The liberation of Lyon

On 3 September 1944 French and American troops and units of the French Forces of the Interior entered Lyon, the third-largest city in France. No battle was fought for it: the main German forces had left during the night of 1–2 September, and the last detachments, which blew up the bridges, departed the following day. For Lyon, known as the capital of the French Resistance, twenty-two months of direct German occupation came to an end – an occupation associated above all with the local Gestapo and with the name of one of its officers, Klaus Barbie.

The pursuit up the Rhône

After the landings in Provence on 15 August (Operation Dragoon) and the capture of Toulon and Marseille, the Allied armies set off northwards after the retreating German Nineteenth Army. At Montélimar the Americans failed to close its line of retreat, and at the end of August German columns passed through Lyon in relatively good order. According to Lyon historians, the last formed unit to pass through the city, on 31 August, was the 11th Panzer Division, covering the withdrawal of the whole army.

The plan was for Lyon to be taken by the US VI Corps under General Lucian Truscott, part of General Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army. Truscott, however, did not want to waste time on street fighting. His 45th Infantry Division bypassed the city to the east, through the Ain department, trying to get ahead of the Germans on their way north; on 1 September it took Meximieux, where it was counter-attacked by tanks of the 11th Panzer Division, supported by columns heading for Burgundy. On the right bank of the Rhône advanced the French II Corps of General Joseph de Goislard de Monsabert, from General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s French Army B, including General Diego Brosset’s 1st Free French Division – veterans of Bir Hakeim, El Alamein and Italy. All the Allied columns were struggling with a shortage of fuel, which had to be brought by lorry from the Provence beaches more than 300 km away.

Capital of the Resistance and Montluc prison

Until November 1942 Lyon lay in the unoccupied zone, and it was here, in a dense network of tenements, passageways and printing works, that the largest organisations of the French Resistance in the south of the country grew up: Combat, Libération-Sud and Franc-Tireur. General Charles de Gaulle’s envoy Jean Moulin operated from Lyon, uniting these movements and bringing about the creation of the National Council of the Resistance; he was arrested at Caluire, near Lyon, in June 1943.

After the Germans moved into the southern zone, an office of the Sicherheitspolizei and SD was set up in the city under Werner Knab, in which the section fighting the Resistance was headed by SS-Hauptsturmführer Klaus Barbie. From February 1943 its main place of detention was the Montluc military prison. According to French research, more than 10,000 people passed through its cells – designed for a single prisoner but sometimes holding eight – by August 1944: members of the Resistance, hostages, and Jews awaiting deportation. Moulin was held here, as was the historian Marc Bloch, shot near Lyon on 16 June 1944; in April 1944 the children of Izieu were brought here before being deported via Drancy to Auschwitz. The occupiers were assisted by the collaborationist Milice, which was particularly active in the Lyon region.

The last weeks of the occupation brought a wave of executions. According to figures cited by the Montluc memorial, 669 prisoners were murdered at 33 different sites between 8 April and 21 August 1944. Between 17 and 21 August, 109 people – Jews and members of the Resistance – taken from the prison on Barbie’s orders were killed at the airfield at Bron, and on 20 August, at the Côte-Lorette fort in Saint-Genis-Laval, the Sipo-SD and the Milice shot some 120 Montluc prisoners, then set fire to the building and blew it up with the bodies inside. One man managed to escape; as late as 2014 only just over 80 of the victims had been identified. Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier, Archbishop of Lyon, protested to Knab. Yves Farge, the commissioner of the Republic appointed by de Gaulle’s government, in turn threatened that for every further execution German prisoners held by the FFI would be killed; according to French accounts, in reprisal for Saint-Genis-Laval partisans in Haute-Savoie shot a total of 84 German prisoners on 28 August and 2 September. On 24 August the Germans abandoned Montluc, leaving some 900 prisoners alive.

