would impose radical changes.
Franck Marché, retired teacher of Jewish extraction:
Before, there were five or six Jewish families in Saumur, all of them tradesmen. There was the Roubakovitch shop on the rue St-Nicolas, and my uncle had a market stall. In 1940, when the laws forced them to put up a sign saying “Jewish Business”, and then to sell their businesses, they ended up isolated, and then, very quickly—penniless. I heard about an incident of informing by some of Saumur’s café owners: they denounced the owner of the “Budan” bar, who had not put up a sign saying “Jewish Business”. Three days after the law came into effect, they sent a letter not an anonymous one but with letterhead and signature to the Chief of Police asking for that bar to be closed down.
Narrator (VO):
9. Close collaboration between the German authorities and the French police facilitated the arrest of the Jews.
Alain Jacobson:
When the Nazis decided, in July 1942, to arrest the Jews of Saumur and Angers and send them to concentration camps, they requested, and obtained without difficulty, the collaboration of the French authorities. In Saumur, and also in Angers, it was French policemen who started arresting Jews in their homes after 13 July 1942. In Saumur, French policemen then escorted the arrested Jews to Angers.
Franck Marché, retired teacher of Jewish extraction:
They were taken to the big seminary in Angers, where they were kept until 20 July, when the SS Commander organised a train to deport the Jews who had been arrested. On the evening of 20 July, this train left directly for Auschwitz. My family never returned.
Alain Jacobson:
It was on that day that the tragedy began, on the platform of this station. The first convoys arrived around midday, transporting women from the seminary, in which around 870 Jews from Maine-et-Loire and all the surrounding Departments had been confined over the preceding three days. The women waited all afternoon on this platform in the sweltering heat; some of them fainted, and they say that others even tried to run away—in vain, of course. Once the men arrived, they started herding them into cattle trucks, 60 to 70 men and women packed into each truck, with the floors covered only by a little sawdust. The train departed in the evening, and took 3 days to go straight to Auschwitz. It was the first of 6 such trains to depart.
Franck Marché, retired teacher of Jewish extraction:
The reaction of the residents of Saumur to the arrest of the Jews was…well, they were helpless at first, they showed a glimmer of pity, if you will, but there was nothing they could do about it.
Alain Jacobson:
As for the Church, which knew all about what was going on, since it was in the seminary that the Jews had been confined—there was no official reaction and, whilst there were some priests who protected the Jews, the higher ecclesiastical authorities never reacted.
Serge Klarsfeld, President of “Jewish Sons and Daughters of France”:
What troubles me most is that the Chief of Police did not protest against the arrests even of the French Jews. It’s not that he was unaware of what was going on. But I think that, in the face of the harshness of the occupation, he chose to look the other way, and not make any protest, as he should have done; if he had protested, if the French Jews had been taken off Convoy№ 8, Ernst wouldn’t have had enough deportees for the train.
Franck Marché, retired teacher of Jewish extraction:
The Sous- Prefet and his men applied all the laws of the Vichy government to the letter, and sometimes went even further. After the arrests, after the deportations of July 1942, the Sous- Prefet asked the local police to conduct an investigation into my mother and her children. My mother was declared Jewish, she wore the Star of David, etc. But he wanted to know whether or not we children should also be deemed Jewish. So the police conducted their investigation, my family gave them baptism certificates from 1941, and a report was sent to the Sous- Prefet Milliat, who forwarded it to the Chief of Police along with a note asking whether or not the Marché children should be deemed Jewish. The reply then came back down to the Sous Prefet: we should indeed be deemed Jewish, since we had two Jewish grandparents and our baptism certificates were invalid. So the Sous- Prefet ordered that we be registered as Jews. I found my name and my brother’s name on the list. Milliat also asked the Prefet if Mr Gaston Marché, my father, who was French and Catholic was Jewish according to one of the 1941 laws. I did not find any reply to this question.
Narrator (VO)
10. The defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad in February 1943 showed that they were not invincible. Resistance networks sprang up, some of them linked to British Intelligence.
Jacques Sigot, historian and author of “Une Résistance Sacrifiée (A Sacrificed Resistance):
In the spring of 1943 a network was set up in Saumur, led by Captain Royér. It tried to recruit from the Saumur region, and Royér selected a man from Montreuil—Jean Renard—to look for men in Montreuil-Bellay and Doué-la- Fontaine; the two networks were connected. Typically for this period, 1943, these men were all adults and family men—artisans and tradesmen—over the age of 40. They accepted this work because they were patriots, and were certainly unaware of the risk they were running. They were told that they would be needed on such-and-such a day, that on such-an-such a day they had to go to a particular place, and they would go there and then return to their normal lives. It should be added that this was not a typically French network. It was a British network, organised by Colonel Buckmaster.
Pierre Habert:
My father was in the Resistance, in a network called Buckmaster. He did what the entire network did. He listened to the radio. People used to listen to it in the first place for news of the war and then, to find out if there were any messages to decode. But the problem was how to listen to Radio London with 100 or 120 Germans in the hotel.
Jacques Sigot:
And the news was there would be parachute drops during the month of July 1943, and it was on 13th July that the famous, the only successful parachute drop took place, the men were alerted by messages from London and they met in the evening next to the Vitré brothers’ farm.
Pierre Deschamps
The plane was coming from the direction of Distre when it caught sight of the fires that had been lit on the ground. It went about as far as Brossay, and turned and came back and dropped the containers. Then we all managed to get them to the side of the road and load them into Mr. Vitré’s cart…. After that, the Vitré boys went and unloaded part of the containers into Mr. Lacaze’s van and he had to make a couple of trips, because he used to the van for his butcher’s rounds in the area. Obviously it wasn’t made to be loaded up with 12 or 15 hundred kilos of equipment like that.
Odette Hulin
So they had formed a small Resistance network. They weren’t able to do much since there were arrests in September 1943. Some of them probably weren’t discreet enough.
Jacques Sigot
I was told it was the men in the cafés talking too much, showing off but by studying the chronology of events and the archives, it turned out that that isn’t how it happened at all. It’s far more logical to go from the leader to the subordinates, so the leaders were arrested on the evening of the 17th and the following morning about 4 o’ clock, Renard was arrested. So to my way of thinking, that means that Royer had certainly given away the names of the other leaders of the network and Renard was arrested at the camp and tortured to death.
