Diana, many congratulations on your new book, the story of ‘André’ Joseph Scheinmann. How did you find out about this extraordinary man?
His son and I were classmates at Harvard, though we never met at university there. When Michel discovered, in our 25th reunion biographies book, that I had been studying Natzweiler, the concentration camp where André was imprisoned for more than a year, he undertook to introduce us. André shared his memoir and confided it to me to publish – which I did, 30 years later!
What sort of man was André?
Impressive, in a most understated and gracious way. One hardly saw the fist of iron in a velvet glove. His gift was to understand that people respond to what they want to hear, and see what they want to see, and he used that to the superb effect. He never spoke over someone’s head. He seemingly had no ego; if people mistook his identity, he was not “hung up” on correcting them, he let them run with their story. This made him a superb special agent! The German high command couldn’t get enough of him, at the French National Railroads where he worked as an interpreter and liaison with them for the French. He enrolled at university for a high degree in German to explain his perfect command of the language, and in acting class. It’s amusing to read his account of his boss and he allowing the Germans to “reluctantly twist their arms” to get him to take time off to accompany them on tours of their uboat bases, fuel depots, airfields….
André leads a life of high risk after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933. Why was that – was it through choice?
His father Max. who fought for Germany in WWI, spoke against Hitler in public meetings beginning in 1924. Everyone on the continent faced high risk after the Nazis came to power. They would soon have to choose to be a bystander, a victim, an aggressor, or a fighter in the shadows! André once risked his life to carry a message back to Germany from France but otherwise he lived the life of a debonair tennis player, chaperoned his sister to dances, and ran a sports specialty shop in his parents small chain of stores in northern France. But when Germany invaded the Sudetenland, his father and he turned in their German passports and André enlisted in the French Army. His dive underground began with the French Army giving him a completely new and phoney identity to protect him from the risk of being considered a traitor, if the Germans caught him with his German name.
How did André make contact with MI6 during the war?
Through his boss at the French National Railroads: Louis Turban, who managed the rail hub in Rennes, Brittany. Turban hired him to translate for the Germans who used the trains for their troop movements and industrial and agricultural exploitation. On his first day on the job, André saw Turban’s anger at how the Germans treated him and he had done his research, so he already knew that he was married to an Englishwoman. He told his boss to give him an office with a rug on the floor and a secretary and an elaborate title: that ruse would flatter the Germans’ vanity and protect Turban. André proposed to handle all the liaisons with the networks and thus protect his boss from taking risks except at the highest levels of setting up the flow of information to London, via one courier boss. Most of the networks of the earliest French Resistance, when André was operating, 1940-1942, were subsidized and their communications, travel, and technical support were facilitated first by MI6 and then the Special Operations Executive. The top people at his networks had been operating with MI6’s Wilfred “Biffy” Dunderdale and France’s Secret Service, the Deuxième Bureau, even before the war.
André was a member of the Resistance, though his network was betrayed – how did that happen and did he know the traitor?
“Betrayal was the daily bread of the Resistance,” it has been said. André was actually an aggregator for networks that sprang up as soon as the Germans took over and flocked to him when they found he was “in touch with London”: Johnny, La Bande à Sidonie, La Bête Noire (The Black Beast-a network André founded), groupes Lehmann and Le Dantec, Aigle, Alexandre, and Georges-France/Groupe 31, his main and longest-running association. You can imagine how many traitors eventually brought those down, including the notorious La Chatte, Double Agent Victoire, who infiltrated their last network, Overcloud, that was their first BCRA/SOE collaboration. After the demise of Georges France, The Abwehr let Andre and Turban run for a few months, during which the SOE facilitated André’s trip to London in January of 1942 via canoe and Motor Gun Boat across the Channel. André said one of the people on that boat turned them in, but he never spoke of it more.
Captured and is imprisoned in various concentration camps – what are André’s accounts of that period of his life?
Accepted wisdom about the Holocaust is challenged in many ways by André’s story in the camps. First of all, he was able, and did, help many fellow prisoners as he was forced into the role of translator for the Germans at both Natzweiler and Dachau. Most “rescuers” are taken for granted to be non-Jews saving Jews, but in André’s case this goes the other way. Also, Natzweiler and all concentration camps on Reich territory were ordered cleared of Jews by SS decree in October 5, 1942. Of course, André was a “secret Jew” at Natzweiler, as many political prisoners in that camp and others were. He put the Germans in their place when asked about his surgical intervention: “Don’t you know, all the best French families circumcise their children?” In fact, Andre was a Nacht und Nebel prisoner/Night and Fog, a special decree and crime against humanity penned by Wilhelm Keitel at Hitler’s command, meant to terrorize the civilian populations of Western Europe.
What did André do after the war?
You’ll have to read the book to find out! I call that part “Cher Camarade.” In it, I describe how he worked for the Resistance longer after the war than in 1940-1942. The devoted and humorous confidences he and his agents shared is revealed more fully in that part of the book. And then, there is the drama of his regaining a “true” identity for which he skirmished for five years until he came to the US for good…
If some of us went through even half what he did, we’d be traumatised – how did his experiences affect him?
André was officially disabled more than 100% but his mind, chivalry and generosity remained strong to the end, which came in 2001. He has so much to live for, first to honour his 300 agents’ service by registering them with the French government for honours and pensions, then with his beloved wife Claire and their son and his children and grandchildren. Claire Dyment Jarrett also served Great Britain during the war, as a Signals Intelligence linguist with the RAF, and is now included on the Roll of Honour at Bletchley Park.
How was the writing process – was there a wealth of material to write the story?
First came his memoir, reproduced pretty much intact in the book. Then, for me, came the discovery of more than a dozen contemporary accounts of him in by his comrades in the Resistance and in the camps. Then, after he died, came the opening of the National Archives of France and Great Britain. Then, six years ago, a trove of hundreds of his agents’ letters and his own official personnel documents came to light when his son discovered where he had hidden them, and shared them with me. These include his official Aussweiss as an interpreter for the Germans and a letter of recommendation for his service by his MI6 boss, as well as his little black book with Biffy Dunderdale’s address and phone numbers, among many others, hidden along with the 500,000 francs the British gave him to start two new networks on his return from London in 1942. A letter of acknowledgement for return of those funds, from the Anglo-French Communications Bureau (cover for MI6 headquarters) in Paris, completes this remarkable story and is shared in the book.
Diana Mara Henry is an award-winning journalist, and author of ublished by Chiselbury.
