General Giraud's escape

On the morning of 17 April 1942 the 63-year-old French General Henri Giraud let himself down a rope, braided in captivity, from the rock on which Königstein fortress stands above the Elbe, a few dozen kilometres from Dresden. At the bottom he shaved off his moustache, put on spectacles and a Tyrolean hat, and walked like an ordinary tourist to the station at Bad Schandau. Eight days later, after travelling by train right across Germany, through Alsace and Switzerland, he was with his family near Lyon, in the free zone. The highest-ranking French prisoner of the Second World War had escaped from the Germans for the second time in his life: in 1914, badly wounded at Saint-Quentin, he had already got away from a prisoner-of-war hospital. News of the escape went round France and the world, enraged Hitler and put the government of Vichy France in an awkward position.

The escape is often described like this: the general climbed down from the castle walls, jumped on to a moving train and rode it to the French border. That is how the story was told in the wartime press, and it is sometimes repeated to this day, but it does not match the accounts of those involved or the findings of historians. Giraud did not jump on to a moving train; he bought a ticket and boarded at an ordinary station. Nor did any train take him to the French border: he travelled as far as Alsace, which had in effect been annexed to the Reich, from where guides took him on foot into Switzerland, and only from there was he taken to France.

The prisoner of Königstein

In 1940 Giraud was one of the best-known French commanders. At the start of the French campaign his Seventh Army, the main reserve of the French army, marched through Belgium as far as Breda in the Netherlands, in accordance with the Dyle Plan as extended by General Maurice Gamelin. When the Germans broke through on the Meuse at Sedan, Gamelin gave him command of the shattered Ninth Army on 15 May. Giraud tried to gather its remnants, drove about the forward area in an armoured car, and on 19 May was taken prisoner near Wassigny, as the German tanks were already racing for the sea. His last report to headquarters is said to have read: “Surrounded by a hundred enemy tanks, I am destroying them one by one.”

On 25 May 1940 he was taken to Königstein. In the 16th-century fortress on a steep sandstone rock the Germans had set up Oflag IV-B for generals and admirals from the conquered countries. Among those held there were the Polish General Franciszek Kleeberg, who died in captivity in 1941, the Dutch Commander-in-Chief General Henri Winkelman and the Norwegian General Otto Ruge, and above all several dozen French generals. Giraud was the most important of them. Conditions were bearable: separate rooms, parcels from home, walks and even supervised outings into the surrounding country. Before going out, however, the prisoners signed an undertaking not to escape, and Giraud considered that an officer’s honour did not allow him to use these walks to get away. He resolved to escape from the fortress itself, which was reputed to be impossible to leave.

In captivity Giraud remained a conservative, loyal to Marshal Philippe Pétain. In July 1940 he sent him a memorandum on the causes of the defeat, in which he blamed the falling birth rate, paid holidays, parliamentarism and the trade unions. At the same time he refused to accept defeat. In September 1940 he wrote a letter to his children which was smuggled into France and afterwards circulated in copies, including among de Gaulle’s supporters: he forbade them to resign themselves to the defeat and reminded them that “the storm passes, but the fatherland endures”.

Preparations

In the winter of 1940–1941 a group was formed in Lyon, in the free zone, to arrange the general’s escape. It consisted of his former chief of staff, General Henri Baurès, his son-in-law Major Marcel Granger, his wife Céline and his children. In time officers of French military intelligence, the Deuxième Bureau, which operated secretly within the Armistice Army, were drawn into the affair, above all the head of intelligence in Lyon, Major François de Linarès. The conspirators communicated with the fortress by a code hidden in seemingly ordinary letters, and plans were smuggled out by generals released from captivity on health grounds. Particularly important help came from General Charles Mast, released in September 1941 at Vichy’s request. He left Giraud a Tyrolean hat and maps he had prepared for his own abandoned escape, and in France he passed on to the conspirators everything he knew about the fortress and its surroundings.

In December 1941 a detailed plan, written on thin paper and rolled up inside a pencil tube, reached Königstein in a cake baked by the general’s wife. On 15 January 1942 Giraud confirmed that he accepted it. The hardest part was getting down the rock. For nearly a year Giraud and General Gustave Mesny braided a rope from parcel string. For it to bear a man’s weight they needed wire: it was sent in tins of grease, and the general distracted the guard who was supposed to check their contents by offering him cigarettes. The wire woven into it strengthened the rope, about 45 metres long, and a wooden bar on which one could sit was fixed to its end. Giraud also learned German and memorised the map of the country around the fortress.

On 1 April a message arrived, hidden in a sentence about a family occasion: “Denise will make her First Communion on 17 April at ten o’clock.” At that point the conspirators still had no guide. They found one at the last minute through Sister Hélène Studler, a nun from Metz who had already been taking escaped prisoners across the demarcation line. He was Roger Guerlach, a young Lorrainer who was evading service in the German army and knew the language and the ways of the Reich well.

Down the rock

On 17 April 1942 several generals kept watch for approaching sentries while Mesny and General Paulin Le Bleu paid out the rope. Giraud slid down the vertical face of the rock below the fortress wall and found himself on the slope, out of the guards’ sight. In his room he left a letter for the commandant in which he posed as a depressed man contemplating suicide and asked him to break the news gently to his wife. This was meant to delay the pursuit, since the Germans might first search for a body.