Pierre Deschamps
I must have been called to be questioned by the Gestapo three times, and I obviously didn’t want to say anything since I was too afraid of being shot.. My group leader, Jean Renard, was brought in to confront us. His vest and his shorts were soaked in congealed blood and when he saw me, he said, “Listen, Pierrot, there’s no point in denial. Captain Royer has given everything away.”
Jacques Sigot
It was on the evening of the 18th then that those who had had done the most to recover the weapons were arrested, that is to say, Jules Rimbaud, where the weapons were hidden, Pierrot Deschamps, where the weapons were hidden before that, Marcel Argot, who had driven the lorry and when you study the chronology, you notice that three days before the Gestapo arrived, Hubert Sommer who was an interpreter for the Gestapo in Saumur found out that the Gestapo was about to come, so he warned Captain Royer. Three times he tried to get through to Royer and Royer wouldn’t see him. Royer wouldn’t do anything and afterwards it was said officially that Captain Royer thought there was no point in warning his men.
Michael Nerlich
Hubert Sommer had already worked for the Resistance before he came to Saumur. He established contact with the Resistance network when he arrived. He found out on the morning of 15th September 1943 that the Gestapo was about to arrest the whole network. I can’t understand why Royer didn’t react for two, possibly even three days. You would have to look at the Gestapo statements. It’s up to historians of the Resistance in Saumur to explain, to take that fact on board.
Marc Bergère : HistoryTeacher at the University of Rennes
Perhaps Royer’s mistake was to underestimate the danger or not to have believed the information that was passed on to him. Or he erred through an excess of military zeal, believing that a soldier remains at his post. The Germans, after arresting the Royer network, demanded the complete replacement of all the Gendarmerie brigades which proved in the end pointless, since in fact the new man in charge, Captain Vialla, lost no time in taking up the torch of clandestine and resistant action.
Narrator (VO):
11. Among members of the Gestapo in Angers, Jacques Vasseur stands out as a traitor, a torturer, executioner… he is well remembered by surviving fighters of the resistance movement.
Marc Bergère :
Jacques Vasseur had a fairly typical career in collaboration, or rather in ultra-collaboration, because his motives were purely personal. He was born in 1920. So he was a young man at the beginning of the war and immediately joined up on the side of the Germans and entered their service as a member of the Gestapo, in effect the French Gestapo.
Michel Ancelin:
My father left by himself for the police station, around midnight, in fact flanked by gendarmes and the Gestapo, and the Gestapo men carried on searching before telling my mother and me to follow them. We went to the police barracks and we didn’t see my father again. We were in a room, a large room, on seats, with our backs to one another and my mother was called to be questioned and then me. I was impressed to be between 4 gendarmes, standing in front of a table where there were Gestapo men, one of whom was a Frenchman called Vasseur who tortured lots of Resistance fighters. He contented himself with giving me a clout or two, which was nothing for him.
Yvette Bazille, daughter of Resistance member Ferdinand Bodineau
We were at home with friends. There was a knock at the door. Dad answered. They asked him to fix a car. They were broken down. Dad answered, “I’m not working,” and Vasseur replied, “We know.” And that’s when he was arrested. They put handcuffs on him and took him outside and put him against the garage wall. Then afterwards, my sister came home and they arrested all four of us who were in the house.
Michel Ancelin:
The next morning about 8 o’clock, they let us go and said, the Germans said to my mother, “You will pack a suitcase for your husband, but it’s this little boy who will bring it back.” And she had the bad idea to say; “They are going to torture you in front of your father to make him talk.” So I was not at all confident taking this suitcase to the front door of the police station. There was no sentry. I walked around and ended up knocking at a door behind which I could hear noise, the radio. Nobody answered. I opened the door and saw my father, tied to a chair in a coma, covered in blood and around him German officers laughing and listening to loud music. So I put the suitcase down and ran away, but the sight of my father made a deep impression on me. And for years afterwards, even now, I can scarcely bear to hear Germans laughing in a group. Besides, it has taken me 40 years to be able to recount that scene.
Narrator (VO):
12. After the war, Vasseur disappeared and lay hidden in his mother’s attic for over 17 years… When he was discovered, he was tried and sentenced to death in 1965.
Marc Bergère :
He was found guilty along with his colleagues Frenchmen and Germans, of many arrests, extortions, tortures and executions. He has thus deeply marked the psyche of the people of Angers.
Michel Ancelin:
I thought, as it was just one night more than twenty years before I had no chance of identifying him but I was shown six people at the back of a room and my heart nearly stopped when I caught his eye. Not only did I recognise him but also I felt myself immediately trembling with fear.
Maurice Leteuil – Resistance member and journalist
When we heard that Vasseur had been found, we were summoned first to Paris, then to Rennes, where I went to see him with my wife. It was rather an aggressive confrontation …He wouldn’t speak. After a while, the investigating judge asked him “Do you recognise this gentleman? He didn’t reply and then three minutes later he still hadn’t replied. So, I said to the judge, “Can I ask him a question?” and the judge said, “Yes, all right.” I asked the question in a familiar way, calling him “tu”. Don’t you recognise me? My name is Maurice Leteuil. You arrested me in Neuille.” Then he had the cheek to say to the judge, “I draw your attention to the fact that Mr. Leteuil is being rude and familiar to me. I stopped speaking familiarly to him, jumped over the desk, and hit him a couple of times and if he has a good memory, he’ll remember it still.
Narrator (VO):
13. Jacques Vasseur was pardoned by de Gaulle and only spent twenty years in prison. He is now living in Germany.
14. Lauriane and Maurice Leteuil worked for the Resistance helping young people to avoid forced labour service in Germany. They used to hide them and supplied them with false papers.
Lauriane Leteuil:
My children were in bed when the Gestapo arrived and when they wanted to take us away, I said, “No, I can’t go and leave my children like this. Kill me if you like but I won’t go.” Then they went and got my mother. I didn’t go and wake them because they would certainly have cried. They were two and a half and three and a half years old. No, I couldn’t say goodbye to them.
