HISTOIRE ET CRIMES de la GESTAPO PARISIENNE – The History and Crimes of the Paris Gestapo, by Rowland W. Black. ASA – Belgo Suisses Publishing, Brussels, 1945. In French. An early and comprehensive publication on the brutal Gestapo gang that operated in Paris during World War II – one of the most detailed accounts of the Gestapo’s atrocities in Paris – the copy of former French police officer, resistance member and underground fighter Jacques Delarue, with his handwritten signature on the protective page.
An early publication on the operational mechanism of the Gestapo during the German occupation of France (1940–1944), detailing how the Gestapo functioned in Paris and other regions as a central arm of Nazi repression. A detailed account of the vile actions of senior German officers such as Karl Bömelburg, head of the Gestapo in Paris, and Helmut Knochen, the Reich Security Commissioner in France. This work presents the first facts published immediately after the war regarding the manner in which the Gestapo carried out persecution, torture, arrests, deportations, and murder in France, in close collaboration with French collaborators—most notably Henri Lafont, a former criminal and leader of the La Carlingue group, and Pierre Bonny, a former French police officer. Countless detailed records are included, with the names of many French citizens—Jews and non-Jews alike—suspected of opposing the Nazi regime, who were arrested by the Gestapo, the circumstances of their arrest, the torture they endured, their disappearance and execution, acts of theft and looting by the Gestapo and their collaborators, informant activity, the Gestapo’s takeover of the French financial system, and more. Many parts of the book are difficult to read due to the atrocities described, such as the chapter titled “The Cursed Hell of Rue Lauriston, ” documenting severe abuse by Gestapo officers against innocent civilians, as well as the chapter titled “The Corpse Makeup Artist, ” which describes Gestapo agents disguising bodies to make identification impossible, and more. The second part of the book includes transcripts from the “Paris Gestapo Trial” – documentation of the trial of twelve collaborators and Gestapo members who operated on Rue Lauriston and were captured after the liberation of Paris, headed by Henri Lafont: the reading of the indictment before the defendants and their attempts to deny their crimes, the harrowing testimonies of witnesses for the prosecution, and the execution of Lafont and several of his accomplices on December 22, 1944.
The main operational bases of the Gestapo in France included 11 Rue des Saussaies, which served as the headquarters in Paris, and 84 Avenue Foch, which became a notorious site for interrogations and torture. The Gestapo also administered the Drancy camp, which served as a transit point for the deportation of Jews to extermination camps. Their activities focused on the hunting of Jews, resistance fighters, communists, and political opponents, employing methods of terror, extortion, and human intelligence. The publication at hand also provides fascinating details about the Gestapo’s establishment in France as early as the early 1930s, through the creation of a spy network of French collaborators—antisemites who supported Nazi ideology—which enabled mass arrests of French intellectuals and industrialists upon the German entry into France, without firing a single shot, thanks to the intelligence network the Gestapo had established in the years preceding the war.
Jacques Delarue [1919–2014]: Resistance fighter, former Police District Commissioner, who was stationed in one of the central administrative departments of the judicial police in Paris. At the outbreak of World War II, he served as a police officer in the regional state police in Limoges, a headquarters that would later become one of the bases of the intelligence services of the Unified Resistance Movements (MUR). In February 1944, he was arrested by German police officers who were members of the regional Gestapo service and imprisoned in Limoges until the liberation. After the war, he returned to his police duties, and in early 1946 was called to the central administration of the judicial police, to the sub-directorate for internal state security, to handle the consequences of the liberation. In the postwar years, he became one of France’s leading researchers on resistance movements, serving as one of the vice presidents of the Association for Research on Internal Resistance (AERI). He was a member of the Association for the Study of Gas Murders under the National Socialist Regime (ASSAG). As part of his work as a historian, he authored numerous important and influential works.
236 [4] pp. Good – very good condition.
