The military capability, the political instrument and operational control

By Tristan Lecoq

Inspector-General of National Education
Associate lecturer in contemporary history
at Paris-Sorbonne University

By Laurent Martino

PhD in History from the University of Lorraine

History and Geography Teacher, Académie de Nancy-Metz

By Adeline Poussin, PhD in Ethnomusicology

Nice Sophia Antipolis University

LIRCES interdisciplinary research centre

The Mont Valérien monument stands against the fort's southeastern glacis. It forms an outer wall of Vosges pink sandstone, over 13 feet high and 300 feet across.

Sixteen studs, corresponding to the 16 tombs of the crypt, are spaced at regular intervals along it. Each is decorated with allegorical motifs in high-relief bronze.

A 40-foot Cross of Lorraine stands at the centre of the monument. Before it, an eternal flame burns in a bronze brazier.

Under the Occupation, the national anthem blossomed across the political spectrum, in both Free France and Vichy France, the so-called ”free” zone not occupied by the Germans.

Father (”abbé”) Blanc, born on 21 June 1903 in Maillane (Bouches-du-Rhône), the former curate of Sorgues in Vaucluse and La Capelette in Marseille, managed to assemble a small mixed team of resistance members at the beginning of 1943. The special services documents about the Blanc case illustrate very precisely the methods of infiltration, investigation and then repression used against the Resistance.

Spi-Fall Dellagnolo-Matrose (sailor) and Spionage Organisation Alliance: these code names reveal the stages in a joint investigation conducted by the Strasbourg Gestapo and the Paris SIPO-SD to bring down, twice, the members of the Alliance network, founded by Georges Loustaunau-Lacau in spring 1941.

The special services archives include documents discovered by the occupation troops in Germany after the end of the war. Among them are several hundred individual files in the names of French men and women, civilians and soldiers, prepared by section III F of the Abwehr in Paris. These agents helped the Abwehr to monitor and penetrate resistance organisations and the enemy special services. They were commonly known as V-Männer (Vertrauensmänner) or ”trusted men”.

The career of Hans Sommer, from the SS to the Stasi via the German army and the SD, illustrates a clear fact: German agents were very well trained. Real intelligence professionals, several of them recycled their experience after the war by working for intelligence agencies, which were always looking for talent to exploit.

The type of document presented here is quite exceptional. While its author wanted to produce a work of humour, he had no idea that his caricatures would serve to expose some of the Sicherheitsdienst agents in Metz and their French auxiliaries, the very same who had dealt heavy blows against the Resistance in Moselle.

”The Gestapo”! The Nazi political police generally sums up our vision of the German agents who operated in occupied France. And yet they came from many backgrounds, and many were a long way from our usual representations of them. First of all, very few members of the Gestapo were sent to occupied France, where repression was mainly the responsibility of the military administration and their rural police, the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP).

When the Liberation came, it was vital to be able to identify and list the agents of the Resistance networks, retrace their actions and recognise their rights. It was also essential to check that no enemies, traitors or usurpers could sneak among them and profit from the agents who had demonstrated their commitment to preparing for the future.

One of the great treasures of the special services archives is the collection of cables and telegrams. Conserved at the National Archives and the Defence Historical Service, these documents have their own logic and contain many secrets. They reveal the daily life of the Resistance and make it possible to reconstruct, sometimes with surprising precision, the circuits by which information and decisions were exchanged and thus to improve our understanding of the operations of the Resistance in the field.

Free France produced its own laws, carrying out fundamental legal work that was confirmed following the Liberation and whose traces still remain in today's substantive law. This is the case with ”decree 366”: signed in London on 25 July 1942, this text, which sets the rules by which people can join the Free French Forces, is still valid and continues to have an impact. As for the note on the application of the decree, it gave rise to several particularly moving chirographs.

Conserved in the file opened by the Central Bureau of Intelligence and Operations (BCRA) in the name of Geneviève de Gaulle, the letter we present here is a rare and moving document. The letter is first of all that of a niece writing to her uncle to pass on news of the family, which is in the midst of torment. It is also that of a young woman writing to the leader of Free France, aware of the role women must play in restoring the nation and seeking to ”serve”, ”with all [her] strength”.

A recent film, The Imitation Game, recalled the essential role played by the cracking of the Enigma code in the Allied victory. But who knew that the French secret services had recruited Hans Thilo Schmidt as early as 1931? This German spy was the source of the first information about the machine for encrypting secret messages. Without this intelligence, it would probably not have been possible to reconstitute the machine or to figure out how it worked.

The special services of Free France, which have gone down in history under the name of the Bureau central de renseignements et d'action (BCRA, Central Bureau of Intelligence and Operations), were founded in London on 1 July 1940. However, many months would pass before Colonel Passy's services were fully operational. They gradually widened the scope of their operations and learned to work with the British.

Long known as the ”Bureau central de renseignements et d'action collection”, the archives of the French special services during the Second World War arrived at the Château de Vincennes following long tribulations, passing from hand to hand and from one shore to the other of the Channel and the Mediterranean. Finally donated to the Army Historical Service by the Directorate General of External Security in December 1999, and undergoing classification work since 2013, the archives had actually been deposited in secure premises in Vincennes for longer than that.