We were three days and four nights in that cattle wagon, 50 women with a tiny bucket in the middle to relieve oneself in. We had a Red Cross parcel, with a bit of bread, a tin of sardines, no key to open the tin and an apple. By the time we got to Auschwitz, we were completely wrecked, physically and emotionally. Immediately I said, “It is over, we’ll never see France again.” And we had medical examinations. We had to stand completely naked, of course, to have our hands examined. We queued up completely naked, just for our hands to be seen. The guards, they were really foul women. They weren’t intelligent women nor educated nor anything. They were foul women.
Narrator (VO):
15. As the Germans realized that they were losing the war … massacres of civilians become frequent… In the district of Saumur, a group of farmers was rounded up, then taken to the police barracks and executed the same night.
16. Raymonde Cochin was only nine years old when the Germans made her an orphan.
Raymonde Cochin
In the evening I lay down on a bed with Mum and I didn’t see my Dad again. They took him away with the others, and my mum, once I was asleep they took her away, too. In the morning I had no mum, I had nothing. There was woodland where the cavalry worked their horses and a horse stumbled on an arm or a leg or something. They were killed with their eyes blindfolded, the women were, and the men were tortured. Once they had been disinterred, they looked, and all of them had certainly suffered.
Narrator (VO):
17. The Allies bombed Saumur 14 times during 1944. The bombing was meant to be strategic but British pilots poorly informed about the geography of the town dropped their bombs on the island between the bridges and killed many civilians.
Elyane Barreau:
My father said, “Either you leave or you go down to the cellar, because there is going to be an air raid and warning balloons. Well, we didn’t see the balloons; the balloons came along later, when the bombing had started already. Which is why people rushed to the cellars allocated by the civil defence. Once we came out of the cellars, we saw the houses were razed to the ground and people immediately went back to their homes to try and rescue their belongings, because, you know, as soon as there is an air raid, there is looting and lots of people were killed by delayed action bombs. There was even a family; they were all alive when the bombing was over. The mother came up to make a bottle for her baby, and they all got killed in the cellar. She was the only one left alive. It’s a funny thing, you know, when you have a two-storey house and it’s completely flattened, it’s bizarre. The whole area was completely destroyed.
Alain Jacobson:
In Saumur, the Germans carried out many acts of destruction before they left a scorched earth policy in the end they decided not to defend the town so they evacuated it without a fight and it was the Resistance from the north that liberated it.
Hervé Cannet;
Patton liberated Angers, on 18th August. It was the first town liberated in our region then the Americans received the order to go along the north bank of the Loire They left the south of the Loire and told the various Maquis who were there, “you deal with that.” And young men who had escaped forced labour saw it was the moment to rise up and join the Maquis en masse, which was soon swamped by the numbers coming to them saying, “Give us weapons, we want to chase the Germans away’
Narrator (VO):
18. The Germans finally left Saumur on the night of the 30th August 1944
Jeannine Bourdin:
There was a whole night when we heard marching, marching, marching. We opened the shutters, in the dark, of course, and we could see all the “Boche” leaving, some on bicycles. It wasn’t very glorious. It didn’t look at all like the magnificent Germans on the Champs Elysées, we had the pleasure of seeing all those self-important twits riding the battered old bikes they had stolen, because my bike was stolen too, and some of them had flat tyres. So they set off back to Germany on their bikes like the lousy bastards they were; that’s a lovely memory.
Narrator (VO):
19. Henri Lalande, a young cadet from the military academy in La Flèche who had joined the local Maquis, was one of the first members from French liberation Forces to enter Saumur.
Henri Lalande:
I set out on patrol in the morning with about ten comrades. As we drew near the northern suburbs of Saumur we began to see a few civilians. We made contact, and they said, ‘The Germans are gone; you can go on into the town.’ So we continued to advance. We went along the Loire and the bridge was cut. A Saumur man came up to us and said, “I have a boat you can use.” I set off with 3 or 4, no more, of my comrades and we landed on the other bank. I got to Saumur and there were no Germans, thank goodness, and I was in a hurry to do just one thing, to let my comrades know, so I decided to go up to the chateau. And a very nice lady, whom I asked for a white flag, anything, a sheet, in order to let the others know, offered me a tricolour that she had no doubt kept hidden at home. So I climbed up on to the roof and I hung up the flag and I think that for the whole neighbourhood that was the signal that Saumur was liberated. We went back down into the town, and, of course, people hung flags at their windows etc. and brought out bottles from cellars, with the result that the end of the day was very merry and very, very enjoyable.
Herve Cannet
Among the memories that people have of that day is the astonishing speed with which the people of Saumur brought out the tricolour flags, which had obviously been banned. Suddenly the French tricolour fluttered on every side, as if little hands had been working everywhere through that night of 30th August to make the blue, white and red flags and the town very, very quickly became colourful
Narrator (VO)
20. When liberation came the French felt the need to take revenge…and many acts of violence took place.
Marc Bergère :
Acts of popular violence in Saumur were quite extensive; it has to be acknowledged, without saying at the same time that it was a blood bath. There was an initial explosion of popular violence in the hours and days following the liberation, which took the form basically of the local FFI forces in various villages searching out women who would have their heads shaved.
Elyane Barreau:
Three women were carted around town with their heads shaved. One woman’s husband was a prisoner of war. Apparently she had been living it up with the Germans, we never saw her with Germans, but she certainly had her hair chopped off.
Jeanine Bourdin
It came down to two or three people having their heads shaved. I happened to have a brief sight of the women because my little brother, who was six or seven, thought it clever to go and see what was happening on the public square, and indeed those poor women did have their hair cut off and in the countryside, that’s really the only thing that took place…. It happened in Saumur as well, I think, in the courtyard of the Gendarmerie.
Marc Bergère :
The purge in France and in the Loire region, including Saumur, was particularly repressive towards women. They appear to have been the victims of violence purely on the grounds of having had or being suspected of having had sexual relations with the Occupier. A certain form of appropriation, of nationalisation of the female body took place. It was as if women no longer belonged to themselves but to the nation and their bodies were an extension of national territory to be fought over by men. French men were practically impotent during the war, since there was a defeat, impotent afterwards as prisoners of war, during the air raids, and even during the liberation, which they witnessed rather as spectators than as actors in many cases. This relative impotence coupled with the fact that at the same time women obtained new rights, in particular, the right to vote certainly contributed to a kind of dislocation of male identity.
Narrator (VO):
21. A judicial purge was put in place and collaborators were judged according to the scale of their crimes.
Michel Barreau: - member of the F.F.I.
