Ep 171: I Am André: German Jew, French Resistance Fighter, British Spy

Diana Mara Henry and Gabe Scheinmann join the show to discuss the new book I Am André: German Jew, French Resistance Fighter, British Spy

Aaron MacLean:

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, Andre Scheinmann 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.

Aaron MacLean:

For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter @AaronBMacLean. Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean, thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Dr. Gabriel Scheinmann, 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.

Diana Mara Henry:

Thank you.

Dr. Gabriel Scheinmann:

Thanks, Aaron.

Aaron MacLean:

So, this is a remarkable book about a remarkable man, who happens to be your grandfather, Gabe. This is Andre Scheinmann 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. We'll start with you, Gabe. Tell me about growing up knowing about this, and just your youthful recollections of Andre.

Dr. Gabriel Scheinmann:

Thanks, Aaron. And I'm sure you have many of this, but long time listener, first time caller, and I really appreciate the podcast that in general really is a must listen every week. The reality is I actually didn't know a whole lot growing up. My grandfather Andre, I was 15 when he passed away, the last couple of years of his life he was in a lot of physical pain. He was 86 when he passed, so 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 8 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 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, that was what I had growing up. He was an incredibly kind, and humble, and gentle man, 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 Steven Spielberg Shoah project, which we have a number of hours of testimony, and then with another outfit that I can't remember off the bat, Diana would know better it.

But anyways, it wasn't a lot. So I actually, until Diana started to put all of this together, and I read an 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 ... I mean, it's in the title right? But for a German Jew who 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 how I got to know the story but a little later in life.

Aaron MacLean:

It's an incredible story. Diana, Gabe mentioned that you're the person 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?

Diana Mara Henry:

Well, it is 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 Natzweiler. And as I was about to leave for the reunion, I got a phone call from Michelle saying, "I'd like you to meet my father, he was a camper at Natzweiler." And I had never heard that term of being-

Dr. Gabriel Scheinmann:

Camper.

Diana Mara Henry:

... camper when you were interned in a concentration camp. But it's a very unknown camp, little known camp still today, the only concentrations logger 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 and occupation. So, the French have distanced themselves from the camp as much as possible by even not calling it by the name Natzweiler. They call it Le Struthof, which has retarded I think, scholarship about the camp to a great degree.

But that's how I became involved. I met Andre, he shared his memoir with me, which 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 from first to last draft in 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 was trained by them, and his aliases, and really great treasure trove of a story that then was enhanced in 2018 when Michelle 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 I mean, 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 felt that he was still in a sense somehow in MI6, had a responsibility to observe the official secrets promised that he made.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, I have a psychological theory about why so many people are silent about their experiences in camps, or for that matter in occupied countries, or in combat units, all these traumatic experiences that trauma sometimes plays a role and just a desire to not talk about unpleasant things. But also because these sorts of awful situations often force people into 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 why on earth would you want to talk about it? In Andre's case, the story's actually remarkable. And this is also the case after it becomes a bit of a joke after the war, everyone in France was in the resistance. Every movie about the French experience of the war is about the resistance. Well, the truth is a lot of people were in the resistance. A lot of people collaborated, a lot of people did nasty things. Andre's story is just remarkable. Why don't we start at, Diana, let me ask you about Andre's parents and their life in Germany. Tell us a bit about the family.

Diana Mara Henry:

Well, his parents, Max and Regina, had come to Germany from Poland, and Andre was born, he notes the irony was born in Munich, 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. 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 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 Max toured 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.

Regina's great uncles had been officers in the Polish Army in World 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 Thorn, who was in the staff of General Pilsudski, so 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.

Aaron MacLean:

So, they're in France, it's the '30s, obviously things get more tense. And Andre is a young adult at this point, right? He's in his late teens, early 20s.

Diana Mara Henry:

Yes.

Aaron MacLean:

And it looks like war is imminent, and both Andre and his father joined the army.

Diana Mara Henry:

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. He had a fighting spirit. Andre was accepted, and his draft, 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 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 Rennes in Brittany. And that was his first act of derring-do. 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've 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, Andre Maurice Poulvet, but also a different birthdate, and different parents, and a different place of birth, of course in 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 Andre Maurice Poulvet, alias [French 00:14:16], the nephew, because he worked with his handler whose name was Thomas Green, and who is known as Uncle Tom.

