FRANCE: 100 for 2

When two Frenchmen slipped up to the Nazi military commander of Nantes early last week and riddled him with pistol bul lets, the Germans knew exactly what to do. They stationed military patrols around the city, imposed a 14-hour curfew. From Paris General Otto von Stülpnagel, commanding the German Army of Occupation, issued a terse communique. He offered a reward of 15,000,000 francs (to be paid by France) for the killers, promised he would execute 50 French hostages if the killers were not arrested in two days.

The General was as good as his word.

Forty-eight hours later 50 French prison ers stumbled out of their cells and were riddled by firing squads. They were trade-union leaders, “Communists,” men suspected of helping the British or Free French. One was not a Frenchman but an Anamese from Indo-China. But still the men who had shot Lieut. Colonel Karl Friedrich Holtz were free. Not even the promise of a sizable fortune had persuaded their friends to betray them to the Ger mans. General von Stülpnagel announced that he would shoot 50 more hostages if they were not found.

That same day the Nazis had another dead officer on their hands. Early in the evening four men waylaid a Nazi Major in Bordeaux, shot him too. Again the German authorities clamped down. They fined the city 10,000,000 francs, picked 50 more hostages to die for the new killing.

From Vichy old Marshal Henri Philippe Petain broadcast an appeal to the people of France. In his tired, halting voice he begged: “Frenchmen, your duty is clear —put an end to this butchery. Do not let more evil be done in France.” Frenchmen who illegally tuned in the BBC broadcast from London heard an other radio appeal. General Charles de Gaulle asked his countrymen not to kill Germans “in the present circumstances. …” Instead he asked all Frenchmen to join a general strike, to spend five minutes this Friday in silence and “scornful meditation.”

While he was speaking the Bordeaux hostages were shot. Then the Germans made a magnanimous gesture. They would delay for a few days the execution of the next hundred hostages. To explain this change of heart Vichy authorities is sued an official statement. “It is rumored in Vichy,” the announcement said, “that Marshal Pétain wished to give himself up as a hostage in the occupied zone to prevent additional executions planned as a result of attacks at Nantes and Bordeaux. The Marshal’s Cabinet has no declaration to make on the subject.” The announcement of this “rumor” was all the protest Vichy dared to make.

In London and Washington Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt decried these “Nazi butcheries.” In Bordeaux and Nantes 100 Frenchmen waited in their cells for death.