On Christmas Eve 1944, we were in Angers. There were rumours that our company had been designated to shoot war criminals, but we didn’t believe it. Then at 4 o’clock in the morning, every one was turned out of bed, we looked at each other and realised it was true. When we were all gathered, we were told we were about to march to Belbey. There we waited for the condemned men to arrive. It’s a very strange feeling they got out of the van handcuffed together. There were even coffins ready, along with the undertakers. There were lawyers and a priest who embraced them then they walked to the execution stake and all of this without a word being spoken. It was done by gestures. There was an NCO, with a sabre. He raised it and when it came down, it was over. There was the coup de grace then, which was done by the NCOs: a bullet to the head.
Marc Bergère :
These three persons, Thomas, Simine, Néguier, were collaborators. They were executed, having been sentenced by the regular courts. The three were accused of extremely serious acts of treason and espionage.
Narrator (VO):
22. At the same time, an economic purge was organised by the new French government.
Marc Bergère :
It tried to distinguish between those who had made scandalous profits and those who had worked with the Occupier in order to make the best of the situation. For example, the Committee for the Confiscation of Illegal Profits punished all the big wine houses of Saumur. To begin with, in Saumur, there was no immediate change of Sous Prefet, since he had worked for the Resistance as well. The first Sous-Prefet in Saumur represented the other possibility; he was removed at the liberation, was found guilty and sentenced as being unworthy of the nation and was dismissed from the civil service.
Jeannine Bourdin:
Occupation is awful. You are humiliated, it’s worse than anything, it’s not when most people die But it’s when things that aren’t very pleasant tend to come out into the open.
Narrator (VO):
23. After 4 years under the “jackboot”, France won its freedom but it took another winter to defeat Nazism. In 1948, the city of Saumur was decorated with the Croix de Guerre, for its association with the heroic action of the cadets of the Cavalry School and for its patriotism during the years of occupation.
THE END
Narrator (V.O)
1. In 1940, when the French armies were in retreat, Colonel Michon and the cadets of the Cavalry School of Saumur decided to resist the advance of the German army…
2. But the cadets were defeated, Saumur bombarded, and the German occupation began.
Alain Jacobsone:
The reason for the rapid collapse of the French armies is still debated in France. The French army was well equipped, despite what has been said. The problem was its defensive strategy, a hangover from 1914-1918. But the troops themselves, and Saumur is an excellent example, fought well and the French sustained enormous losses in the campaign for France.
Jeannine Bourdin:
I have a traumatic memory. I was 13 when my parents decided to go back to Saumur, though my father had no illusions about our German conquerors. We crossed the demarcation line, which cut France in two. The cars stopped, German soldiers were letting them through one by one. My father did not want to go back to the occupied zone, because he thought the Germans would arrest us. And it was only 1940 …I remember my poor mother saying” What choice do we have? We’ve got the house in Saumur- you’ve got your job.. You know the sort of things women say.
Pierre Habert: son of Marcel Habert, Resistance fighter and deportee
In 1940, when France collapsed, we followed the crowd; we left the hotel with all the family, because the fifth column had done its work and everyone was frightened. One morning, we were overtaken by the Germans.. My parents said there was no point going any further, and when we arrived back here at the hotel one afternoon we opened the door and saw a German flag on the window, the big red flag with the swastika. That was our first contact with the Germans, that swastika at the hotel. As we were going in, we saw the Germans, who had occupied the hotel, as its owners were not there. They were having a great time, they had taken over the whole hotel.
Robert Gildea, Professor of History at Oxford University:
When the Germans arrived in 1940, many French people were afraid there would be atrocities. There had been many stories of atrocities in the First World War—children hacked to bits, etc. Despite the exodus, despite the French people’s flight before the German armies, nothing happened. Most people said that they behaved properly.
Jeannine Bourdin:
At first the occupation wasn’t so bad, as far as I can recall. But it was only the beginning—the Germans were trying to be nice; and besides, I suppose they were still consolidating their grip over the occupied countries.
Johannes Vandenrath, former member of the Wehrmacht:
I think there was some sort of general instruction to behave properly towards the French and most German soldiers did so, as far as I could tell.
Robert Gildea, Professor of History at Oxford University:
So life carried on more or less as before, and I would even say that the country benefited from the Germans’ presence, because the Germans were ordering French companies to produce armaments; their policy was that France should not become like
Poland, that they should treat the French well so that they would work well for Germany.
Narrator (VO):
3. The Germans were very strict about security. They confiscated all weapons, even hunting rifles, and requisitioned private houses.
Elyane Barreau, Saumur resident:
They’d make a chalk mark on the door and tell you that you had to put up a German. And my mother said that she would never, ever put up a German, and she never did. She even went so far as to take the keys out of our car and put them in her pocket, and told them: “Come and get them!” My mum was not frightened of the Germans.
Michel Ancelin, son of the former public prosecutor and Resistance fighter Louis Ancelin:
From the day after the Germans arrived, it was absolutely forbidden to have any weapons, and if any Frenchman were found with a weapon he would immediately be sentenced to death.
Narrator (VO):
4. Marshal Pétain wanted to create a stronger society, more virile, more moral. And many French people saw him as the saviour of France.
Alain Jacobson
The people of Saumur were moderates; they never leant towards fascist solutions, but were happy with returning to tradition. In a way, politics hid behind the figure of the Marshal and his popularity.
Robert Gildea, Professor of History at Oxford University:
At that time, there was nothing unsavoury about collaboration; collaboration meant talking to the Germans in order to try to get prisoners of war released, make it easier to cross the demarcation line, reduce the amount of the daily tribute that France paid to Germany. So for many French the Vichy regime meant the possibility of making the occupation less harsh.
Jeannine Bourdin:
The awful thing about periods of occupation is that all human emotions are exaggerated: beautiful ones, ugly ones, and then all the unworthy ones—you know, the petty-minded feelings of people whose chief preoccupation was getting enough food, who told themselves: “Oh well, it will all be over one day”. Such people behaved, how should I put it, very “cautiously”.
Robert Gildea:
Most French people thought that the most important thing was to survive the occupation; nobody knew how long it would last. And the most dangerous thing to do, obviously, was to get involved, whether in the Resistance or as a collaborator. The best thing to do was not get involved, to carry on as normal.
