School of War - Ep 171: I Am André: German Jew, French Resistance Fighter, British Spy

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

Diana Mara Henry and Gabe Scheinmann join the show to discuss the new book I Am André: German Jew, French Resistance Fighter, British Spy, which charts the astonishing, brave, and tragic World War II career of ‘André’ Joseph Scheinmann. ▪️ Times      •      01:50 Introduction     •      03:01 The story of a fighter      •     09:26 Born in Munich        •      11:87 Citizen without a country      •      17:08 Liaison to the High Command       •      21:46 MI6       •      25:20 Spycraft      •      30:27 London and capture      •      36:31 Interrogation       •      42:52 Max and Regina       •      46:40 Natzweiler      •      52:29 Dachau      •      55:30 America     •      01:01:17 “Jews as fighters” Follow along on Instagram or YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Today, we have another incredible story of fighting and survival in World War II. For those who caught our episode on Veterans Day with Frank Cohn last year, there are some parallels. Unfortunately, André Scheinman is no longer with us to tell his own story, but it is an incredible one. Fleeing Germany, joining the French army under an assumed identity, escaping a POW camp, becoming a leader in the French resistance, then capture, torture, the murder of his parents at Auschwitz, And finally, for him, Dachau, as a resistance prisoner, where he was liberated in 1945. His grandson, one of our guests today, grew up knowing only that his grandfather had been a Holocaust survivor. The truth is far, far more complicated and even astonishing.

Let's get into it. It is for war this Milwaukee invasion of Hawaii. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender.

For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Dr. Gabriel Scheiman, executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society, and Diana Mara Henry, author most recently of I Am Andre, German Jew, French Resistance Fighter, British Spy. Gabe, Diana, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you. Thanks, Aaron.

So this is a remarkable book about a remarkable man who happens to be your grandfather, Gabe. This is Andre Scheinman that we're discussing. And there's a personal dimension to this that we should say right up at the outset of our conversation today, which is Gabe you and I were in Europe together on a World War II staff ride, which for any listeners not familiar with the concept of a staff ride, we were essentially visiting battlefields that the U.S. Army primarily had fought on in 1944 and 45 to study the strategy and operations and so forth and learn something from the war. And in the course of this trip, which went to Dachau towards its conclusion, we realized that we had a Dachau connection that my father had participated in the liberation of Dachau. And your grandfather had been a prisoner there. Tell me, we'll start with you, Gabe. Tell me about, you know, growing up, knowing about this and just your youthful recollections of André. Thanks, Aaron.

And I'm sure you have many of this, but a long time. listener first time caller, and I really appreciate the podcast in general really is a must, must listen every week. The reality is like, I actually didn't know a whole lot growing up. You know, my, my grandfather, Andre, was, I was 15 when he passed away. The last couple years of his life, he was in a lot of physical pain. I'm just that he was 86 when he passed the old man. And for much of my youth, it's not actually something he really wanted to talk about quite a lot. I mean, it was really only in the last, you know, eight to 10 years of his own life that He gave a number of public talks.

I remember going to a couple of them, but I was, you know, 11, 9, 10, 11, 12. I had known, at least it was explained to me, I think more by my father, that he was a Holocaust survivor, although that's a more complicated term or question in this case, because his story is not exactly that in the exact same way as we typically think of it in the American experience. And so I sort of, that was sort of what I had growing up. He was an incredibly kind and humble and gentleman, did not personally talk a lot about. And in fact, and I'm sure we'll get to this. And Diana can talk about it. I mean, really, Diana is what got him to open up a lot more and obviously get his story down on paper and start this project. But it's not something that he did out there a lot.

He did in the early 90s, I think it was the early 90s, some video testimony first with the Stephen Spielberg show up project, which we have number of hours of testing. And then with another outfit that I can't remember off the bat, Diane would know better. But anyways, it wasn't a lot. So I actually, until Diana kind of started to put all of this together and I read a early draft of the manuscript a number of years ago, I actually didn't know a lot of these details. And for my own sake, his story is unique in many ways and the story of a fighter. And it's an unusual story for a German, I mean, it's in the title, right? but a Jewish, for a German Jew who believes, you know, signs up in the French army,

fights for the French, French surrender, fights in the resistance, captured, and then even fights from within imprisonment and survives. And so, I mean, that's sort of how I knew this, got to know the story, but a little later in life. It's an incredible story. Diana, Gabe mentioned that you're sort of the person who, who started to draw a lot of the details out of Andre. How did you first meet Andre? and why and how did you do that and what led to the book? Well, it's really Gabe's father who introduced me to Andre.

We were classmates at Harvard, although we didn't know each other. And for our 25th class reunion, we wrote in our alumni book about what we had been doing. And I wrote that I had been studying the Camp Natswiler. And as I was about to leave for the reunion, I got a phone call for Michelle. saying, I'd like you to meet my father. He was a camper at Nossweiler. And I had never heard that terrible being a camper when you were interred in a concentration camp, but it's a very unknown camp, little known camp still today.

