Clandestine Communist kidnappings and executions in liberated Paris

Jean-Marc Berlière and Franck Liaigre have followed the publication of their 2007 book,  "Liquider les traîtres - Liquidate the Traitors: the hidden face of the French Communist Party between 1941 and 1943", with "Ainsi finissent les salauds--Putting an End to the Bastards: clandestine kidnappings and executions in liberated Paris."




Under the heading, "The Bloody Liberation", the weekly current affairs magazine, Le Point, under the pen of François-Guillaume Lorrain, has given a good introduction to the book in this week's edition.

"At the beginning of September, 1944, the Seine was no longer a quietly flowing river, but carried dozens of corpses along its length. The dead all resembled each other in a a couple of respects: they all had a bullet in the back of the head, and a cement block hanging from their necks. They had something else in common: they had all been executed by the FTP, the French resistance fighters known as the "Free Shooters". The Libération is a sacred moment in our history. But Berlière and Liaigre are historians. Their job is to root through the archives.

The two historians zoom in on one address, the Dental Institute at 176, Avenue de Choisy, the headquarters of the communist FTP, from August 22 to September 15, 1944. It was a torture center, a killing center and it bears comparison with what happened in the French Gestapo torture center in the Rue de Lauriston and the Nazi Gestapo intelligence offices in the Rue des Saussaies*.

There, in blood, in an atmosphere of summary justice, people were made to atone for the sins of Petainism, in a total lack of respect for the Republican legal system which had just been restored. The historians have found the executioners. And the victims. Not really notorious collaborators: a former socialist member of parliament, a pathological liar, a washerwoman, former Free Fighters... People died for the slightest reason. Some survivors have testified. The executioners were amnestied, in the name of... The Resistance. Other "killing machines" existed in other places. But, this Institute... Another black page in our history was written in the Avenue de Choisy; where one of the regulars was a certain Marguerite Duras."

* "Rue des Saussaies figures in the novel The World at Night by Alan Furst, as the location of the headquarters of the Nazi Gestapo intelligence offices." (information from Wikipedia).