Alain Jacobson:
But adopting a “wait-and-see” policy does not mean that you’re indifferent to what’s going on, that you’re pro-German. This wait-and-see attitude on the part of the people of Saumur went hand in hand with hostility to the German occupation; they could not stand the Germans being there.
Narrator (VO):
5. Despite the restrictions, everyday life carried on.
Elyane Barreau, Saumur resident:
You couldn’t go out after the curfew. I worked between the bridges, and I was always being stopped by a German on the bridge demanding to see my papers. And then there was the shortage of food; you had to get by as best you could. If you lived in the country it was alright, but for people in the towns it was a different matter; you had to queue to get shoe coupons, fabric coupons, and coupons for heaven knows what else.
Johannes Vandenrath:
The shortage of provisions in Angers wasn’t as bad as in other towns, maybe because more supplies had been put aside, and there were also restaurants where you could get a really good meal right up to 1944.
Geneviève Fougeray:
There was nothing to sell, there were no goods, but we had a nice garden and I had some rabbits. And who killed the rabbit? Me! When the rabbit was strung up, how I cried and cried! I couldn’t eat rabbit for at least 25 years after that.
Pierre Habert:
But we still managed to go out and have fun, to find entertainment. I remember there was a man who played the accordion. We would go dancing in the cellars and barns of the surrounding farms. The point of departure was the market place that you can see opposite the hotel. He would come on Sundays—on a bike, of course, as there weren’t any cars—with his accordion in a wooden box on top of his luggage rack. Only he knew where the dance was to be held, and he would show us the way to the farms, where we would spend the afternoon dancing to his accordion.
Narrator (VO):
6. The Germans had to deal with a huge number of prisoners of war.
Silvère Vesnier:
The Germans found themselves having to deal with this enormous number of prisoners, since they hadn’t expected victory to come so quickly. Over a million French soldiers, perhaps even as many as two million were taken prisoner. The Germans didn’t have the facilities in their country to accommodate them. There’s another point that’s very important, especially for Saumur: the prisoners came from the French colonies. And because of the Nazi doctrine that the white man was superior to the so-called inferior races, they didn’t want to send the blacks to their own country, as they were afraid of racial contamination.
Geneviève Fougeray:
The people were taken off the train in Saumur and made to walk across the whole town to the Cavalry School, where they were imprisoned. They were hungry, they had travelled from Germany with nothing to eat or drink. I put together a parcel of various different things, including some sugar, and the Red Cross then distributed the contents.
Alain Jacobson:
The first act of resistance was to help the numerous prisoners in Stalag 181, which the Nazis established at the cavalry School. This was a fairly unfocussed resistance, which initially took the form of the citizens’ showing solidarity when the convoys arrived at the premises, but an escape network was then set up, both on the inside, at the School and on the outside, by civilians and clergymen, who transported the escapees to the demarcation line.
Geneviève Fougeray:
Sister Agnes was a nun from the convent of the Good Shepherd who took in washing, and she would go to the former Cavalry School to collect the soldiers’ dirty linen. On such occasions, she would do her best to smuggle some of the prisoners out. She must have hidden the prisoners in the baskets. They used to say that the Germans would stick their bayonets into the baskets, but I don’t know if that’s true.
Silvère Vesnier:
The astonishing thing about Stalag 181, its defining characteristic, is that there were so many escapes—according to the Saumur writer and Resistance fighter Mr Marnot, nearly 1500 people escaped. 1500 escapes from a facility that did not even last two years is a huge number. The Germans couldn’t figure out where all these people went. So they presumed that there were accomplices. There were, of course, accomplices.
Michel Ancelin, son of the former public prosecutor and Resistance fighter Louis Ancelin:
One night, 40 Senegalese escaped through the Saumur sewers; most of them emerged close to the clinic on the rue Seigneur. Some locals would ask my father to hide them for a night of two until they could get them to the escape network, which then took them to the Free zone.
Narrator (VO):
7. The German reaction was to impose a fine on the city, but since there was no proof, they withdrew it.
Alain Jacobson:
The reactions of the Germans were rather moderate, because the city, despite the escape network and the escapes from the Cavalry School, seemed to them to be basically calm. The occupation was easy—one might even say pleasant.
Johannes Vandenrath:
We had quite a lot of free time, and I would go for many trips into town, normally with a friend. I often went to the theatre and the opera. I went to the movies every week, and we would swim in the Maine in our swimming trunks.
Narrator (VO):
8. But for the Jews of Saumur, the Nazi regime would impose radical changes.
Franck Marché, retired teacher of Jewish extraction:
Before, there were five or six Jewish families in Saumur, all of them tradesmen. There was the Roubakovitch shop on the rue St-Nicolas, and my uncle had a market stall. In 1940, when the laws forced them to put up a sign saying “Jewish Business”, and then to sell their businesses, they ended up isolated, and then, very quickly—penniless. I heard about an incident of informing by some of Saumur’s café owners: they denounced the owner of the “Budan” bar, who had not put up a sign saying “Jewish Business”. Three days after the law came into effect, they sent a letter not an anonymous one but with letterhead and signature to the Chief of Police asking for that bar to be closed down.
Narrator (VO):
9. Close collaboration between the German authorities and the French police facilitated the arrest of the Jews.
Alain Jacobson:
When the Nazis decided, in July 1942, to arrest the Jews of Saumur and Angers and send them to concentration camps, they requested, and obtained without difficulty, the collaboration of the French authorities. In Saumur, and also in Angers, it was French policemen who started arresting Jews in their homes after 13 July 1942. In Saumur, French policemen then escorted the arrested Jews to Angers.
Franck Marché, retired teacher of Jewish extraction:
They were taken to the big seminary in Angers, where they were kept until 20 July, when the SS Commander organised a train to deport the Jews who had been arrested. On the evening of 20 July, this train left directly for Auschwitz. My family never returned.
Alain Jacobson:
It was on that day that the tragedy began, on the platform of this station. The first convoys arrived around midday, transporting women from the seminary, in which around 870 Jews from Maine-et-Loire and all the surrounding Departments had been confined over the preceding three days. The women waited all afternoon on this platform in the sweltering heat; some of them fainted, and they say that others even tried to run away—in vain, of course. Once the men arrived, they started herding them into cattle trucks, 60 to 70 men and women packed into each truck, with the floors covered only by a little sawdust. The train departed in the evening, and took 3 days to go straight to Auschwitz. It was the first of 6 such trains to depart.