Aaron MacLean:

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 a non-German name, 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." It becomes the cornerstone of his ability to operate in the resistance and survive at all. I mean, had they kept everything else, the birthdate and everything, at some point presumably the Gestapo or French authorities would've figured it out. How much foresight, and I mean, this is '38, right? That this is happening. So, how much of this is intentional? How much of it is lucky accident?

Diana Mara Henry:

Well, I think that he enlisted in '38, but he wasn't actually fighting until, well, he was in The Phoney War, [French 00:15:22] 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, 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 the war, he did regain his German birth certificate and then he regained his name Joseph Scheinmann, but he always kept the name Andre as well. So, even on his birth certificate he's Andre Joseph Scheinmann. I'm sorry, on his death certificate he's Andre Joseph Scheinmann.

Aaron MacLean:

So, he fights in Belgium, he's taken prisoner. He's wounded and 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, the SNCF, which still exists today, which presumably puts him in a place where he has privileged 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.

Diana Mara Henry:

Well, he got a social security pass as soon as he ... 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 derring-do, and he went to the employment office in Rennes 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, he 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 English 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 needs to be done, and you'll be protected because everything will go through me."

And he said, "All you need to do is give me," he'd just been hired, "All you need to do is give me an office, a secretary, a rug on the floor, and a very elaborate title, special liaison to the German Eichmann," because Andre knew the German mind, and he knew that they would be flattered by this elaborate scenario that he set up. So, that's in fact how it happened. He endeared himself to the Germans. He told everyone that he had studied German for many years, and he enrolled in the University of Rennes 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 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 for a few weeks. And he play acted. He said, "Well, I don't know if I can leave my position. I mean, my boss will have to 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, "Well, I don't know. He's a pretty valuable man around here. I'm not sure I can spare him, but oh well, and 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 installations.

Aaron MacLean:

So can I ask, how is this work structured? So, this is happening throughout 1941, right?

Diana Mara Henry:

Early-

Aaron MacLean:

And he's in this privileged position where he has access to all of this information, he has some cover and awareness from his formal boss, his official boss in the SNCF. But this information that he has, 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 context with the English, and how he evolves into becoming an MI6 asset.

Diana Mara Henry:

Well, I do think that his boss was an MI6 asset even before the war. MI6 had their own structure in France, embedded in France before the war, and actually worked pretty closely with the [French 00:22:03] 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 his with a group called the Black Beast, [French 00:22:28], which was a railroad network that he actually headed up, and they were a sabotage network. This was starting in September of 1940 when he was hired. 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 is a researcher who helped me a 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 barely any effective secret resistance networks until 1942. But these smaller networks, so I can enumerate some of them, [French 00:23:51] Johnny, and then finally his largest network, [French 00:23:55], which was known as Group 31 during the war. And these were all supported by SIS. There were also groups, which were like networks [French 00:24:10] who had been an MI6 agent before the war in the far east, and yeah. So, 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.

Aaron MacLean:

And what was the counterintelligence or counter resistance threat, or maybe more precisely how did it actually work? Joining the resistance in the fall of 1940 is a little bit like marching off to war in the summer of 1914. It's better to join in 1944, it's better for your survivability statistics. 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 cat and mouse game like through '40 and '41?

Diana Mara Henry:

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, as soon as the Germans signal that they needed troops moved, or they had lots of trains coming in or going back out to Germany and beyond the Russian front, Andre's boss would call in new employees but immediately give them a leave of absence so that they could find housing and so on. So, there were immense bottlenecks that lasted for weeks that delayed the troop movements and the [French 00:26:05] 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 so, he reversed the typical German bullying and accused them of being disorganized. And so, a lot of this was very good camouflage. And then of course, as you say, the betrayals it's said were the daily bread of the resistance. So, each of his networks in turn became infiltrated. The Germans had many different secret services, so we know about the Gestapo but that was really the police force. The Abwehr, the German military, had their own secret services and they employed V 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 [French 00:27:23], or known as [French 00:27:25], The Cat. [French 00:27:26] was another one of her names, aliases.

And she was hired by one of Andre's collaborators to be his secretary. So, then she had access to all of those agent names. And George France, the head of George France, 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 he mentions Andre several times, not only as Andre but as Martin, and many of his agents. So, when he returned from London in beginning of February '42, his main network had been betrayed, but also the ones that he had been working with, others that he'd been working with.

Aaron MacLean:

So, the hollowing out of these networks is happening beneath his feet, as it were. But what takes him off to London?

