The Barbès metro attack, 80 years later

French Resistance member Pierre Georges shot dead a German naval midshipman on August 21, 1941, at the Barbès-Rochechouart metro station in occupied Paris, the first deadly attack on the occupiers, leading to the Nazis to kill hundreds of hostages they had in the occupied. zone. Jowharrecalls this pivotal moment for La Resistance, 80 years later.

The crisp and bureaucratic prose of the Paris police report captures the audacity and the drama: “This morning, at 8:05 am on August 21, at the Barbès-Rochechouart station, line 4, on the platform at the direction of Porte d ‘Orléans, a German naval officer, Mr. [Alfons] Moser was shot twice while getting into the first class carriage. […] An individual standing in the carriage door fired two shots from a pistol, through his pocket, at the officer approaching the other door. The perpetrator and another individual quickly got off the train, ran towards the exit, jumped over the barriers and fled the scene ”.

The Resistance fighter who killed the naval officer was 21-year-old Pierre Georges, who soon became known by his nom de guerre, Colonel Fabien. Georges had been appointed second in command of the communist youth battalion in early August 1941.

“The attack was his creation,” said Gilles Ferragu, a professor at the University of Paris Nanterre and the author of a summary of hostage-taking throughout history, Hostages, une histoire.

Running through the streets of Paris, Georges shouted: “We have avenged Titi!” Two of his comrades, Samuel Tyszelman and Henri Gautherot, had been executed two days earlier after their arrest in an anti-Nazi demonstration earlier in the month. General Otto von Stulpnagel, the German military commander in occupied France, issued a decree on August 14 that all communist activity was henceforth punishable by death.

The Barbès attack changed the nature of the Occupation. The commander of the Wehrmacht (German army) in the Paris region announced two days later that “all French arrested, whether by the German authorities in France or by the French for the Germans, are considered hostages.”

“In response to any other act of this type, and depending on its severity, several hostages will be shot,” the decree continues.

“The assassination of the German naval officer was a pretext for the intensification of the repression of the Nazis in France, centered on the hostage policy,” Ferragu said.

“Of course, the Wehrmacht was very happy to take French hostages after the June 1940 capitulation without shooting them,” he added. “But that changed in August 1941.”

Mass executions

Hatred of communism was at the center of Hitler’s worldview, with a Nazi hoax that the ideology was a Jewish plot as part of a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy theory. But the French Communists kept their activities secret in light of the Nazis’ Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact with the USSR, until Hitler broke the agreement and invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941.

“The French Communist Party kept a low profile until then,” said Dominique Tantin, director of the Association pour un Maitron des fusillés et exécutés (an association for the memory of the victims of Nazi executions known as Maitron), which works to honor the memory of Members of the French Resistance assassinated by the Nazis.

“After Operation Barbarossa, the Communists became fully involved in the Resistance, despite initial concerns, such as a reluctance to kill soldiers because they may well have been members of the working class,” Tantin continued.

“The executions of Tyszelman and Gautherot caused the communists to intensify their activities, and Georges decided to lead by example.”

The first retaliatory Nazi hostage killings took place in early September and escalated throughout the month. A September 16 decree from Berlin created a climate of terror by encouraging the German occupiers to undertake massive reprisals, targeting communist and Jewish prisoners, whom the Nazis deemed “ideologically guilty.”

The decree sparked mass executions. The best known in France is the murder of 48 hostages in Paris and Nantes and Châteaubriant in western France on October 22, 1941, in reaction to the assassination of the senior Wehrmacht officer, Lieutenant Colonel Karl Hotz.

“This was the first great performance and it made a great impact,” wrote Tantin.

Two days later, 50 hostages were executed in Gironde, in rural south-western France, in retaliation for an attack on a German naval officer in Bordeaux. But it was on December 15, 1941, when the killings reached a record high, with 95 hostages shot dead.

In all, from September to December 1941, the Nazis killed 243 French hostages, including 154 non-Jewish communists and 56 Jews, most of whom were communists.

The Nazis ‘should have stayed home’

General Charles de Gaulle, leader of Free France, the London-based government-in-exile that rejected the June 1940 armistice, said in a BBC broadcast on October 23: “The French killings of the German occupiers they are absolutely justified. If the Germans don’t want to be killed, they should have stayed home and not go to war with us. ”

But de Gaulle also urged the Resistance to engage only in strikes of great symbolic value, arguing that “it is currently too easy for the enemy to retaliate with massacres.”

Yet despite its price in French blood and tears, Nazi retaliation achieved an important Resistance goal of conquering French hearts and minds.

“Regardless, it was the horror of the revenge killings of German hostages that achieved the Resistance’s goal: to bring the French out of their apathy and to decisively change public opinion in favor of the Resistance,” as he put it. Tantin.

The puppet Vichy regime was also involved in the retaliation. “When the occupiers wanted revenge for the Nantes attack, the Nazis asked [Marshal Philippe] The Pétain regime provided a list of hostages, and the Minister of the Interior, Pierre Pucheu, complied and provided the Germans with a list of 61 people, mainly communists, ”Tantin pointed out.

But these reprisals were counterproductive for both the Vichy and the Nazis. They were not an impediment; Resistance attacks continued. A new Nazi measure on November 7 decreed that captured Resistance fighters were to be deported to Germany.

‘Forgotten in the collective memory’

As French public opinion became even more enraged at the Nazi occupiers, and as Germany needed French manpower to help provide military materiel, the policy of killing hostages ended in late November 1942.

However, the Nazis revived politics one last time after that: They took 50 French hostages from a prison camp near Paris and shot them dead, just days after the assassination of an SS colonel in Paris in September. from 1943.

According to Maitron’s investigation, the Nazis killed 819 hostages in the occupied area (northern France and the entire Atlantic coast, directly occupied by the Nazis, as opposed to the central and southern area led by collaborators of the Vichy regime) between 1941 and 1943.

The group has been working to compile biographies of each and every French hostage the Nazis killed. “They have been forgotten in the collective memory and we need to show people their stories and their characters,” Tantin said.

As the poet Louis Aragon wrote in Les Martyrs after recovering the testimonies and letters in 1942 of the Resistance guerrillas killed in Châteaubriant: “Do these things really happen in France? Yes, they do, you can be sure of that. These 27 men embodied France, in a way that the people who identified them with their German executioners do not. His blood will not have been spilled in vain ”.

This article was translated from the original in French.