I Am André
Cher Camarade … mon capitaine … mon lieutenant … Monsieur Le Neveu … 31AQ … MI6 #99421 … #4368 at Natzweiler and #101739 at Dachau … Martin … Turquoise … interprète … Herr Dolmetscher … 0419064, French Liaison Officer … Agent from C … A.N. Other … Mon cher ami … Mon cher André … Mon chef …
This is the man whose memoir I was given and and whose life I was privileged to bring to readers in I am André, German Jew, French Resistance Fighter, British Spy. The man’s identity took three decades of research to reveal, and I hope you will as fascinated as I was to discover who was the man behind the aliases.
Born Joseph Sheinmann in 1915, Munich, an irony with which he begins his life story, his father began touring Germany to speak to his fellow German veterans groups starting in 1924, the year- 100 years ago- that Hitler was imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the German government in the Beer Hall Putsch. As well as being a merchant, his father Max, like his uncles in the Polish Army, was a fighter and a resistor to the Nazis, inside Germany. When Hitler came to power, in 1933, Max moved his family to France. Both he and his sone gave up their German passports in 1938 and tried to enlist in the French Army. André was taken, with a careful red inscription on his enlistment booklet: “Does not possess French Nationality.” Yet they offered him a “pseudo” – a fake identity complete with phoney birth date, place, and parentage.
As André Maurice Peulevey, he served in the French Army, the French Resistance, as agent 99421 for the SIS, was arrested and spent 18 months in Gestapo prisons in Peris and the last two years of the war in the little known camp of Natzweiler, in Alsace, and in Dachau and its subcamp Allach when the KLNa’s prisoners were moved into the heart of the Reich in front of the advancing Allied forces in 1944. If the Germans asked about his circumcision, he told them with the arrogance he knew they required: “Don’t you know all the best French families circumcize their sons?” Did MI6 ever know that he was a Jew, much less a German?
We do know that Wilfred ‘Biffy” Dunderdale, this year the subject of Tim Spicer’s biography, is in André’s “little black book,” and that Thomas Greene, Biffy’s notorious and still mysterious adjunct, is recorded there with both their London and Paris addresses and phone numbers as well. Greene wrote a letter of reference for his service both in the resistance and for his clandestine trip to England in January 1942, across the Channel by MGB 314 and back to start, as Greene wrote, “two important new missions” for MI6. Gentry, wrote up the receipt for the 500,000 francs that André returned to him at the Anglo-French Communications Bureau, the cover for MI6 in Paris, a month after his return from Dachau in June, 1945. André also kept the parachute certificate from an RAF officer seconded to SIS, Wg.Cdr. Cautley Nasmyth-Shaw from the Air Ministry, when André traveled to London with French passport #303 for debriefing and possibly other reasons, in December and January 1945-1946. So much documentation of an SIS agent is rare indeed.
How did this documentation accrue and how lucky was André’s biographer to come into possession of it? André did not betray the official secrets act. Even after his death, the National Archives of both France and England were opened for the war years, at last. The people involved were mostly, like André in 2001, gone without ever seeing their records? André’s son in 2018 discovered a trove of hundred of his agents’ letters, official documents, and his official “laisser-Passer,” his official Aussweiss for the French National Railroads (SNCF) stamped with the Third Reich’s seal, allowing him freedom of movement, day and night, to the installations that he was able to visit as the official interpreter of the SNCF to the German overlords of the railroads.
For that was the key to André’s access to the major military endowment of the Germans in Brittany, their key to the passage of the French Channel for their blockade of Britain and access to the Atlantic and passage to the North sea, their battleships Geneisenau, Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen, their airfields and fuel depots, their submarine bases, all of which André visited as their interpreter. …Always “reluctant,” of course, working with his equally seemingly reluctant boss at the railroads, André Turban, whose British wife Agnes Ingham was also in the network of Georges-France, known to MI6 during the war as Group 31….
There is much humor in the play-acting that André, with his native-born savvy about the German psyche, was able to use to wreak havoc on the German high command while seeming to be dragged into their wake and at times berating them for their “poor organization” that was stalling their use of the railroads….
There are also love stories in this subtle and sexy man’s life, not that we know all of them, of course. When André, a member of the influential International prisoner’s committee at Dachau, met the GIs at the gate on the day of its liberation, he hugged the first one through and her helmet fell off, her blond hair tumbling to her shoulders. He writes: “It was a woman! I hugged her again.” Brian Stonehouse, in his oral testimony online at the collection of the Imperial War Museum, tells of seeing the woman journalist come first through the gates, without André’s wry bravado.
SIS disguises created for André in London, January, 1942
Ruth, the love of his childhood, helped him organize Jewish youth in Dusseldorff to counter the Nazi persecution. André gave up another romance to protect the young woman who was trying to enlist him into her resistance group in Rennes by pretending to be a careerist dolt, as he describes it. His wife Claire’s remarkable WWII saga, was to be a Signals Intelligence Linguist fielding, transcribing and misleading Luftwaffe pilots. She is on the roll of honour at Bletchley for these achievements, detailed for the book by Dr. Timothy Bowes Austin. For the first time since his war began, André was not in command when he met Claire on his return to Paris. But still he found a unique way of courting her, by spilling tea in her lap. “What do you want from me?” she asked him, while he kept fussing over her. And, André for the first time since his war began, was entirely honest.
Diana Mara Henry is an award-winning journalist, and author of ublished by Chiselbury.