Diana Mara Henry:

Well, he had lost contact with London because the head of George France, his major network was arrested in October of '41. And so, with her the contact was lost. And he was able to reestablish contact through Johnny, the network Johnny, which was also operating from Rennes. 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 Gaullist network, which the two leaders of the Gaullist network, the Le Tac 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. 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 de Gaulle did have some few ineffective networks that were trying to operate. Their transportation, their radio services were all working through the special operations executive, or through MI6.

Aaron MacLean:

And so, how does the exfiltration actually work? And then, what is he up to in London? What's the training regimen, what is the program for him?

Diana Mara Henry:

Well, they go to the Le Tac 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 a cliff. But this woman, Yvonne Le Tac said, "No, I'm not moving." And so, there's a form of resistance right there, she just refused to vacate her home to them. 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, carrying grenade in her hand and rifles over her shoulder. And they got into canoes and paddled out to the several kilometers to the MTB or the MGB, the motor gunboats that 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 Helford, and the Gaullists were there to meet his buddies, the Le Tacs, and they said, "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 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 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 saboteurs to the Gaullist 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 plan that he would turn over his 300 saboteurs to the British, to the French, and let the Le Tac brothers, who were saboteurs, do that part of the job. And he would go on working with the British in intelligence and create new networks.

Aaron MacLean:

But meanwhile, his networks in France are so penetrated that basically he comes back and is rolled up pretty quickly.

Diana Mara Henry:

He had the foresight, as usual, to hide the 500,000 French francs, to hide 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 their eyes flew open, he says, and he was invited to have a coffee with them as they usually did, the Germans, while they called in the Gestapo. And he said he was thrown into a closet, bound hand and foot, even Houdini couldn't escape.

Aaron MacLean:

And Gabe, you knew none of this growing up. Or did your dad?

Dr. Gabriel Scheinmann:

I knew none of this. Again, a combination I think of being too young and him not really sharing publicly. I don't know how much my dad knew. He knew some of it, but I think similarly it wasn't until my dad was into his 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, 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's 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, "Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to come to this?" And my grandfather said to him, was like, "Because I want to show the Germans I'm still here." And so, I think my dad even unpeeling the layers of the onion as his life went on as well.

Aaron MacLean:

So, let's talk about captivity then, which I guess really has three main phases. He's in a prison for quite a while, it was a normal French, I guess in Paris, right? A normal Parisian prison where you would keep resistance fighters. And then he's taken to Natzweiler, and then finally to Dachau. So, 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.

Diana Mara Henry:

Yes, he had had maybe 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. But 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." "No, no, no, you won't believe me." So, after we 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 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 decided to take another course."

And he said, "That's why I went to London." So, apparently they beat him up, but they also were telling each other, he heard as he was laxing into unconsciousness, "Only a Frenchman would be that crazy about a woman." So, then they did know that he had gone to London and they were beating him up, and he called actually the head of the prison of Rennes, who was an army man. So, 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 commandant ordered his wounds be treated, he'd be fed. And then they said, "Well, we might as well use him for propaganda." 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 while he wrote a report, and he said he was given croissants, 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, morale is great. There's no shortage of anything, even though there are ration cards so people can eat whatever they want. So, they threw him back into the cells of Rennes, and he was subjected to a military trial, a German military trial, and was sentenced to death. 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, 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 need to go to court. I'm already being shot once, I don't need to hear that you're going to shoot me again."

Aaron MacLean:

It's very German to get it all properly documented.

Diana Mara Henry:

Yeah, yeah. So, that was his prison experience. Of course, there are many more episodes.

Aaron MacLean:

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 imagine you're a pilot off of an aircraft carrier and 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 Andre's mindset is you're 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?

Diana Mara Henry:

Well, he says that actually the mental torture was more difficult than the physical torture, because as you say, he invented a story. 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 excruciating. But he said 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. 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 interest of his comrades, and he said the Germans did offer him to turn him if he would work with them.

Aaron MacLean:

And it's in this period where he's in prison and being subject to torture and interrogation that Max and Regina, Gabe, your great-grandparents, are murdered, right? How does that play out?

Diana Mara Henry:

Well, no. He says in his book that they gave up hope when they found out that he was arrested. They did manage to get food and clothing to him, and some money in prison. But by July of '42, I think [French 00:43:07] they were picked up in the hotel where they were sheltering in Paris.

Aaron MacLean:

And they don't have assumed identities.