Dressed as a tourist and carrying false German papers, Giraud walked to the station at Bad Schandau, where he met Guerlach. They exchanged the agreed password. The plan was to travel to Berlin and from there by night train to Strasbourg, where an escape network was waiting. But the Berlin train did not leave for another five hours, and waiting at a station so close to the fortress was too dangerous. Giraud therefore exchanged the tickets for a train to Munich. On the way he changed into civilian clothes brought by Guerlach, and the two of them changed trains so as not to wait long at stations, where checks were most likely. According to French accounts, in two days they covered some 800 kilometres by rail across southern Germany.

On 19 April they were in Alsace. On the train from Strasbourg to Mulhouse, where a contact was waiting for them, Giraud lost sight of Guerlach. Assuming that his guide had missed the train, he got off at Sélestat to wait for the next one. While waiting he reportedly watched a football match held to mark Hitler’s approaching birthday. He reached Mulhouse in the evening, spent the night in a hotel and only the next morning found Guerlach and the contact. By then the Germans had already circulated wanted notices and offered a reward of 100,000 marks for help in capturing the general. The original route, across the demarcation line, was too risky. A new one was improvised, through Switzerland. On 22 April, led by Father Joseph Stamm, a priest working with French intelligence, Giraud crossed the Swiss border.

In Switzerland he contacted the head of Swiss military intelligence, Colonel Roger Masson (PL), a former student of his at the French war college. He was taken to France by car, and French intelligence steered him away from the crossing at Annemasse, where, as it turned out, the Germans were waiting for him. On 25 April Giraud reached Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon near Lyon and was reunited with his family.

Hitler’s fury and Vichy’s predicament

The escape was a humiliation for the Germans. On 25 April Hitler ordered that everything be done to catch the general, and the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, told the ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, that the Führer was furious. According to French accounts Hitler is supposed to have said that Giraud was worth as much as thirty divisions. At the Nuremberg trial General Erwin Lahousen of the Abwehr testified that Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel had demanded that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris have the general killed, and that Canaris had dragged the matter out. The Giraud affair was later taken over by Heinrich Himmler.

For Vichy the escape came at the worst possible moment. The day after it, on 18 April 1942, under German pressure, Pierre Laval returned to the head of the government, removing from its leadership Admiral François Darlan, since February 1941 deputy prime minister and the Marshal’s designated successor. Darlan kept command of the armed forces. Laval wanted an understanding with Germany, and the escape threatened to wreck his talks on the release of prisoners; there were then more than a million French prisoners in camps in Germany. In France, by contrast, the news was greeted with joy. It was one of the few pieces of good news since the armistice of Compiègne, and from London the escape was praised by General Charles de Gaulle, who asked the British to try to bring Giraud to England.

On 27 April Giraud arrived in Vichy, and on 29 April Pétain received him at the Hôtel du Parc. The general laid before the Marshal calculations intended to show that Germany could not win the war. Pétain listened indifferently and sent him on to Laval. The conversation with the head of government was stormy. Laval, convinced that Germany would win, accused the general of wrecking, by his escape, the release of many thousands of prisoners, and urged him to return to captivity of his own accord. Giraud replied that he would go back if the Germans released all married prisoners. On 2 May, with a guarantee of safe conduct, he met Abetz at Moulins on the demarcation line. The ambassador rejected this condition, saying that it would mean releasing some 600,000 men, and the conversation ended in a quarrel. Giraud returned to the free zone under the protection of the Armistice Army’s intelligence service. On 4 May he wrote Pétain a letter giving his word as an officer that he would do nothing that might harm the Marshal’s relations with the German government. In return he was to be left in peace. The Germans took their revenge on others: according to French sources they halted the release of sick officers and the talks on the return of some of the prisoners.

The escape’s place in the war

The escape from Königstein made Giraud a figure on whom those who wanted to return to the war on the Allied side, but did not trust de Gaulle, began to pin their hopes. The general soon considered himself released from the word he had given Pétain when, in June 1942, Laval declared in a radio speech that he wished for a German victory. Mast, who was now serving in Algiers, became his representative in North Africa. The Americans, looking for a French commander well enough known to bring the Vichy army in Africa over with him, made contact with Giraud in June, and their envoy in Algiers, the diplomat Robert Murphy, held talks with Mast and a group of conspirators. On the night of 5–6 November 1942 the British submarine HMS Seraph took Giraud off the coast near Le Lavandou and transferred him to a flying boat, which brought him to Gibraltar on 7 November. There the general held talks with General Dwight Eisenhower on the eve of the Allied landings in North Africa. His appeal to the troops in Africa, however, fell on deaf ears, and the Americans had to come to terms with Darlan. After the admiral’s assassination in December 1942 Giraud became head of the French administration in North Africa, and in 1943 he vied with de Gaulle for the leadership of Free France and lost.

Others paid for the escape. The Germans took members of the general’s family hostage, and his eldest daughter Renée, arrested in Tunisia, died in 1943 on the way to Germany. General Mesny, who had helped braid the rope, was murdered by SS men in January 1945 while supposedly being transferred to another camp, in reprisal for the death of a German general in French captivity. The escape itself went down in history as one of the most daring of the war. In 1949, the day before his death, Giraud was awarded the Médaille militaire for it.