Franck Marché, retired teacher of Jewish extraction:
The reaction of the residents of Saumur to the arrest of the Jews was…well, they were helpless at first, they showed a glimmer of pity, if you will, but there was nothing they could do about it.
Alain Jacobson:
As for the Church, which knew all about what was going on, since it was in the seminary that the Jews had been confined—there was no official reaction and, whilst there were some priests who protected the Jews, the higher ecclesiastical authorities never reacted.
Serge Klarsfeld, President of “Jewish Sons and Daughters of France”:
What troubles me most is that the Chief of Police did not protest against the arrests even of the French Jews. It’s not that he was unaware of what was going on. But I think that, in the face of the harshness of the occupation, he chose to look the other way, and not make any protest, as he should have done; if he had protested, if the French Jews had been taken off Convoy№ 8, Ernst wouldn’t have had enough deportees for the train.
Franck Marché, retired teacher of Jewish extraction:
The Sous- Prefet and his men applied all the laws of the Vichy government to the letter, and sometimes went even further. After the arrests, after the deportations of July 1942, the Sous- Prefet asked the local police to conduct an investigation into my mother and her children. My mother was declared Jewish, she wore the Star of David, etc. But he wanted to know whether or not we children should also be deemed Jewish. So the police conducted their investigation, my family gave them baptism certificates from 1941, and a report was sent to the Sous- Prefet Milliat, who forwarded it to the Chief of Police along with a note asking whether or not the Marché children should be deemed Jewish. The reply then came back down to the Sous Prefet: we should indeed be deemed Jewish, since we had two Jewish grandparents and our baptism certificates were invalid. So the Sous- Prefet ordered that we be registered as Jews. I found my name and my brother’s name on the list. Milliat also asked the Prefet if Mr Gaston Marché, my father, who was French and Catholic was Jewish according to one of the 1941 laws. I did not find any reply to this question.
Narrator (VO)
10. The defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad in February 1943 showed that they were not invincible. Resistance networks sprang up, some of them linked to British Intelligence.
Jacques Sigot, historian and author of “Une Résistance Sacrifiée (A Sacrificed Resistance):
In the spring of 1943 a network was set up in Saumur, led by Captain Royér. It tried to recruit from the Saumur region, and Royér selected a man from Montreuil—Jean Renard—to look for men in Montreuil-Bellay and Doué-la- Fontaine; the two networks were connected. Typically for this period, 1943, these men were all adults and family men—artisans and tradesmen—over the age of 40. They accepted this work because they were patriots, and were certainly unaware of the risk they were running. They were told that they would be needed on such-and-such a day, that on such-an-such a day they had to go to a particular place, and they would go there and then return to their normal lives. It should be added that this was not a typically French network. It was a British network, organised by Colonel Buckmaster.
Pierre Habert:
My father was in the Resistance, in a network called Buckmaster. He did what the entire network did. He listened to the radio. People used to listen to it in the first place for news of the war and then, to find out if there were any messages to decode. But the problem was how to listen to Radio London with 100 or 120 Germans in the hotel.
Jacques Sigot:
And the news was there would be parachute drops during the month of July 1943, and it was on 13th July that the famous, the only successful parachute drop took place, the men were alerted by messages from London and they met in the evening next to the Vitré brothers’ farm.
Pierre Deschamps
The plane was coming from the direction of Distre when it caught sight of the fires that had been lit on the ground. It went about as far as Brossay, and turned and came back and dropped the containers. Then we all managed to get them to the side of the road and load them into Mr. Vitré’s cart…. After that, the Vitré boys went and unloaded part of the containers into Mr. Lacaze’s van and he had to make a couple of trips, because he used to the van for his butcher’s rounds in the area. Obviously it wasn’t made to be loaded up with 12 or 15 hundred kilos of equipment like that.
Odette Hulin
So they had formed a small Resistance network. They weren’t able to do much since there were arrests in September 1943. Some of them probably weren’t discreet enough.
Jacques Sigot
I was told it was the men in the cafés talking too much, showing off but by studying the chronology of events and the archives, it turned out that that isn’t how it happened at all. It’s far more logical to go from the leader to the subordinates, so the leaders were arrested on the evening of the 17th and the following morning about 4 o’ clock, Renard was arrested. So to my way of thinking, that means that Royer had certainly given away the names of the other leaders of the network and Renard was arrested at the camp and tortured to death.
Pierre Deschamps
I must have been called to be questioned by the Gestapo three times, and I obviously didn’t want to say anything since I was too afraid of being shot.. My group leader, Jean Renard, was brought in to confront us. His vest and his shorts were soaked in congealed blood and when he saw me, he said, “Listen, Pierrot, there’s no point in denial. Captain Royer has given everything away.”
Jacques Sigot
It was on the evening of the 18th then that those who had had done the most to recover the weapons were arrested, that is to say, Jules Rimbaud, where the weapons were hidden, Pierrot Deschamps, where the weapons were hidden before that, Marcel Argot, who had driven the lorry and when you study the chronology, you notice that three days before the Gestapo arrived, Hubert Sommer who was an interpreter for the Gestapo in Saumur found out that the Gestapo was about to come, so he warned Captain Royer. Three times he tried to get through to Royer and Royer wouldn’t see him. Royer wouldn’t do anything and afterwards it was said officially that Captain Royer thought there was no point in warning his men.
Michael Nerlich
Hubert Sommer had already worked for the Resistance before he came to Saumur. He established contact with the Resistance network when he arrived. He found out on the morning of 15th September 1943 that the Gestapo was about to arrest the whole network. I can’t understand why Royer didn’t react for two, possibly even three days. You would have to look at the Gestapo statements. It’s up to historians of the Resistance in Saumur to explain, to take that fact on board.
Marc Bergère : HistoryTeacher at the University of Rennes
Perhaps Royer’s mistake was to underestimate the danger or not to have believed the information that was passed on to him. Or he erred through an excess of military zeal, believing that a soldier remains at his post. The Germans, after arresting the Royer network, demanded the complete replacement of all the Gendarmerie brigades which proved in the end pointless, since in fact the new man in charge, Captain Vialla, lost no time in taking up the torch of clandestine and resistant action.
