The assassination of Karl Hotz

On the morning of 20 October 1941, a few minutes before eight, two German officers were crossing the square in front of the cathedral in Nantes on their way to the headquarters of the military administration. They were Lieutenant Colonel Karl Hotz, field commandant (Feldkommandant) of Nantes and the Loire-Inférieure department, and his aide, Captain Wilhelm Sieger. At the corner of the rue du Roi-Albert two young men came up behind them. Gilbert Brustlein shot Hotz in the back with a 6.35 mm pistol, and Hotz died moments later. The pistol of the second gunman, Spartaco Guisco, jammed, and Sieger survived. Both assassins escaped into the tangle of streets in the old town and were never caught.

It was the first assassination of a senior Wehrmacht officer in occupied France. The response came two days later: on 22 October the Germans shot 48 hostages, and on 24 October another 50 were shot at the Souge camp near Bordeaux in reprisal for the killing of a military official in Bordeaux. Many accounts speak of 50 hostages shot in retaliation for Hotz. The Germans had indeed announced that 50 people would be shot at once and a further 50 later, but on 22 October 48 died: two names were struck from the list at the last moment. The figure of 50 nevertheless lived on in memory, because Nantes commemorates the victims as “the fifty hostages”.

The communists take up arms

During the first year of the occupation the Germans met no armed resistance in France. Resistance was symbolic: leaflets, slogans on walls and, in the summer of 1941, the letter “V”, which the BBC urged people throughout occupied Europe to paint. The French Communist Party, banned after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, kept to the Comintern line, although its activists on the ground organised actions such as the miners’ strike in Nord-Pas-de-Calais. After the German attack on the Soviet Union the party called for armed struggle against the occupier. The task was entrusted to the Organisation spéciale (OS), the party’s armed wing, and to the action squads of the communist youth, later known as the Youth Battalions. Their leaders included Albert Ouzoulias and Pierre Georges, a veteran of the International Brigades who later became known as “Colonel Fabien”.

On 21 August 1941 Pierre Georges, accompanied by Brustlein, shot dead Alfons Moser, an employee of the Kriegsmarine administration, at the Barbès–Rochechouart metro station in Paris. It was revenge for the execution of two young communists arrested after a demonstration on 13 August. The Germans declared all Frenchmen imprisoned for offences against the occupying forces to be hostages, and the government of Vichy France, anxious to forestall the Germans, set up special courts which sentenced several communists to death. After further attacks the Germans themselves shot a dozen or more hostages in September. To Hitler this was leniency. On 16 September 1941 the chief of the OKW, Wilhelm Keitel, issued an order on “communist insurrectionary movements” in the occupied territories: the life of every German soldier killed was to be paid for with the deaths of 50 to 100 communists.

The military commander in France, General Otto von Stülpnagel, was sceptical about mass executions. On 11 September he wrote to the Army High Command that the situation did not justify them and that they might turn the entire population, which was working for the Reich, against the Germans. He nonetheless carried out Berlin’s instructions. On 28 September 1941 he sent the commanders of the military districts a “hostage code”: every local headquarters was to keep lists of people who would be shot in the event of an attack. At the top were former deputies and officials of communist and anarchist organisations, followed by people spreading communist ideology, those who had attacked soldiers, saboteurs, distributors of leaflets and people close to those suspected of attacks.

The commando from Paris

Around the middle of October the leadership of the OS decided to carry the attacks into the provinces. On 13 October Pierre Georges gathered three men at the Gare Montparnasse: Spartaco Guisco, a 30-year-old veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Gilbert Brustlein, a 22-year-old Paris worker, and 17-year-old Marcel Bourdarias. In Nantes they were to plant charges on the railway and kill a German officer – any officer. When they opened fire, they did not know that their victim was the town’s commandant.

The victim was no typical occupier. Karl Hotz, born in Wertheim in 1877, an officer from imperial days, had become an engineer after the First World War. Between 1929 and 1933 he had directed the construction of a tunnel beneath Nantes, linked to the filling-in of arms of the Loire and the Erdre, and he had friends among the local elite. When the Germans occupied Nantes in June 1940, he was sent there as commandant, probably because he knew the city. He spoke French, played the piano in the homes of Nantes notables and, according to French accounts, was regarded as a courteous man. He was not a member of the NSDAP. He was nonetheless an occupation commandant: under his authority in August 1941 Marin Poirier, a member of the underground sentenced by a military court, was shot after Hotz refused him clemency despite the mayor’s pleas.

The French authorities in Nantes responded with condolences and an appeal to the inhabitants to identify the perpetrators, and the press blamed the attack on “agents of London and Moscow”. What happened next, however, was decided in Paris and Berlin.

The forty-eight

Hitler learnt of the assassination before noon and demanded that 100 to 150 hostages be shot. Stülpnagel persuaded Berlin to accept a solution spread over time. His proclamation appeared on 21 October: 50 hostages would be shot immediately, and another 50 if the perpetrators had not been caught by the evening of 23 October. A reward of 15 million francs was offered for information leading to the assassins. The same day in Bordeaux the communist Pierre Rebière shot dead Hans Reimers, a counsellor in the military administration, which led to a separate announcement of reprisals.