The only concentrations log are in France, although the French say it wasn't in France because it was actually Germany had taken Alsace back into France after the invasion. occupation. So the friendship distanced themselves from the camp as much as possible by even not calling it by the name, Natsweiler. They call it Lestritz, which has made it very, has retarded, I think, scholarship about the camp to agree with me. But that's how I, that's how I became involved. I met Andre. He shared his memoir with me, which was, had been spoken, I think, and transcribed and had no chapters or paragraphs. And so I edited that memoir and then asked him for his CV, which he wrote down impeccably,

and from first to last draft and one draft and all about his resistance networks and his introduction to the MI6, the Secret Services in Britain and Great Britain and how he, you know, was trained by them and his aliases and really a great treasure trope of a story that then was enhanced in 2018 when Michel told me that he'd found a box of his father's papers, which were his correspondence with his agents after the war, and his war record and his documentation of his honors and his, I mean, the whole, the whole mass of secret material that came to light after 17 years after Andre died that he had never revealed to me or to any of his family. I think following the Official Secrets Act in Great Britain,

he may have, you know, felt that he was still in a sense and somehow an MI6, you know, had a responsibility to observe the official secrets promise that, thing. Yeah, I have a sort of a psychological theory about why so many people are silent about, you know, their experiences in camps or, or, you know, for that matter, you know, in occupied countries or or in combat units, you know, all these sort of traumatic experiences. The trauma sometimes plays a role and just a desire to not talk about unpleasant things. But also because, you know, these sorts of awful situations often force people into, you know, situations where they're doing things they're not proud of or they're not doing things that they wish they had.

And so if they survive and life goes on and like, why on earth would you want to talk about it? In Andre's case, a story's actually remarkable. I mean, this is a, you know, and it's also the case after it becomes a bit of a joke. Like after the war, you know, sort of everyone in France was in the resistance. You know, every, every movie about the French experience of the war is about the resistance. Well, the truth is a lot of people weren't in the resistance. A lot of people collaborated. A lot of people did nasty things.

André's story is just remarkable. Why don't we start it, Diana? Let me ask you about Andre's parents and their life in Germany. Tell us a bit about the family. Well, his parents, Max and Regina, had to come to Germany from Poland. And Andre was born. He notes the irony was born in Munich, sort of the headquarters of the Nazi party. And later, of course, he was interned in Dachau, which is a few.

miles outside of Munich. So he was very aware of that irony. Max, they were both a great influence on him. I think that Max, primarily for the story of espionage and resistance that Andre tells in his memoir, is Max was a, I was a resistor to Hitler. So from 1924 on, Max had been a veteran of World War I fighting for the German side. But from 1924 on, he starred toward the veterans' organizations in Germany and spoke out against Hitler and the rise of the Nazi Party.

So really, I think he can be considered as a resistor to Hitler and to Nazism. And there were, Regina's great uncles had been officers in the Polish Army in World War. War I. So he had a great military tradition in his family that I think influenced him. In fact, one of those uncles was Joseph Thorne, who was in the staff of General Pilsutsky, a Polish general. So it was a tradition that was in the family and through Max the tradition of resistance.

And actually, clairvoyance, Max got visas for the family in 1924 to go to France. And so in 1933, when Hitler actually came to power, the family moved to France immediately with those visas that Max had procured for them so many years before. So they're in France. It's the 30s. Obviously, things get more tense. André is a young adult at this point, right? he's in his late teens, early 20s. Yes.

And it looks like war is imminent. And both André and his father joined the army. Yes, they turned in their passports in 1938 and went to enlist in the French army. And Max was not accepted into the army. He was an older man at that point. You know, he had a fighting spirit. Andre was accepted. And his draft, his, his, his, his,

His documents show that he was accepted into the French army as a citizen without a country. But they made sure to write on the draft booklet that he did not possess French nationality. So throughout the war, he was not a French citizen and, in fact, didn't gain French citizenship until 1951, although he fought for France and was taken as a prisoner of war by the Germans and escaped from prisoner of war camp in Rennes or right outside of Rhein and Brittany. And that was his first act of Daring-Due. And from then on, he obtained documents. He had an alias that the French army had given him.

They did this for a lot of their fighters who had foreign names or foreign sounding names and could have been not treated as prisoners of war, but as traitors. Andre would have been considered a traitor if he had been taken by the Germans in war. So they gave him an alias, which was not just a name, a different name, but also a different birth date and different parents and a different place of birth, of course, than Munich. And so he used that alias throughout his time in the resistance and working for the British and in the concentration camps.

And in fact, no one knew in any of those episodes that he was German, much less a Jew. We don't know whether the MI6 actually may have known his true identity because MI6 records are forever closed. But the records that do exist with his name, his alias in the British National Archives are all under the name, André Maurice Poulvet, alias Le Neuve, the nephew, because he worked with his handler, uncle whose name was Thomas Green, and who is known as Uncle Troll. Before we move on to his service and the resistance and for MI6, let's just linger on this question of the alias for a second, because it's very elaborate.

It's more than just, you know, a non-German name. Right. It's a non-Jewish name, very pointedly. And it's this whole elaborate other identity. I mean, it's much more than just we're going to fiddle with your name to save you some potential trouble. You know, it becomes sort of the cornerstone of his ability to eye. operate in the resistance and survive at all. I mean, had they kept everything else, the birthday and everything, you know, at some point, presumably the Gassapo or, you know, French

authorities would have figured it out. Yeah. How much foresight and for, I mean, this is 38, right, that this is happening. So how much, how much of this is intentional? How much of it is lucky accident? Well, I think that he, you know, he enlisted in 38, but he wasn't actually fighting until, well, he was in the phony war, the Dord de Gaire, you know, from 39 on, when France and Germany declared war, but really weren't on the battlefield until 1940, spring of 1940. So by somewhere in there between 38 and 40, he did get this completely different identity. And that's why actually when he and I talked about what the title of the book should be, you know, I suggested I am Andre