Narrator (VO):
11. Among members of the Gestapo in Angers, Jacques Vasseur stands out as a traitor, a torturer, executioner… he is well remembered by surviving fighters of the resistance movement.
Marc Bergère :
Jacques Vasseur had a fairly typical career in collaboration, or rather in ultra-collaboration, because his motives were purely personal. He was born in 1920. So he was a young man at the beginning of the war and immediately joined up on the side of the Germans and entered their service as a member of the Gestapo, in effect the French Gestapo.
Michel Ancelin:
My father left by himself for the police station, around midnight, in fact flanked by gendarmes and the Gestapo, and the Gestapo men carried on searching before telling my mother and me to follow them. We went to the police barracks and we didn’t see my father again. We were in a room, a large room, on seats, with our backs to one another and my mother was called to be questioned and then me. I was impressed to be between 4 gendarmes, standing in front of a table where there were Gestapo men, one of whom was a Frenchman called Vasseur who tortured lots of Resistance fighters. He contented himself with giving me a clout or two, which was nothing for him.
Yvette Bazille, daughter of Resistance member Ferdinand Bodineau
We were at home with friends. There was a knock at the door. Dad answered. They asked him to fix a car. They were broken down. Dad answered, “I’m not working,” and Vasseur replied, “We know.” And that’s when he was arrested. They put handcuffs on him and took him outside and put him against the garage wall. Then afterwards, my sister came home and they arrested all four of us who were in the house.
Michel Ancelin:
The next morning about 8 o’clock, they let us go and said, the Germans said to my mother, “You will pack a suitcase for your husband, but it’s this little boy who will bring it back.” And she had the bad idea to say; “They are going to torture you in front of your father to make him talk.” So I was not at all confident taking this suitcase to the front door of the police station. There was no sentry. I walked around and ended up knocking at a door behind which I could hear noise, the radio. Nobody answered. I opened the door and saw my father, tied to a chair in a coma, covered in blood and around him German officers laughing and listening to loud music. So I put the suitcase down and ran away, but the sight of my father made a deep impression on me. And for years afterwards, even now, I can scarcely bear to hear Germans laughing in a group. Besides, it has taken me 40 years to be able to recount that scene.
Narrator (VO):
12. After the war, Vasseur disappeared and lay hidden in his mother’s attic for over 17 years… When he was discovered, he was tried and sentenced to death in 1965.
Marc Bergère :
He was found guilty along with his colleagues Frenchmen and Germans, of many arrests, extortions, tortures and executions. He has thus deeply marked the psyche of the people of Angers.
Michel Ancelin:
I thought, as it was just one night more than twenty years before I had no chance of identifying him but I was shown six people at the back of a room and my heart nearly stopped when I caught his eye. Not only did I recognise him but also I felt myself immediately trembling with fear.
Maurice Leteuil – Resistance member and journalist
When we heard that Vasseur had been found, we were summoned first to Paris, then to Rennes, where I went to see him with my wife. It was rather an aggressive confrontation …He wouldn’t speak. After a while, the investigating judge asked him “Do you recognise this gentleman? He didn’t reply and then three minutes later he still hadn’t replied. So, I said to the judge, “Can I ask him a question?” and the judge said, “Yes, all right.” I asked the question in a familiar way, calling him “tu”. Don’t you recognise me? My name is Maurice Leteuil. You arrested me in Neuille.” Then he had the cheek to say to the judge, “I draw your attention to the fact that Mr. Leteuil is being rude and familiar to me. I stopped speaking familiarly to him, jumped over the desk, and hit him a couple of times and if he has a good memory, he’ll remember it still.
Narrator (VO):
13. Jacques Vasseur was pardoned by de Gaulle and only spent twenty years in prison. He is now living in Germany.
14. Lauriane and Maurice Leteuil worked for the Resistance helping young people to avoid forced labour service in Germany. They used to hide them and supplied them with false papers.
Lauriane Leteuil:
My children were in bed when the Gestapo arrived and when they wanted to take us away, I said, “No, I can’t go and leave my children like this. Kill me if you like but I won’t go.” Then they went and got my mother. I didn’t go and wake them because they would certainly have cried. They were two and a half and three and a half years old. No, I couldn’t say goodbye to them.
We were three days and four nights in that cattle wagon, 50 women with a tiny bucket in the middle to relieve oneself in. We had a Red Cross parcel, with a bit of bread, a tin of sardines, no key to open the tin and an apple. By the time we got to Auschwitz, we were completely wrecked, physically and emotionally. Immediately I said, “It is over, we’ll never see France again.” And we had medical examinations. We had to stand completely naked, of course, to have our hands examined. We queued up completely naked, just for our hands to be seen. The guards, they were really foul women. They weren’t intelligent women nor educated nor anything. They were foul women.
Narrator (VO):
15. As the Germans realized that they were losing the war … massacres of civilians become frequent… In the district of Saumur, a group of farmers was rounded up, then taken to the police barracks and executed the same night.
16. Raymonde Cochin was only nine years old when the Germans made her an orphan.
Raymonde Cochin
In the evening I lay down on a bed with Mum and I didn’t see my Dad again. They took him away with the others, and my mum, once I was asleep they took her away, too. In the morning I had no mum, I had nothing. There was woodland where the cavalry worked their horses and a horse stumbled on an arm or a leg or something. They were killed with their eyes blindfolded, the women were, and the men were tortured. Once they had been disinterred, they looked, and all of them had certainly suffered.
Narrator (VO):
17. The Allies bombed Saumur 14 times during 1944. The bombing was meant to be strategic but British pilots poorly informed about the geography of the town dropped their bombs on the island between the bridges and killed many civilians.
Elyane Barreau:
My father said, “Either you leave or you go down to the cellar, because there is going to be an air raid and warning balloons. Well, we didn’t see the balloons; the balloons came along later, when the bombing had started already. Which is why people rushed to the cellars allocated by the civil defence. Once we came out of the cellars, we saw the houses were razed to the ground and people immediately went back to their homes to try and rescue their belongings, because, you know, as soon as there is an air raid, there is looting and lots of people were killed by delayed action bombs. There was even a family; they were all alive when the bombing was over. The mother came up to make a bottle for her baby, and they all got killed in the cellar. She was the only one left alive. It’s a funny thing, you know, when you have a two-storey house and it’s completely flattened, it’s bizarre. The whole area was completely destroyed.