Dr. Gabriel Scheinmann:

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 when they had just reopened what basically the equivalents called the French Holocaust Museum and Archives in Paris. And looking for my great-grandparents' names, Max and Regina, which are displayed on a wall of those that were taken ultimately to Auschwitz, as Diana said. And you could go into the archives and look for all sorts of documentation. And at the time, I literally found on microfiche, if people remember what that is, as 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, German sounding last names, et cetera.

And yet, you could look at both cards, and the handwriting of both cards is identical, but the last name, Scheinmann, 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. French police, French military officer, I don't know. Which again, goes back to what you were saying earlier and 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 in the world 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, give him an alias to offer him protection in case he were captured.

And obviously in this case, the example I gave of my great-grandparents taken to Auschwitz, is French doing the work. And so again, the history belies the fact that we think this is just the Germans, but the collaboration aspect, people knew. People knew.

Aaron MacLean:

And Andre only finds out about this after the war? When does he learn the fate of his parents?

Diana Mara Henry:

I think not until after the war. And really, his goal and rising in the resistance and in MI6 was really to send his parents across the English Channel to safety in London. And having had this training, and these creds, and this tremendous budget that the British had entrusted, I think he was not deluded in thinking that he might've 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. He never saw them again.

Aaron MacLean:

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're interested in Natzweiler precedes your professional interest in Andre. What's up with Natzweiler? You have a concentration camp on French soil, what was its purpose? What was its role in the network of German incarceration? The vast network of German incarceration of the day?

Diana Mara Henry:

Yeah. Well, Natzweiler was a late camp in terms of having only been built 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 Nacht und Nebel prisoners. This was the Night and Fog decree that Hitler had thought up when the challenge of the communist resistance coming back to life happened after he turned on Russia. And so, Hitler was inspired by Wagner's Das Rheingold opera, which has a character and a curse in it of Nacht und Nebel, Night and Fog. And Hermann Keitel, 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 enforced disappearance was a more terrible weapon of terror than outright publicized shootings and executions.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, I just have to linger on it for a second because it's a largely forgotten episode, a 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 the better singers, and artists and so forth. It was the Ballad of October 16th condemning FDR as a warmonger is written in this period. 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. It's an incredible period, nobody remembers it. But okay, so he's at Natzweiler, and what is existence like?

Diana Mara Henry:

Well, again, I think it was Primo Levi who said that 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 buff. 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 maybe six to 10 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 have sick their dogs on you or beat you up. So, he served as an interpreter in Natzweiler and in Dachau. And so, 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 [inaudible 00:50:26] in the behind instead of them, or distracting the Nazis. So again, as an interpreter he didn't just function for the Germans, he functioned for his comrades to try to get them to avoid the blows, and sometimes to distract their abusers.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. And in the fall of '44, obviously the allies are a sure, there's the breakout out of Normandy, the war moves east pretty rapidly, and Andre and others are transferred to Dachau. Now, I know a little bit about Dachau, not as much as you, Diana. I've been there numerous times, I've 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, it was not a death camp. And there's this distinction between death camps and labor camps in terms of their purpose and their function. Auschwitz was both, Auschwitz had both a slave labor component but also an extermination component. Dachau never a formal extermination component, though a lot of people were killed there and there were 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, and it's not like ... It was pretty bad to be a slave too, by the way. I mean, it was a 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 in operation basically for as long as the Nazis had been around, and was much more like a prison gulag in its early days. By this point, the level of sickness, death, casual murder, whatever is just, my impression of Dachau in that last year, six months is it must have felt like a place that was just spinning rapidly out of control. Everything is falling apart around it, and it's a truly, truly awful experience compared even to the Dachau of say, 1942 or '43. Is that what you've found in your own scholarship?

Diana Mara Henry:

Well, Natzweiler was the only concentration camp I've ever been to. But from Andre's story, he did get typhus, which was rampant there at the end, because of the overcrowding, and the misery, and the famine and so on. So, when he got typhus he went to the infirmary, and he was treated for typhus. Fellow prisoners were cleaning up the lines in Germany that had been bombed, and they were able to find some kind of medication for him, antibiotics, or aspirin or something that he was able to ... He recovered, but he was kept on the role at the infirmary, and every day his temperature was charted for 56 days till the liberation of Dachau. And why would one think after his infection dropped 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 that were like a prisoner leadership group that were entrusted, or had entrusted or planned among 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 on leaving from executing and murdering all the remaining prisoners.