The bridges over the Rhône and the Saône

In August the regional Resistance leaders, Alban Vistel and Lieutenant Colonel Marcel Descour, concluded that with their poorly armed units they could not launch an uprising in Lyon on the model of Paris or Marseille – Vistel reported that he had about 500 men in the city itself and only a few dozen sub-machine guns, and the Germans were threatening reprisals against the population. Some of the communist Francs-tireurs et partisans took a different view: on 24 August an uprising broke out in working-class Villeurbanne, which was put down after several days of fighting. At the end of August Vistel brought several thousand partisans from the Ain, the Isère and the Vercors to the outskirts of the city; on 1 September they began infiltrating the suburbs, while avoiding open clashes.

During the morning and early afternoon of 2 September German rearguard units blew up the bridges over the Rhône and the Saône and set fire to the Brotteaux and Guillotière stations and some of the warehouses. According to Lyon historians, only two crossings survived, saved by the intervention of a Resistance officer. That same day a patrol of the US 45th Division drove into the city, while from the south the 36th Infantry Division approached, its leading elements finding fires and partisans fighting the Milice in the industrial districts. At around 2 p.m. Vistel, seeing that the Germans were leaving, occupied the prefecture without a fight; Farge hung the tricolour from it, which still drew fire from German stragglers. In the evening the town hall was taken.

On 3 September units of the 1st Free French Division, elements of the US 36th Division and further groups of the French Forces of the Interior and the FTP entered the city, now empty of Germans. The only shooting came from militiamen hidden on the rooftops, who were quickly overpowered by the partisans. According to the US official history, some 2,000 Germans, mostly stragglers, were taken prisoner in and around the city; the main body of the Nineteenth Army was already on its way north. That same day Farge as commissioner of the Republic, Justin Godart as acting mayor – standing in for Édouard Herriot, the pre-war mayor and former prime minister, who had been taken to Germany – and Vistel as military commander of the region proclaimed the restoration of the Republic. In the afternoon the first issue of the daily Lyon libéré appeared, and troops and partisans paraded through the streets amid cheering crowds. General Brosset soon became military governor of Lyon.

After the liberation

The first days of freedom brought – as everywhere in France – summary justice against collaborators and militiamen, and the public head-shaving of women accused of relationships with Germans. Farge tried to move the reckoning into the courts as quickly as possible: he set up military courts, and later special courts and civic chambers. According to French accounts, as part of the so-called épuration a total of 272 death sentences were carried out in the Rhône department and some 2,600 other convictions handed down; collaborationist newspapers were suspended, and people compromised by cooperation with Vichy and the occupier were removed from offices, the courts and the university.

The army did not stop in the city. The US 45th Division and the remnants of Task Force Butler tried once more to cut off the Germans near Bourg-en-Bresse, but the rearguard of the 11th Panzer Division held the route open. VI Corps then turned north-east towards Besançon and the Belfort Gap, while the French II Corps set off through Burgundy towards Dijon, where the forces coming up from Provence were to meet the armies arriving from Normandy, which a little over a week earlier had liberated Paris. On the same day that Lyon was liberated, the British in the north entered Brussels.

Significance

The liberation of Lyon was the last great success of the first phase of Operation Dragoon. In less than three weeks since the landings the Allies had covered more than 300 km and, without street fighting, taken one of the country’s main industrial centres and the most important communications hub of the Rhône valley, although the destroyed bridges and burnt-out stations hampered the movement of supplies northwards for many weeks. At the same time, the entry into the city showed the limits of the success: the Nineteenth Army had once again escaped its pursuers and managed to withdraw towards the Vosges, where in the autumn it built a new defensive line.

The city also had symbolic significance for Fighting France. On 14 September General de Gaulle came to Lyon and in a speech called it the “capital of the Resistance” – a title that has stuck to the city ever since. Montluc prison later became a memorial to those interned there and to the victims of the occupation. Klaus Barbie escaped justice for a long time: after the war he worked for American counter-intelligence in Germany and then fled to South America. Extradited by Bolivia in 1983, he was sentenced in Lyon in 1987 to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity – including the deportation of the children of Izieu – and died in prison in 1991.