Rudolf Kunesch was an Austrian Wehrmacht soldier drafted into KdS and, though senior to Dohse in rank, was assigned to be his deputy. This clumsy arrangement meant that Dohse could not give Kunesch direct instructions, except through Hagen. While Dohse himself normally initiated operations, it was Kunesch who frequently commanded them, leaving his ‘chief’ to attend only in the technical role of ‘observer’. Tensions were not improved by the fact that when prisoners were brought in, it was Kunesch, not Dohse, who interrogated them first. Overweight, balding, thick-lipped, an energetic drinker, with a face straight out of a 1930s gangster film, Kunesch was regarded as ‘brutal and stupid’. His heavy-handed approach stood in sharp contrast to Dohse’s preference for more subtle techniques. These differences, exacerbated by the lack of clarity about their relative seniority, meant that relations between the two men were very often strained to the point of open warfare – though there is no record of Dohse ever complaining about his deputy’s brutal methods.
Kunesch was in due course supported by his ‘chief torturer’, Anton Enzelsberger. Known as ‘Tony the Boxer’, Enzelsberger had been heavyweight boxing champion of Austria. With only one working eye (ice blue) and a shaven head, Enzelsberger was as close as one could get to the caricature of a dyed-in-the-wool, hatchet-faced Nazi thug. He was also a regular soldier, untrained in police skills, and had been released from a sentence for murder when Hitler annexed Austria. Kunesch, Enzelsberger and their subordinates preferred torture to all other means of extracting confessions from their subjects. Among their favourite instruments of persuasion were a rubber cosh (Kunesch was known as ‘the cosher-in-chief’); a whip similar to a cat o’ nine tails; and an arrangement consisting of two braziers backed by a reflector, in front of which prisoners were placed to slowly roast like pieces of meat on a barbecue.
Another new recruit was forty-two-year-old Marcelle Louise Sommer. Born in the Swiss Romande, Marcelle Sommer had been interned with her mother by the French during the First World War and spoke flawless French. She spent some years between the wars working first at a department store in Paris and then in – and very probably spying on – the Michelin factory in Clermont-Ferrand. Hated and feared in equal measure, she became known locally as the ‘lioness of the Gestapo’. Though she had started as Dohse’s personal assistant (and had been one of those the Abwehr had tried to poach), she quickly rose to become head of Department IV’s intelligence section. Tall, imposing and statuesque, even without the high heels she habitually wore, she was the mistress of one of Dohse’s section chiefs (and one of his few close personal German friends), SS-Obersturmführer Schöder. Dohse trusted Sommer completely and gave her full autonomy to run her own network of French agents, which included many women and prostitutes employed as agents provocateurs.
Dohse’s personal assistant was twenty-five-year-old Claire Keimer, whose blonde tresses and Wagnerian proportions soon became well known in Bordeaux. Intelligent, quick-witted, ambitious, fluent in French and a natural in the spying business, it was not long before the two became lovers. Her role, however, extended well beyond being Dohse’s mistress, for over time she also became his chief confidante and adviser – often attending his interrogations and participating in conferences to decide strategy and policy.
The main elements of Dohse’s staff assembled, he and Sommer set about creating a network of agents. Among the most important of these were 108 individuals each paid 5,000 francs a month (the equivalent of around £1,000 today), plus expenses. These included ‘agents of influence’ – senior officials in the French administration and police, key leaders in pro-Gestapo French paramilitary units – and undercover agents who were used to infiltrate Resistance groups and organisations. The financial resources available to Dohse’s section were, like those of all the German secret services, almost unlimited. French counter-intelligence at the time commented that ‘[German] officers, civil servants and agents … spend without limit and enrich themselves without scruple’. There was even a fixed tariff for information and betrayal:
denunciation of a Jew or a Communist = 1,000 francs
denunciation of a Gaullist = 3,000 francs
information leading to the discovery of a weapons cache = 5,000–30,000 francs (depending on the size of the horde)
One French collaborator, the appropriately named Johann Dollar, is calculated to have earned, in a single year, the equivalent (at today’s prices) of £18,600, for information passed to the Germans.
Dohse’s most important collaborator on the French side was the local police chief, Pierre Poinsot, the scourge of the communists in 1941. Now, as the head of the new Vichy French police brigade known as the Section des Affaires Politiques (or SAP), he also ran his own network of agents. Dohse made Poinsot a paid informer, supplementing his meagre French policeman’s salary with occasional bonuses (amounting on one occasion to 10,000 francs, accompanied by a further 20,000 to be distributed to his men). Poinsot and his unit, who soon became known as the ‘murder brigade’ for their habit of killing and extreme torture, now became, to all intents and purposes, an extension of Dohse’s Gestapo organisation. Poinsot reported to Dohse daily, arrested whoever Dohse wanted, tortured (or refrained from torturing) whoever Dohse wanted, and did nothing unless Dohse approved of it. On one occasion Dohse ‘interrupted’ one of Poinsot’s torture sessions on a young resistant: ‘I said to Poinsot “Enough! Get him dressed”,’ Dohse later claimed. ‘Then I put the young man in my car and sat him next to me. He was not chained or handcuffed. I said “Listen. Tell me the truth … or I will hand you back to the French police” … it was not a nice thing to do – but it was my job … I took the young man to my home and had him fed – and he gave me everything.’
It is fair at this stage to point out that, although torture, extreme brutality and executions were largely institutionalised among the Nazi security forces and Poinsot’s SAP, the Resistance were also not squeamish about using ‘enhanced techniques of persuasion’ and punishment. A female SOE agent connected with Bordeaux describes in a post-mission report how two newspaper journalists in Poitiers suspected of collaboration were executed by the local Resistance, one by being shot and the second by being first tortured and then killed using a metal file, with which he was stabbed more than twenty times.
In all, Dohse and Sommer recruited more than a hundred low-level French, Russian and Spanish agents scattered across the region. A headquarters for this spy network was established in the Place de la Cathédrale in Bordeaux. This was supplemented by the establishment of a number of safe houses around the city and by the formation of right-wing French paramilitary organisations, which provided Dohse with information and operational support as required. In due course, the French forces which Dohse could rely on also included the much-hated, black-shirted Milice française (‘French militia’). Raised with the help of the Germans in 1943, but not active in Bordeaux until the spring of 1944, this paramilitary force, created to fight communism and ‘terrorism’, was drawn largely from the ranks of the French fascists and the criminal fraternity.
In early May 1942, Dohse finally found a proper home for his now fast-growing unit. He requisitioned a large property at 197 Avenue du Maréchal Pétain, opposite the main KdS headquarters in Bouscat. The building, a substantial nineteenth-century château on three floors, stood in its own grounds and was protected by a low wall which supported a fence of robust cast-iron railings. Substantial wine cellars beneath the house were converted into prison cells and, when occasion arose, torture chambers. Dohse chose an airy room on the ground floor at the rear of the building, adjacent to a handsome glass veranda which gave access to the garden and stables, as his office. The stables, too, were converted for use as interrogation cells. The most notorious of these was christened the Chambre d’action. Above the door was a notice instructing ‘No water, no food’.
At the start, Dohse was assiduous when it came to protecting his back, making a point of taking the train to Paris to brief Bömelburg almost every weekend. He also acted as secretary and translator to a Franco-German body based in the French capital called the Cercle Européen. This discussed a future united Europe formed around an axis between Germany and France. As time passed, however,