And the hospital ward at Dachau was the center for this international Prisoners committee, this is where they met. This is from the first report that was written by the Americans on the liberation of Dachau. So, Andre again had a leadership position, and he was prepared, which is one of the reasons he was able to get to the gates so quickly when Dachau was liberated. And he says 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 he hugged her again, he said. But it was an American journalist.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. So, he incredibly survives, stays on in France, becomes French. Why America? Why the move to America? Gabe, maybe, I don't know if Diana or Gabe, you're better positioned to answer that question.

Dr. Gabriel Scheinmann:

I'm happy to answer it. So I mean, this is the family lore in that way. So, there was some American family already. My great-grandfather, Max, well, there were a couple of different branches who had made their way to America 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. And the tragedy here obviously is that my great-grandfather helped a number of his family members escape to America, but not himself, 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. And in fact, in the book, Diana has a picture of him doing French military training in the late '50s in the United States, actually as part of what we might call reserve duty. I'm not really sure. But in 1952, they wanted to send him, the French military, wanted to send him to Indochina, to presumably the French were trying to obviously maintain their crumbling empire in Indochina. This is the prelude to what we Americans eventually succumb to in the Vietnam War. And he basically said, "No way. You chose not to fight for your own country, for the homeland of France. You surrendered, you didn't fight. I, even as a non-French citizen, fought in the French military, joined the French Army, didn't have to necessarily, and that I was not going to 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 I knew growing up. And so, from that moment on 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.

Aaron MacLean:

I'm at the age now where I have these strange thoughts that would never have occurred to me 20 years ago, and my main thought hearing the two of you tell this story is just to reflect on how proud Max would've been of Andre. 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 if he had the opportunity how proud he would've been.

Dr. Gabriel Scheinmann:

Absolutely. And I started off by saying what I knew as a kid growing up as my grandfather was 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, and at each instance chose to join the fight or stay in the fight. 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 Natzweiler and Dachau, didn't have to try and protect others or sabotage operation.

These were all choices that 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 those are awful years. And so, I'm not going to stand here and judge those who did those other things of flee and hide, because every circumstance is a little different, but that's not what he did.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, something else we discussed when we were in Europe together but it's worth just reflecting on here, you and I in our different ways, through your grandfather for you, for me, with my dad though, both of us having Dachau in common as a part of the story, I was shaped by my understanding of World War II and my understanding of what 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 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 developed for you later in life that actually the story is far more complicated and interesting, in some ways richer. I worry greatly about people who are too young, which is basically everyone younger than us, to have had access in their youths to people who had these sorts of stories.

One of my earliest memories is being in Munich, and I'm very young in this story, this is the '80s, 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, however it was in the '80s. And I remember him asking at the desk in the hotel for directions to Dachau, and the clerk, who 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, he said very casually, "But why do you want to go there? It's all just Jewish propaganda these days." And I remember my father, who had a temper, turning white and then turning red, and I'm going to clean up his language because we've never been designated 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.

Dr. Gabriel Scheinmann:

Yeah. And that's how stories get told down. I mean, obviously there's books, and I'm very lucky that Diana, my whole family took up this project to memorialize this, because otherwise I 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 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 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 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, to try and bring it to contemporary times.

Because I do think there's this idea that people can point to and say, "Well, I'm against Nazism, and I'm against radical Islamism, and I'm against terrorism." 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. And you and I, Aaron, have talked about before in that trip you mentioned is about the American role in this and the allied role in this obviously, and how that changed the course of history. I mean, really saved the free world to where we are today still, 80 plus years, almost 80 years later. But that's why I did nothing on this story. I mean, this is my grandfather's story, but I'm incredibly proud to be even related to him, to be able to set this example and set this framing for the times that we're in.

Diana Mara Henry:

Well, I just wanted to say that universalizing what Gabe is talking about, although I think I completely share the opinion or 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. So, they fought in every other army to great success, but 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 people of any religion and ethnic background can hold as an example, is that no matter what the circumstances we do have choices as individuals, and 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 dad was in Patton's army. And so, as a warrant officer in the engineer battalion of the Blue Ridge division, after he went through [inaudible 01:04:24] with the American soldiers who were all assigned by Eisenhower to visit a concentration camp as part of their experience in the army in Europe, and he said 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."

Aaron MacLean:

Gabe Scheinmann, 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.

Dr. Gabriel Scheinmann:

Thank you.

Diana Mara Henry:

Thanks.

Aaron MacLean:

This is a Nebulous Media production, find us wherever you get your podcasts.