because it really did become his identity. I mean, he said that if someone mentioned the name Joseph, he wouldn't even bat an eye. He completely became Andre. And after, you know, after the war, he did regain his, his German versus. certificate. And then he regained his name Joseph Scheiman, but he always kept the name André as well. So even on his birth certificate, he's André Joseph Scheinman. I'm sorry, on his death certificate,

he's Andre Joseph Schein. So he fights in Belgium. He's taken prisoner. He's wounded. He's taken prisoner, I guess, in that order. And then he escapes and embarks on the really remarkable phase of his career. And he has a job in the rail network, right? The SNCF, which still exists today, which presumably puts him in a place where he has privilege access to information that would be of interest to Germany's enemies. Tell us about how he integrates back into society, gets this job, and starts his career. Well, he got a social security pass as soon as he escaped from prisoner of war camp by asking a fellow prisoner who he discovered was a forger. to forge release documents from the German command of the prison.

So that was, I think, his first act of Daring Dew. And he went to the employment office in Rheun in Brittany to get a job. And they offered him a job. I don't know how he told them. They knew that he spoke German. And they offered him a job working for the Germans. And he said, no, I won't work for the Germans. But then they called him back.

and they said, well, we have a job, really, it's working for the French. So we went to work for the head of the French National Railroads, as you mentioned, in Brittany at the hub for that whole part of France, which is the westernmost part and abuts the Ingress Channel. And so he immediately detected, he did his research about his boss, the man who was employing him, and realized that the man had an English wife and was in all likelihood sympathetic to the British.

And when he had his first meeting with his boss, it was in the context of a meeting with the Germans, and his boss was enraged by their demands, and as soon as the Germans left, his boss slammed his fist down on the desk and said, I hate those guys. he said, you can tell them whatever you want, but I just can't abide them. And Andre said, look, I want to work with you.

I want to do whatever it needs to be done, and you'll be protected because you'll, everything will go through me. And he said, all you need to do is give me, he just been hired, right? All you need to do is give me an office, a secretary, a rug on the floor, and a very elaborate title, you know, special liaison to the German Ikeman. Because Andre knew the German mind, and he knew that they would be flattered by this, you know, elaborate scenario that he set up. So that's in fact how it happened, and Andre was able to then, you know, he endeared himself

to the Germans. He told the German, he told everyone that he was, he had studied German for many years, he enrolled in the University of Rhein to get a high degree in German. So this explained his facility with the German language. In any case, he was able to monitor from the railroads, of course, the German use of rail cars for troop movements, for, you know, building materials for their submarine bases. And he was able to monitor the airfields by placing agents there.

and then the Germans asked him to come with them on a tour of their U-boat bases, their fuel depots, you know, for a few weeks. And he said, you know, he, you know, play acted. He said, well, I don't know if I can leave my position, you know, I mean, my boss will have to, you know, tell you whether I can do this or not. This is not my role. So the Germans went to his boss and his boss said, you know, well, I don't know. He's a pretty valuable man around here. You know, I'm not sure I can spare him. But, oh, well, you know, when they twisted this.

If you twist my arm, I'll let him go. So, of course, then he got even more privileged information by traveling with the German high command around Brittany to see their strategic insolations. So can I ask what the, you know, how is this work? structured. You know, so this is happening throughout 1941, right? Really? And he's in this privileged position where he has access to all of this information.

He has some cover and awareness from his, his formal boss, his official boss in the SNCF. But this information that he has is, you know, talk us through the extent to which he is sinking in with existing resistance networks and engaging in operations that are, as it were, indigenously French. and then talk us through, you know, context with the English and how this sort of evolved, he evolves into becoming an MI6 asset. Well, I do think that his boss was an MI6 asset even before the war. MI6 had a, you know, had had their own structure in France, embedded in France before the war and actually worked pretty closely with the Duesembourg. the French Secret Services.

But the indigenous French resistance, as you mentioned, in Brittany was very strong. It was the strongest area of France in terms of percentage of resistance and resistors. And there were a lot of small networks, and actually he started with a group called the Black Beast, La Bette Noire, which was a railroad network, that he actually. headed up. And they were a sabotage network. And then they threw, this was starting in September of 1940 when he retired. So it's really his story, as you mentioned before, is the earliest resistance, which is seldom talked about from 1940 to the beginning of 42. But many groups flocked to him then. So he became, in the words of Tim Austin, who was a researcher who helped me for great

deal with the British archives, he became an aggregator of networks. So the smaller indigenous networks found out that he was in touch with London. And I think that many of them did not realize that being in touch with London, as far as Andre being able to communicate by messenger weekly across the Pyrenees and then by radio, was actually with the British. I think a lot of them thought that it was with de Gaulle, who had, you know, barely any effective secrets resistance networks until 1942. So, so, but these smaller networks, so I can enumerate some of them, La Bet Noir, Egl, Alexandre, Johnny, and then finally his largest network, George Ponce, which was known as Group 31 during the war. And these were, you know,

all supported by SIS. There were also groups, which were like networks, group Le Mans, the Dentec, who had been an MI6 agent before the war in the Far East. And, yeah, so there's, there was a lot of activity that was connected to the British, either from before the war or during the war through Andre's agency. And what was the counterintelligence or counter-resistance or counter resistance threat, or maybe more precisely, how did it actually work? You know, joining the resistance in the fall of 1940 is a little bit like marching off to war in the summer of 1914. Like you're, it's better to join in 1944.