The list was drawn up with French involvement. The Vichy interior minister, Pierre Pucheu, put forward the names of internees at the Choisel camp at Châteaubriant, mostly communists and trade unionists, taking care, according to French historians, that communists rather than “good Frenchmen” should die. The Germans demanded that the list include 30 internees from Châteaubriant and 20 members of the Nantes underground, so that the reprisal would strike different circles. In the end 27 people were chosen from Châteaubriant. Two names were struck from the Nantes list at the last moment, among them that of the lawyer Fernand Ridel, on whose behalf friends of Hotz had interceded.

On the afternoon of 22 October 1941, 27 hostages were shot in three groups of nine in the La Sablière quarry outside Châteaubriant. Among them were Charles Michels, a communist deputy from Paris; Jean-Pierre Timbaud, secretary of the Paris federation of CGT metalworkers; two Trotskyists, including Pierre Guéguin, mayor of Concarneau, who had broken with the party after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; and the youngest, 17-year-old Guy Môquet, the son of a communist deputy, arrested in Paris a year earlier for handing out leaflets. The condemned refused blindfolds and died singing the Marseillaise. At the Le Bêle firing range in Nantes 16 prisoners from the Nantes jails were shot, mostly members of the local underground, among them a group of First World War veterans, and at the fort of Mont Valérien (PL) outside Paris five more men from Nantes, who had earlier been taken to Paris. The bodies were distributed among the cemeteries of a dozen or so surrounding communes so that the graves would not become places of pilgrimage. Even so, they were covered in flowers from the first days. Guy Môquet’s farewell letter to his family became one of the best-known texts of the French Resistance after the war.

On 24 October, at the Souge military camp near Bordeaux, 50 hostages, most of them communists, were shot in reprisal for Reimers. In the space of three days, then, 98 people died. On the same day Hotz was buried in Nantes with military honours, in the presence of representatives of Marshal Philippe Pétain.

Reprisals suspended

The second fifty from Nantes were to die if the perpetrators had not been caught by 23 October. The executions did not take place. Pétain and his ministers asked Hitler for clemency, the deputy prime minister François Darlan gave assurances of cooperation in the hunt for the assassins and, according to some accounts, Pétain himself considered giving himself up to the Germans as a hostage, before his ministers talked him out of it. Stülpnagel explained to Berlin that the attacks were the work of small groups, that most French people did not support them, and that shooting hostages only alienated people and would make later rapprochement harder; he warned against using “Polish methods” in France. On 24 October the deadline was postponed, and on 27–28 October Hitler agreed to suspend the executions indefinitely.

Brustlein evaded arrest. Recognised from photographs by the owner of the Nantes restaurant where the assassins had eaten, he made his way to Spain in November and from there to Britain, where he joined the Free French. Guisco and Bourdarias were arrested in early 1942 in connection with other cases and shot. Seven members of Brustlein’s Paris group were shot in March 1942 after a show trial.

The assassination also divided the French in exile. On 23 October General Charles de Gaulle said on the BBC that it was “entirely normal and entirely justified” for Frenchmen to kill Germans, but he gave instructions that this should not be done in the occupied territories for the time being, because the enemy could all too easily respond by massacring the defenceless. Instead, on 25 October he called on his compatriots to stop all work for five minutes as a symbolic gesture on 31 October at 4 p.m. The communists saw this as a call to passivity and did not halt their attacks. The reprisals were publicly condemned by Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the RAF dropped leaflets with their statements over France. On 11 November de Gaulle made Nantes a Companion of the Liberation.

Place in the war

The Hotz affair set the rules that applied in France until the end of the occupation. A communist attack, reprisals aimed at prisoners who had nothing to do with it, and lists of hostages drawn up with Vichy’s help were repeated after every attack from then on. On 15 December 1941 the Germans shot 95 hostages, most of them at Mont Valérien, among them the communist journalist Gabriel Péri, and on 7 December Keitel had signed the Nacht und Nebel decree, under which those suspected of resistance were secretly deported to the Reich. Otto von Stülpnagel, who had become convinced that mass executions alienated the workers and fuelled resistance, left his post at his own request in February 1942. In 1942 the police and hostage policy passed from the army to the Higher SS and Police Leader Carl Oberg. The writer Ernst Jünger, a staff officer in Paris, described this policy in a memorandum for Stülpnagel.

Historians disagree about the consequences of the assassination. The communists saw it as the beginning of the armed struggle in western France, and the blood of the Châteaubriant hostages became the foundation of the party’s post-war image as “the party of the 75,000 executed”. The British historian Robert Gildea, by contrast, writes that in Nantes the reprisals tended to discourage the inhabitants from armed struggle, and that their main result was the transfer of control over repression from the army to the security police. After the liberation a new avenue laid out over the filled-in bed of the Erdre was named the Cours des 50-Otages, and in 1952 a monument to the fifty hostages was erected there. Hotz lies in the German war cemetery at Pornichet.