three-day journey to the East in cattle wagons, where they were gassed upon arrival or worked to death. You will listen to the voices of those who survived, They will tell you of the terrible things they saw, from which you will instinctively wish to turn away But you must not. You will have to listen and look dispassionately upon the actions of this man, whose crimes occupy one of the darkest chapters of history. And I’m afraid I must tell you now it is with the massacre of innocent children that you will be most concerned.’
Lucy was lost to her surroundings. No one seemed to breathe or move. There was just the calm evocation of a time long past, strangely alive to her as though it were part of her own memory.
‘SS-Unterscharfuhrer Eduard Schwermann was posted to Paris in July 1940, a month after the city fell into German hands and the Occupation began. He was twenty-three years of age and a volunteer. For one of low rank, he was astonishingly close to the highest echelons of his masters. Based in the Jewish Affairs Service of the Gestapo, he was an aide to its chief, the personal representative of Adolf Eichmann. The latter was Head of the Jewish Affairs office at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, eventually captured, tried and executed by the State of Israel in 1962. By the end of the war, this small department had presided over the deportation of seventy-five thousand, seven hundred Jews from France, most of them to Auschwitz.’
For economy the Crown had restricted the evidence against Schwermann to operations in Paris during 1942. The case would focus on his participation in the notorious ‘Vel d’Hiv’ round-up (code-named ‘Vent Printanier’, or ‘Spring Wind’), and the destruction of a smuggling ring whose purpose had been to save some of the children likely to be arrested.
Mr Penshaw went on to explain that at 4 a.m. on 16th July 1942, 888 arrest squads broke into Jewish homes throughout the city. For two days, amid screams and shouts, young and old were hauled through the streets to collection points. Coaches, once used for public transport, took them away — either to the Velodrome d’Hiver, or to Drancy, an unfinished housing complex on the edge of the city. Time and again these squads returned to the old Jewish quarter, whose history stretched back to the Middle Ages and whose winding streets had been a refuge since the Revolution. News of the round-up spread like fire. Panic set in. Over a hundred people committed suicide. Paris watched, dumbstruck. No one could have foreseen this aspect of Occupation — 12,884 people vanished, including 4051 children.
In due course, as the Defence formally admitted, families taken in the Vel d’Hiv round-up were first sent to other internment centres in the Loiret, either Pithiviers or Beaune-la- Rolande (known as the ‘Loiret Camps’), or Compiegne. There, the children were separated from their families before being transferred to Drancy The parents were deported to Auschwitz. The children, all under sixteen, later made the same journey and suffered the same fate. It was thought 300 or so may have survived.
In the months prior to ‘Spring Wind’, rumours of a massive round-up spread throughout Paris. A group of young French students, all roughly Schwermann’s age, decided to act. Led by Jacques Fougeres, a smuggling ring known as The Round Table was formed, linked to Jewish and other Resistance groups in the city. The aim was to collect Jewish children from various ‘drop off’ points in Paris and hide them in monasteries outside the city. From there they would be taken to Switzerland. It was am heroic and tragic effort. Heroic because they could never have protected the thousands at risk; tragic because they were all captured in the days before the round-up began.
So what bearing did these events have upon the young German officer now brought before the court in the autumn of his life? He was a member of the team that planned ‘Spring Wind’; he stalked the rue des Rosiers and the rue des Blancs- Manteaux, overseeing wave after wave of arrests; he supervised the final departure of children from Drancy to Auschwitz. And as for The Round Table, he managed to infiltrate its ranks and secured the arrest of each member, before they could save any more children from the coming storm. The students were later transported to Mauthausen concentration camp where they met their deaths. The Jury would see the personal commendation Schwermann received from Eichmann, congratulating him on this ‘achievement’.
Mr Penshaw emphasised the importance of viewing these events in the harsh light of the times. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had fled Germany during the 1930s, driven out by violence and the repressive legal machinery of the State. Many had sought refuge in France. But France fell, and within months of the Germans setting up their administration in Paris, they moved against the Jews. A census was ordered; businesses were seized; the first arrests took place in May 1941, with further round-ups in August and December. Them, on 20th January 1942, at a villa on the shore of the Wannsee, near Berlin, the Nazi government formally decided the fate of all European Jews. A ‘Final Solution’ was under way which required the urgent ‘evacuation’ of Jews ‘to the East’. Two months later, on 27th March 1942, the first trainload of victims left Paris for Auschwitz. The ‘evacuations’ had begun, and the mass killing of Jews deported from France would now get under way
Mr Penshaw concluded:
‘The Prosecution case against Schwermann is simply this: he was inextricably involved in the machinery of death. And he must have known that execution or serious harm awaited those who were deported to the camps. If you, the jury, are sure this man was part of that enterprise then you must find him guilty of murder in relation to each of the charges laid against him.’
Lucy covered her face with her shawl and mumbled a sort of prayer to the ether: that Victor Brionne would come forward; that Schwermann would be convicted; and that Agnes would die in peace. Raising her head she looked to the man in the cardigan beside her, and saw the thin tears streaming down his face.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
1
Anselm left Mr Roderick Kemble QC prostrate in a cab at Waterloo and hurried through the Eurostar terminal, finding his seat a matter of minutes before the train lurched forward.
He gloomily skimmed a cutting on The Round Table Wilf had given to him. He’d shown the text to Roddy who’d glanced over it while he ate, raising an aimless question as to why Jacques was interrogated in the June when the ring was not broken until the July With affection, Anselm had filled the Master’s glass. As expected Roddy appeared not to have read the cutting. The June arrest had had nothing to do with the events of the following month. Only a Silk of Roddy’s standing could get away with that sort of blunder — and he did, frequently with breathtaking aplomb.
Once in Paris, Anselm took a room in a cheap hotel near Sacre Coeur. The next morning he set off for the Boulevard de Courcelles, near Parc Monceau, to the Fougeres home, wondering how he was going to phrase the application of the law to the death of their son.
All the witnesses were agreed on the basic facts: the pensioner, Mr Ogden, had grabbed the man with the white beard (Milby never named him. Instead he used a rather coarse term of art). The man with the beard had told him to let go, but Mr Ogden had then drawn back his fist. So the other had struck out. At that point Pascal Fougeres had slipped and fallen, banging his head. The terms of the conversation prior to the altercation had also been agreed. But, as the investigating officer repeatedly pointed out to the outraged witnesses, nothing said by the man with the beard constituted a criminal offence. Milby told Anselm that the police would have liked to nail him, ideally with a manslaughter charge under the doctrine of transferred malice — on the understanding that the backhand slap directed at Mr Ogden technically ‘shifted’ to Pascal. But that ignored the only compelling legal analysis: Mr Ogden was the aggressor and the response of his victim was not an unlawful act. The brute fact was that the terms of every other potential charge could not be stretched to accommodate the offensiveness of the victim.
After it became known that Pascal had died, the man with the white beard informed the police that he would not insist on charges being laid against Mr Ogden.
2
Etienne was the son of Claude Fougeres and the nephew of Jacques, the Resistance hero. After the war the family had remained in the South — until the eighties when Etienne’s political career rose from local to national