It's better for your survivability statistics. You know, what are the Germans doing? How are they monitoring? I mean, obviously, if you're the Germans and stuff on the railways keeps getting sabotaged, The SNCF office is a pretty obvious place to start pulling the thread and monitoring people and trying to figure out how people are getting to you. How does that look from Andre's perspective? And what's the sort of cat and mouse game like through 40 and 41?

Well, Andre had a very proactive stance, as you can already know, from how he worked it out with his boss from his first day on the job. with the Germans, his boss and he devised some methods for slowing down the rail service. So his boss, you know, as soon as the Germans signal that they needed troops moved or they had, you know, lots of trains coming in or going back out to Germany and beyond the Russian front, you know, André's boss would call in new employees but immediately give them a leave of absence so that they could. you know, find housing and so on. So there were immense bottlenecks that lasted for weeks that delayed the true movements and the material that the Germans wanted to move. And so Andre, instead of waiting for the Germans to complain about it, he went to them and he complained to them that they were poorly organized. And that, you know, so he took the, he reversed the typical

German bullying and accused them of being disorganized. And so a lot of this, you know, was very good calm thought. And then, of course, as you say, the, you know, betrayals, it said, were the daily bread of the resistance. So each of its networks in turn became, you know, became infiltrated. the Germans had, you know, many different secret services. So we, you know, know, know, know, that was really the police force. The Aweer, the German military, had their own secret services.

And they employed the men. So they employed confidence men whose role was infiltrating these different networks. So, for instance, Andre's last network was infiltrated by a, woman, very famous woman called La Chate, or known as La Chate, the cat, Victoire, was another one of her names, aliases. And she was hired by one of André's collaborators to be his secretary. So, you know, so then she, you know, she had access to all of those agent names. And Jean-Faunt, the head of Jean-Chance, was arrested and with a mass of materials, including lists of her agents.

And she apparently didn't even risk being tortured. There's a 42-page indictment for her in which she mentions Andre several times, not only as Andre, but as Martin. So, and many of his agents. So when he returned from London in the beginning of February 42, the, you know, his main network had been betrayed, but also the ones that he had been working with, others that he'd been working with.

So, so that, the sort of hollowing out of these networks is kind of happening beneath his feet, as it were. Yeah. But what takes him off to London? Well, he had lost contact with London because the head of Jean-Fauntz, you know, his major network, was arrested in October of 41. And so with her, the contact was lost.

And he was able to reestablish contacts to Johnny, the network Johnny, which was also operating from Hemp. And through them, and it's told in the book of how he discovered who those agents might have been. And so through then they reestablished contact with London. and then with MI6, but also with a Gulles network, which the two leaders of the Gulles network, the Lutac brothers, came to his boss and said, we want to work with you. And his boss said, no, no, no, I don't do stuff like that.

But my translator might be interested, my interpreter. You'll have to go sit on a bench over there and I'll see if he wants to join you. you know, I'm not involved. So Andre went out to meet them and through them, we established contact with London and also with MI6 and also got the opportunity, the call to go to London with them. Of course, MI6 was organizing all of the cross-channel travel. So even though DeGalb did have some few ineffective.

networks that were, you know, trying to operate. Their transportation, their radio services, were all working through the special operations executive or through MI6. And so how does the exfiltration actually work? And then what is he up to in London? What's the training regimen? You know, what is the program for him? Well, they go to the Lutac brothers home, which was right on the coast, right on the cliff of the English Channel. And their mother was deeply involved in the resistance. And in fact, the Germans had cleared that whole coastline of all people who lived in the villas along the edge of the cliff. But this woman, Yvonne-Tac, said, no, I'm not moving. And so there's a form of resistance right there. She just refused to, you know,

vacate her home to that. So they had to walk through minefields to get to that house. And then she at night would accompany her sons and whoever was traveling with them down the cliff, as Andre describes it carrying grenade in her hand and rifles over her shoulder. And they got into canoes and paddled out to the several kilometers to the MTV or the MGB, the motor gunboats. They were waiting for them and then taken across the channel, which was a very heavily traffic shipping line. for the Germans.

So it was extremely dangerous. But he got to England, to Helle, and the Gauls were there to meet his buddies that attacks. And they said, you know, come with us. And he said, no, I want to work with the British. I've been working with the British. And I want to go on working with the British. So Thomas Green was there and took him back to London.

and they had, he never talked about in detail about his training, but they had special schools. And the people I've talked to who are experts in this matter think that he was given a bespoke training course because he came back so quickly. But he said he learned codes, and he never talked about silent killing, but I know that was, you know, one of the topics

and how to deal with interrogations and being followed. and following and he was assigned. So he was assigned two new missions in England for MI6 and given 500,000 French francs, a half a million French francs, which was a huge amount of money. The British sent their agents back. It's recorded like Benjamin Coburn was sent back with 26,000 francs as an agent. So Andre was clearly not being sent back as an agent. He was entrusted with creating two new networks for intelligence and escape,

which is what he really was most interested in. And he turned over his Zapoteurs to the Gulles network. So it was really, I think, one of the earliest experiences that the Secret Services in London had of working together. And Andre was the fulcrum of it because Andre devised this, you know, this plan that he would turn over his 300 saboteurs to the British, to the French, and let the L'Olahto-Latac brothers who were saboteurs, you know, do that part of the job. And he would go on working with the British in intelligence and create new networks.