Alain Jacobson:
In Saumur, the Germans carried out many acts of destruction before they left a scorched earth policy in the end they decided not to defend the town so they evacuated it without a fight and it was the Resistance from the north that liberated it.
Hervé Cannet;
Patton liberated Angers, on 18th August. It was the first town liberated in our region then the Americans received the order to go along the north bank of the Loire They left the south of the Loire and told the various Maquis who were there, “you deal with that.” And young men who had escaped forced labour saw it was the moment to rise up and join the Maquis en masse, which was soon swamped by the numbers coming to them saying, “Give us weapons, we want to chase the Germans away’
Narrator (VO):
18. The Germans finally left Saumur on the night of the 30th August 1944
Jeannine Bourdin:
There was a whole night when we heard marching, marching, marching. We opened the shutters, in the dark, of course, and we could see all the “Boche” leaving, some on bicycles. It wasn’t very glorious. It didn’t look at all like the magnificent Germans on the Champs Elysées, we had the pleasure of seeing all those self-important twits riding the battered old bikes they had stolen, because my bike was stolen too, and some of them had flat tyres. So they set off back to Germany on their bikes like the lousy bastards they were; that’s a lovely memory.
Narrator (VO):
19. Henri Lalande, a young cadet from the military academy in La Flèche who had joined the local Maquis, was one of the first members from French liberation Forces to enter Saumur.
Henri Lalande:
I set out on patrol in the morning with about ten comrades. As we drew near the northern suburbs of Saumur we began to see a few civilians. We made contact, and they said, ‘The Germans are gone; you can go on into the town.’ So we continued to advance. We went along the Loire and the bridge was cut. A Saumur man came up to us and said, “I have a boat you can use.” I set off with 3 or 4, no more, of my comrades and we landed on the other bank. I got to Saumur and there were no Germans, thank goodness, and I was in a hurry to do just one thing, to let my comrades know, so I decided to go up to the chateau. And a very nice lady, whom I asked for a white flag, anything, a sheet, in order to let the others know, offered me a tricolour that she had no doubt kept hidden at home. So I climbed up on to the roof and I hung up the flag and I think that for the whole neighbourhood that was the signal that Saumur was liberated. We went back down into the town, and, of course, people hung flags at their windows etc. and brought out bottles from cellars, with the result that the end of the day was very merry and very, very enjoyable.
Herve Cannet
Among the memories that people have of that day is the astonishing speed with which the people of Saumur brought out the tricolour flags, which had obviously been banned. Suddenly the French tricolour fluttered on every side, as if little hands had been working everywhere through that night of 30th August to make the blue, white and red flags and the town very, very quickly became colourful
Narrator (VO)
20. When liberation came the French felt the need to take revenge…and many acts of violence took place.
Marc Bergère :
Acts of popular violence in Saumur were quite extensive; it has to be acknowledged, without saying at the same time that it was a blood bath. There was an initial explosion of popular violence in the hours and days following the liberation, which took the form basically of the local FFI forces in various villages searching out women who would have their heads shaved.
Elyane Barreau:
Three women were carted around town with their heads shaved. One woman’s husband was a prisoner of war. Apparently she had been living it up with the Germans, we never saw her with Germans, but she certainly had her hair chopped off.
Jeanine Bourdin
It came down to two or three people having their heads shaved. I happened to have a brief sight of the women because my little brother, who was six or seven, thought it clever to go and see what was happening on the public square, and indeed those poor women did have their hair cut off and in the countryside, that’s really the only thing that took place…. It happened in Saumur as well, I think, in the courtyard of the Gendarmerie.
Marc Bergère :
The purge in France and in the Loire region, including Saumur, was particularly repressive towards women. They appear to have been the victims of violence purely on the grounds of having had or being suspected of having had sexual relations with the Occupier. A certain form of appropriation, of nationalisation of the female body took place. It was as if women no longer belonged to themselves but to the nation and their bodies were an extension of national territory to be fought over by men. French men were practically impotent during the war, since there was a defeat, impotent afterwards as prisoners of war, during the air raids, and even during the liberation, which they witnessed rather as spectators than as actors in many cases. This relative impotence coupled with the fact that at the same time women obtained new rights, in particular, the right to vote certainly contributed to a kind of dislocation of male identity.
Narrator (VO):
21. A judicial purge was put in place and collaborators were judged according to the scale of their crimes.
Michel Barreau: - member of the F.F.I.
On Christmas Eve 1944, we were in Angers. There were rumours that our company had been designated to shoot war criminals, but we didn’t believe it. Then at 4 o’clock in the morning, every one was turned out of bed, we looked at each other and realised it was true. When we were all gathered, we were told we were about to march to Belbey. There we waited for the condemned men to arrive. It’s a very strange feeling they got out of the van handcuffed together. There were even coffins ready, along with the undertakers. There were lawyers and a priest who embraced them then they walked to the execution stake and all of this without a word being spoken. It was done by gestures. There was an NCO, with a sabre. He raised it and when it came down, it was over. There was the coup de grace then, which was done by the NCOs: a bullet to the head.
Marc Bergère :
These three persons, Thomas, Simine, Néguier, were collaborators. They were executed, having been sentenced by the regular courts. The three were accused of extremely serious acts of treason and espionage.
Narrator (VO):
22. At the same time, an economic purge was organised by the new French government.
Marc Bergère :
It tried to distinguish between those who had made scandalous profits and those who had worked with the Occupier in order to make the best of the situation. For example, the Committee for the Confiscation of Illegal Profits punished all the big wine houses of Saumur. To begin with, in Saumur, there was no immediate change of Sous Prefet, since he had worked for the Resistance as well. The first Sous-Prefet in Saumur represented the other possibility; he was removed at the liberation, was found guilty and sentenced as being unworthy of the nation and was dismissed from the civil service.
Jeannine Bourdin:
Occupation is awful. You are humiliated, it’s worse than anything, it’s not when most people die But it’s when things that aren’t very pleasant tend to come out into the open.
Narrator (VO):
23. After 4 years under the “jackboot”, France won its freedom but it took another winter to defeat Nazism. In 1948, the city of Saumur was decorated with the Croix de Guerre, for its association with the heroic action of the cadets of the Cavalry School and for its patriotism during the years of occupation.
THE END