Paddy Ashdown - The Cruel Victory - The French Resistance, D-Day and the Battle for the Vercors 1944

The Germans were moving on to the offensive and the main burden of their offensive in the northern Alps would fall on General Pflaum, who commanded 157th Reserve Division based in Grenoble. Pflaum’s division was, as its name suggests, not a front-line unit. Its main task was not combat but training. But it was also charged with a military task – the maintenance of order, especially where this threatened key German communications routes. Pflaum’s priority was to keep open at all costs the road and rail communications corridors running through the north and centre of his area of responsibility.

Karl Pflaum himself was a career officer with a good deal of active service as an infantry soldier on the eastern front where he had commanded a front-line division from the autumn of 1941 until he was relieved of his command because of heart disease. Pflaum’s direct superior in France was the commander of the Military Zone of the South of France, Generalleutnant Heinrich Niehoff, whose reporting line ran through Stülpnagel to the Supreme High Command of the German Army in Berlin and thence to Hitler’s bunker.

When it came to carrying the main burden of infantry fighting in Pflaum’s area, the only troops of true front-line quality he could rely on were his elite Alpine Gebirgsjäger Regiment – it was these troops that had come in overnight on skis to take up positions behind Malleval, cutting off the Maquisards trying to flee from the valley. Well trained and well led, the Gebirgsjäger were exceptionally capable in mountainous areas and winter conditions. But not many of Pflaum’s troops were of the same standard as his Alpine units. One experienced French officer in Grenoble in late 1943 and 1944 commented after the war that the units based in and around Grenoble were ‘mainly troops under instruction, with the exception of the officers and a few more experienced soldiers’. In the German tactic of surround, attack, annihilate, destroy, these were troops who would be employed chiefly in the first and last phases – cordoning before the operation started and reprisals after the fighting had finished.

For many German soldiers, France, and especially the south of France, was regarded as an easy, even idyllic posting. A German historian of the period wrote that those stationed at Annecy, where the headquarters of one of the Gebirgsjäger regiments was housed in an old hotel, enjoyed ‘A life lived in the midst of this jewel of nature. The fourteen-kilometre lake stretches its arms right into the centre of the city, making it into a veritable oasis designed to please the eye. The houses are beautifully maintained and surrounded by groves and vines, which also decorate the surrounding hills. And everywhere the sparkling lake with its canals crossed by many bridges seems to act as a silver adornment to the whole scene. The men of the Regiment saw themselves as the fortunate inhabitants of a paradise right in the middle of the Second World War.’

This paradise was, however, soon to turn into something far less pleasant. By the early months of 1944, the morale of many of the raw recruits who made up the majority of Pflaum’s division was low and their steadiness under fire shaky. By now they would have known that the war would be over in the next year or so and that Germany was not going to win. Moreover, by this time they had become hated occupiers, facing an increasingly well-armed and capable insurrection, in a country which grew more hostile by the day. What was going to happen to them when they had to get out?

In a coded message to London on 11 February 1944, a French agent remarked on the jumpiness of German troops in the Annecy area: ‘The Germans load their rifles when travelling through tunnels on the railway. In the streets in the evening, they keep turning round and are always careful to keep their distance from all active members of the Gestapo [for fear of being caught in a Resistance assassination attempt] … A German who had broken his leg at a winter sports station recently was to be taken to hospital … but the comrade who was to accompany him refused through fear of the Maquis.’ In his report on the Union Mission, Henry Thackthwaite was more blunt, describing some of these rear-area German troops as ‘corrupt and miserable’.

Beyond his own forces, Pflaum could also call on neighbouring units who, together with other specialized theatre units, supplied supporting troops for a number of anti-partisan operations carried out in his area. Finally, he could request assistance from outside the French theatre as well. In early spring 1944, experts in the conduct of anti-partisan operations in the Balkans were brought in to advise and train some key elements of Pflaum’s forces. On the darker side, among these additional troops were units known as the Eastern Troops made up of captured prisoners of war and Russian deserters from the eastern front. These included Turkmens, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis and Georgians. They wore German uniforms with armbands showing their nation of origin. At their peak these Eastern Troops, totalling almost half a million, were chiefly used to carry out reprisals in the ‘annihilation’ phase of anti-partisan operations on the Russian front, Yugoslavia and subsequently France. The French christened them ‘Mongols’ because of their Asian features and their reputation for acts of horror and atrocity.

These were not the only troops of non-German origin under Pflaum’s command. There were also some – perhaps up to 20 per cent – who came from other occupied countries. These included Slovenes and Poles. Thackthwaite’s Union Mission report describes the quality of these troops as ‘in general bad … [many] are … ready to join us on D-Day’.

On the face of it Pflaum himself was third in the German command hierarchy in France. But this is to give a false view of his true position. There were officers, especially within German security structures, who had at least as much influence as he did on anti-partisan operations. The most important of these was the head of the Sipo/SD, an umbrella organization which incorporated both the German Security Police and the Security Department. This body is often known as the ‘Gestapo’, though the Gestapo was in fact only one of the component units within the Sipo/SD. The chief of the Lyon Sipo/SD, which covered the Vercors area, was SS-Obersturmbannführer Werner Knab, one of whose subordinates was Klaus Barbie.

Knab had a huge influence on the conduct and command of all anti-partisan operations in the Lyon area. Following some previous disagreement with his superiors he had been posted to the Ukraine, where he was assigned to one of the most notorious of the so-called ‘mobile killing units’ to ‘demonstrate his reliability’. This he succeeded in doing in quick order, gaining a reputation for the ruthless destruction of partisan units and unwanted elements such as Jews.

Pflaum himself, on the other hand, had first intended to wage a ‘clean war’ against the French Resistance. In fact, until around late April 1944 he believed (not perhaps without some justification) that the local population did not as a whole support the Resistance and that some were even hostile to it. By late spring 1944, however, Pflaum’s opinion and that of his division had become much more aggressive as the casualties from guerrilla actions started to rise. In the first five months of 1944, the division lost fifty-five of its soldiers, killed or wounded by the Resistance. In the ten weeks from June to mid-August that figure rose to 650. The totals for Resistance and civilians killed by the Germans rose commensurately – from sixty in February 1944 to 840 in July.

February 1944 saw the pace of events begin to quicken towards the great event which everyone knew was ahead – some time, somewhere – in the coming year: the Allied invasion of the northern European mainland.