But meanwhile, his networks in France are so penetrated that basically he comes back and is rolled up pretty quickly. They were, they were all, he, he had the foresight as, as usual, to hide the 500,000 French francs to hide, you know, all of his documentation. And when he was arrested, he came back to work a couple of days after he got back from London and they were waiting for him and, you know, his eyes, their eyes flew open, he says. And he was, you know, invited to have a coffee with them as they usually did, the Germans, while they, you know, called in the Gestapo and he said he was thrown into a closet, bound hand and foot. Even Houdini couldn't escape. And Gabe, you knew none of this growing up. Did your dad? I knew none of this,

a combination I think of being too young and him not really kind of sharing publicly. I don't know how much my dad knew. He knew some of it, you know, but I think similarly, it wasn't until my dad was into his, you know, college years that he started to learn more of it. My dad spent a year living in Germany on a Fulbright, I think, after college or after law school. And again, kind of, you know, my grandfather opened up a little bit. But even him, I mean, again, Diana might correct me, I think there are things that my dad learned much, much later about what my grandfather service was. My grandfather, I believe it was his last international trip, insisted on attending the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau in 1995.

And my dad went with him. And I think for my dad, it was a lot about trying to understand, you know, why do you want to do this? Why do you want to come to this? And my grandmother started him, it was like, because I want to show the Germans, I'm still here. And so I think my dad even kind of unpealing the layer. of the onion, you know, as his life went on as well. So let's talk about captivity then, which I guess really has sort of three main phases.

He's in a, he's in a prison for quite a while. It's sort of a normal French, I guess it's in Paris, right? A normal Parisian prison where you would keep resistance fighters. And then he's taken to Knottesviler and then finally to Dachau. So let's let's talk about each in turn. You say he had training Diana to deal with interrogation. Seems like he had plenty of opportunities to attempt to put that training into practice then, unfortunately. Yes, he had maybe, you know, two to three dozen interrogations, and he did get brutalized.

He told the Germans that when they found out that he had gone to London, he realized that someone else had told them. He said, well, you know, he said, well, I would tell you why I went to London, but you won't believe me. So the Germans are like, yes, we want to hear. You know, no, no, no, you won't believe me. So after he had them begging to tell them, he said, well, I was engaged to a British girl before the war, but she was a twin. And so I heard on the listening to the BBC that one of these girls had been engaged, but I had no idea which one, because I only heard the last. name. So he said, I became obsessed with the idea of seeing whether it was my girlfriend, the twin, who was the one who had, you know, decided to take another course. So, and he said,

that's why I went to London. So apparently they beat him up, but they also were telling, telling each other he heard as he was slapsing into unconsciousness, only a Frenchman would be that crazy, you know, about a woman. So then they did, you know, they did know that he had gone to London and they were, you know, they were beating him up. And he called actually the head of the prison of Pan, who was an armyman. So, you know, he went above the heads of his jailers and said, I want to talk to the commandant of the prison. And he complained to the commandant. He said, look, I could give you some valuable information, but I can't do it if you're beating me up.

And so you're going to have to treat my wound anyway, the come on down ordered his wounds be treated and be fed. And then they said, well, we might as well use him for propaganda. He said, Andre said, I will write a report to you about conditions in England. So he said, but you have to feed me properly. So they picked him up by limousine and took him to their interrogation centers in downtown Paris for three. weeks, well, he wrote a report and he said he was given croissons and coffee and butter and jam and sat at a typewriter for three weeks. And then they saw what he was writing, which was that Britain will never lose the war. You know, morale is great. You know, there's no shortage of

anything, even though they're ration cards, so people can eat it whatever they want. So they threw him back into the sales of plan and he was he was subjected to a military trial in german military trial and was sentenced to death and then he and then as they unraveled the different networks he was tried again with another network and the trial documents i haven't been able to find yeah but andre says that he was sentenced to death two times and the second time he was sentenced to death he said they wanted to take him to court. And he said, I don't, I don't need to go to court. I'm already being shot once. You know, I don't need to hear that you're going to shoot me again. So, so. It's very German to get it all properly documented. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that was his prison experience.

Of course, there are many more episodes. As I understand it, I'm lucky to have never been a prisoner of the enemy. My father briefly was, I think, for less than a day in Italy. And he escaped. He never made it to a camp or anything like that. He was just on the wrong side of the lines for a few hours and ended up getting away. But as I understand it, the theory of the case when you are resisting interrogation is it's very, very hard, borderline impossible for any human being to actually cold turkey, just give nothing up. It can't really be done if the bad guys are willing to torture you, et cetera. So the name of the game is delay, obfuscation, confusion, and just time. You're just playing for time because the idea basically is, you know, imagine you're a,

you're a pilot off of an aircraft carrier and the, you know, the North Vietnamese have you, well, when you took off from that aircraft carrier, you knew where that aircraft carrier was and you knew what the mission set for that day was. You knew all sorts of important and interesting things. But as time goes on, that stuff all becomes less important. So you're just trying to buy the time. And presumably, this is, this is Andre's mindset, is you just trying to buy time until the stuff that you know that's really operationally relevant is expired. Do you think broadly speaking he was successful in that? Well, he says that actually the mental torture was more difficult than the physical torture

because he, you know, as you say, he had, he invented a story. You know, he invented people that he was working with. But he had to remember the details of what they looked like and where they were and what their conversations were and he said that was extreme that was excruciated but he said you know he he had told his agents that he would not talk and his legion of honor and his army corps mentions all say that he gave up nothing and actually he says why he gave up nothing he said that when the germans had the information they would shoot you yeah you were useless to them after that.

He said the only way to preserve your usefulness was to not talk. And so in his own self-interest, as well as the interests of his comrades. And he said the Germans did offer him to turn him and if he would work with them. And it's in this period where he's

imprisoned and being subject to torture and interrogation that Max and Regina gave your great grandparents are murdered, right? How does that play out? Well, no, he says in his book that they gave up hope when they found out that he was arrested. They did, they did manage to get, you know, food and clothing to him and some money in prison. But by July of 42, I think the Rakh of Vivaldi, they were picked up in the hotel where they were sheltering in Paris. And they don't have assumed identities.

No, and in fact, just on this, to give you a sense, you mentioned early on about how the French like to tell a certain story of themselves, let's say, during the war, is that it didn't hit home for me until college. When I was in college, I was visiting Paris, and they had just reopened with basically the equivalence called it of the French Holocaust Museum and Archives in Paris. And looking for my great-grandparents' name is Max and Regina, which are displayed on a wall of those that were taken ultimately to Auschwitz, as Diana said. And you go into the archives and look for all sorts of documentation.

And at the time, I literally found on micro-feas, if people remember what that is, in terms of you look up the literally handwritten, hand-filled-out deportation cards for each of my great-grandparents for Max and Regina. And obviously both German, German-speaking, you know, German sounding last names, etc. And yet you could look at both cards and the handwriting of both cards is identical, but the last name, Scheinman, are spelled differently one from another. And the only conclusion that you can draw from that is that it certainly wasn't a German who was filling out those cards and doing that deportation. It was a French, you know, French police, French military officer. I don't know.

Which again, goes back to what you were saying earlier in what we said before and goes back a little bit to even my grandfather getting this alias during the war, which is it's not that they didn't know. It's not that the French, not that other people know, didn't know what the German, what Hitler's plans for the Jews were. Because in many ways, they did take action to, in my grandfather's case, you know, give him an alias to offer him protection in case he were captured. And obviously, in this case, the example of my great-grandparents taken Auschwitz, you know, as French kind of doing the work. And so, again, we sort of, I think history sort of belies the fact that we think this is just the Germans, but the collaboration has to be. People knew. People knew. And Andre only finds out about this

after the war. When does he, what does he learn? The fate of his parents? I think not until after the war. Yeah. And really, his, you know, his goal and rising in the resistance and in MI6 was really to have to send his parents across the English Channel to safety in London. And having had, you know, this training and these creds and this, you know, tremendous budget that the British had entrusted, I think he was, he was not deluded in thinking that he might have been able to obtain from them passage for his parents. But he was arrested before he could even talk to them again or see them again. You never saw them again. So he's in prison for some time. And then it's the summer of 43 that he finds himself in a concentration camp, though again, not interned

as a Jew, but as a resistance fighter and political troublemaker. How does the escape execution, Diana? And then, you know, your interest in Knottweiler precedes your professional interest in André. What's up with Knottiswiler? Is you have a concentration camp on French soil, what was its purpose, what was its role in the network of German incarceration, the vast, the vast network of German incarceration of the day. Yeah, well, Nassweller was a late camp in terms of, you know, having only been bailed after the Germans occupied France. But from the time that the Germans turned on Russia,

the resistance which was in great part communist resistance, which had stayed dormant during the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact, sprang back to light. And so the camp quickly became a camp for political prisoners, but also specifically for Noctin Nebel prisoners. This was the Night and Fog decree that Hitler had thawed up when the challenge of the communist resistance coming back to life happened after he turned on Russia.

And so Hitler was inspired by very, Wagner's Duss Rheingold Opera, which has a character and a curse in it of Nocte Nebel, Night and Fogg. And Herman Kytel, who was head of the German army, was tasked with the job of writing this decree in which political prisoners would be made to disappear and to terrorize the population more than they had been by public executions, which had been announced on posters and so on. But they thought that this was a, this enforced disappearance was a more terrible weapon of terror than, then outright publicized shootings and executions. Yeah, I just have to linger on it for a second because it's a largely forgotten episode, particularly sordid period in the long history of the left, this period between

the start of World War II and the German invasion of the Soviet Union. When the left is anti-war covering for Hitler, I mean, there's great American folk songs of the period, because as ever the left have, you know, the better singers and artists and so forth, it was the ballot of October 16th condemning FDR as a warmonger is written in this period, right? He said, I hate war and so does Eleanor, but we won't be safe till everybody's dead, is the lyric that sticks in my mind. So it's an credible period, nobody remembers it. But, okay, so he's at Knottweiler, and what is, you know, what is, what is existence like? Well, he, again, he, I think it was Primo Levy who said that, you know, there were two things that

would help people in the camps. One was being in good physical condition when they went in, and Andre was always a tennis bar. So I don't think he continued tennis during the war, but. It was important to him to be in good condition. Even in solitary confinement, he would walk, he said, you know, maybe six to ten hours a day, even in a 10-foot long cell, just to keep strong. And the other was speaking German because if you followed orders, you knew what the Germans wanted.

And if you didn't do what they wanted, they would sick their dogs on you or beat you up. So he served as an interpreter in Natsweiler and in Dachlan. And, you know, so he didn't, he didn't avoid the blows. In fact, sometimes his fellow prisoners who have written about their experiences write about him as sometimes taking the Nazi food in the behind instead of one or distracting the Nazis. So his, again, as an interpreter, he didn't just function.

to, you know, for the Germans, he functioned for his comrades to try to get them to avoid the blows and sometimes to distract their abuses. Yeah. And in the fall of 44, you know, obviously the allies are ashore. There's the breakout out of Normandy. The war moves east pretty rapidly. And Andre and others are transferred to DACA. Now, I know a little bit about DACA.

Not as much as you, Diana. I've been there numerous times. I have kind of an interest in the place. And this period that Andre ends up there, I mean, Dachau, as you know, but maybe most listeners don't, you know, is not a death camp. And there's this distinction between death camps and labor camps in terms of their purpose and their function, you know, Auschwitz was both. You know, Auschwitz had both a slave labor component, but also an extermination component.

DACA never a formal extermination component, though a lot of people were killed there and there are gas chambers there, just not at the scale of further. East. But my point is that this period where Andre shows up, as I understand it, the overcrowding, the living conditions. It's not like it was pretty bad to be a slave, too, by the way. It's pretty miserable existence, even in the non-extermination camps. But this period, in particular, the last year, and this is the first concentration camp. I mean, this place has been an operation basically for as long as the Nazis have been around and was much more like a prison kind of gulag in its early days. by this point, the level of sickness, death, casual murder, you know, whatever, is just, it's, it's, it's, my impression of DACA in that last year, six months is it's just, it must have felt like a place that was just spinning rapidly out of control.

Everything is sort of falling apart around it. And people are just, it's a, it's a truly, truly awful experience compared even to the DACA of, say, 1942 or 43. Is that, is that what you've found in your own scholarship? Well, I, not swire, it's the only concentration camp I've ever been to. But from Andre's story, you know, he did get typhus, which was rampant there at the end, you know, because of the overcrowding and the misery and famine and so on. So when he got tithesis, he went to the infirmary. And he was treated for tithesis. They were fellow prisoners were cleaning up the real long.

in Germany that had been bombed and they were able to find some kind of medication for him, you know, antibiotics or aspirin or something that he was able to. You know, he recovered, but he was kept on the rule at the infirmary and every day his temperature was charted for 56 days till the liberation of DACA. And why, you know, why would one think after his infection dropped, you know, within 10 days or a week from Typhus, why was he still visiting the infirmary? And the answer is in a pass that he has

or an ID card from the Dachau International Prisoners Committee, which was a group of prisoners from different countries and different barracks in Dachau. They were kind of a prisoner leadership group that were entrusted or had entrusted or planned among them, themselves that when the Germans gave up Dachau, that they would be in charge of keeping order in the camp and also in preventing the Germans from on leaving from executing or murdering all the remaining prisoners. So once again, Andre had become, and on the hospital ward at

Dachau was the center for this international prisoners committee. This is where they meant. This is from the first report that was written by the Americans on liberation of DACA. So Andre, again, had a leadership position, and, you know, he was, he was prepared to, you know, which is one of the reasons he was able to get to the gates so quickly when DACA was liberated. And he says, you know, the first prisoner he hugged, who came in with the Americans, her helmet fell off. and her blonde hair fell to her shoulders, and he realized that it was a woman, and they hugged her again, he said.

So, you know, but, you know, it was an American journalist. Yeah. So he kind of incredibly survives. Stays on in France, becomes French. Why, why America? Why the move to America? Gabe, maybe, I don't know if Diana or Gabe is your better position to answer that question.

I'm happy to answer it. So I mean, this is the family lore in that way. So he, there was some American family already. My, my great-grandfather Max, well, there were a couple different branches who had made their way to America even, even earlier, going back several generations. But more directly, my great-grandfather Max had actually brought over to the United States, Andre's sister. And so his sister is in the United States, brought over, I think in the 1928 or 29, I can't remember exactly the day maybe Diana remembers. So first of all, there is actually, and the tragedy here, obviously, is that my great grandfather helped a number of his family members escape to America, but not himself.

Yeah. And obviously not Andre. So that's part of it. The other part of it is that he was still in the French military, my grandfather, for quite a number of years after the end of the war. In fact, you know, in the book, Diana has a picture of him doing French military training in the late 50s in the United States, actually. actually as part of like what we might call reserve duty.

I'm not really sure. But in 1952, they wanted to send him the French military went to send him to presumably the French were trying to obviously maintain their crumbling empire in Indochina. Right. This is the prelude to what we Americans eventually succumb to in the Vietnam War. And he sort of basically said, no way. You know, you chose not to fight for your own country for the homeland of

France, right, you surrendered, you didn't fight. I even as a non-French citizen, you know, fought in the French military, joined the French army when didn't have to necessarily, and that I was not going to, you know, be sent to the far-flung reaches of the world to defend the empire when you wouldn't even defend the homeland. That's the story sort of I knew growing up. And so from that moment on, it worked to find a way passage out of there. And initially when, again, my father was, I think almost five.

My father was born in France, almost five when they left France and ultimately ended up in New York and Ellis Island. And we have those papers, too, actually. We have the transport papers with the cargo of the ship that they took, Ellis Islands and some of that. You know, I'm at the age now where I have these strange thoughts that would never have occurred to me 20 years ago. And like my main thought hearing the two of you tell this story is just to reflect on how proud Max would have been of Andre. You know, obviously he couldn't know everything that was going on. He had some sense, presumably of the resistance activities. Obviously, Andre ends up in prison.

But just, you know, if he had the opportunity, how proud he would have been. Absolutely. And, you know, I started off by saying, you know, what I kind of knew as a kid growing up, as my grandfather, as a Holocaust survivor, and only as I got older, that wasn't exactly, that's not the framing of the right story. He was a fighter. Right. And at each instance, chose to join the fight or stay in the fight.

You know, when they left Germany, I mean, my grandfather was 18, didn't have to join the French army. When he was captured and managed to escape, didn't have to join the resistance, didn't have to climb his way up to be a leader in it. To some of the examples that Diana just gave about being an aggregator of networks, travel to England, and then even within both his imprisonment in Paris and then in Natsweil and Ducca didn't have to try and protect others or sabotage. operation. These were all choices. At each and every moment of his life, he chose to fight and lead as opposed to flee or as opposed to try and hide. And, you know, those are, those are awful years. And so I don't, I don't, I'm not going to stand here and judge those who did those other things of, of, of flee and hide because every circumstance is a little different. But that's not what he did. Yeah, something else we discussed when we were in Europe together, but, you know, I, it's worth

just reflecting on here, you know, you and I in our different ways, you, through your grandfather for you, for me with my dad, though both of us having Docow in comment as a part of the story, you know, I was shaped by my understanding of World War II and my understanding of what, you know, my father's role as a young man was in it. To a similar extent, it sounds like you were, though, you have this fascinating experience of sort of being shaped by being the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, which is one particular kind of World War II story, only to discover and have it develop for you later in life that Actually, the story is far more complicated and interesting in some ways, you know, richer.

You know, I worry greatly about people who are too young, which is, you know, most, basically everyone younger than us, to have had access in their youths to people who had these sorts of stories. You know, one of my earliest memories is being in Munich, and I'm very young in this story. This is the 80s. So it was West Germany. I was in West Germany on vacation with my parents. and my dad wanted to take my mom and me to Dachau to see the memorial and go to the museum there,

set whatever it was in the 80s. And I remember him asking at the desk and the hotel for directions to Dachau. And the clerk who was, you know, was an adult in my eyes, but in retrospect, I think it was quite a young man, gives the directions. And then he says to my father, sort of very casually, you know, like, you know, but why do you want to go there? You know, it's all just Jewish propaganda these days. And I remember my father who had a temper, sort of turning white. and then turning red, and I'm going to clean up his language because we've never been designated in an explicit podcast, but leaning over the desk and saying, I saw what happened there with my own

eyes, don't you dare tell me that it's Jewish propaganda? That's one of my first memories. And I worry that nobody has memories like that anymore. Yeah. And that's how stories get told, you know, down. I mean, obviously there's books, and then I'm very lucky that Diana, my whole family took up this project to memorialize this, right? Because otherwise it wouldn't have gotten it out. And there are lots of obviously institutions that are dedicated to some of these things, archives, museums, memorials. But even then, it's not clear. I mean, I'll be, I'll be honest, I've actually always been a little uneasy with some of the Holocaust memorial framing, because for the most part, it is about the Jews as victims, which obviously we were. I mean,

there's no, there's no doubt about that. But my grandfather's story is one of Jews as fighters. And in the last year and a half, in particular, since the October 7th attacks, there is this reemergence of, you know, maybe it's not okay for the Jews to fight to defend themselves. I mean, that's basically what a lot of the last 15 months of opposition here, I mean, I'm to try and bring it to contemporary times. Because I do think there is this idea that people can point to you and say, well, I'm against Nazism and I'm against, you know, radical Islamism and I'm against terrorism. And look, I believe that we should do Holocaust education and we should teach this in schools and we should memorialize it. And I get that. But at the same time, it's memorializing as a victimhood.

And my grandfather's story and there, I'm sure many others out there, right? And you and I, Aaron, have talked about before in that trip you mentioned is about, you know, the American role in this and the allied role in this, obviously, and how that has, that changed the course of history, right? I mean, really saved the free world to where we are today, still, you know, 80 plus years, almost 80 years later. But that's why I'm, I'm, you know, I did nothing on this story. I mean, this is my grandfather's story.

But I'm incredibly proud to be even kind of related to him to be able to set this example and set this framing for the times that we're in. Well, I just wanted to say that, you know, universalizing, you know, what, what Gabe is talking about, although I think it's, you know, it's, I completely share the, the opinion, or the, or the, the, the, the, the, the, or the, the, the, the, the. observation that it seems to be fine with the world when Jews are fighters for whatever country has given them hospitality, temporarily at least. You know, so they fought in every other army to great, you know, to great success, but, you know, not for their indigenous homeland. But I think also from what Gabe said about choices, the choices that Andre made, that I think those choices really helped his survival. And that's something that, you know, people of any, any religion and ethnic background can, you know, can hold as an example, is that, you know, no matter what the circumstances, we do have choices as individuals.

And we can, we can choose our path, whatever the limitations are. And also, just to bring it back a little bit personally to this Jewish fighter story in World War II, my day. was in Patton's Army. And so as a warrant officer in the Engineer Battalion of the Blue Ridge Division, after he, you know, went through Wardroof with the, with the American soldiers who were all assigned by Eisenhower to visit a concentration camp as part of the, you know, their, experience in the Army in Europe. And he said there's, you know, that he was happy that the American soldiers were being made to visit the camps because he said, they will know through these boys that this was not propaganda. Gabe Shahneman, Diana Mara Henry, author of I Am Andre,

a remarkable book about a genuinely remarkable man. Thank you guys for coming on the show today. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.