Jean-paul Schlienger
French Resistance fighter who stole a Nazi flying bomb engine
JEAN-PAUL SCHLIENGER, who has died aged 91, was a teenage sub-lieutenant in the French Resistance who, in late May 1944, helped to steal, disassemble and ship to Britain the engine of a previously secret Nazi V-1 “Doodlebug” flying bomb.
Schlienger and his 72-man resistance unit raided a V-1 placement in northern France, stole an engine, dismantled it and got it on board two chalutiers (fishing boats) out of Port-aven, Brittany. They, in turn, transferred it to two Royal Navy warships in the Channel.
British intelligence had already received vital information on V-1 placements from another resistance group, the AGIR network, headed by Michel Hollard. But analysis of the V-1 engine delivered by Schlienger and his comrades – as well as the precise coordinates they provided of its original location – allowed the RAF and the Free French Air Force to bomb that location, and also to defend London more effectively against bomb attacks.
On June 13 1944, angered by Allied successes on D-day, Hitler launched his first V-1 against London, Though 6,000 Londoners would die and 18,000 would be wounded in V-1 attacks over the next four months, the RAF and barrage balloons managed to destroy 80 per cent of the incoming missiles.
It was a major coup for British Intelligence, but the crackdown against the Resistance that ensued led to Schlienger being tortured, condemned to death by firing squad and finally sent to Buchenwald concentration camp.
Jean-paul André Emile Schlienger was born in Paris on September 4 1925 to parents originally from Alsace, close to the German border. His knowledge of German, which he learnt from his parents, would stand him in good stead.
He joined the Resistance at 14 – lying about his age – after hearing Charles de Gaulle make his historic call for French men and women to resist their Nazi occupiers on the BBC on June 18 1940. He spent two years delivering clandestine messages among Resistance fighters in Paris until, in September 1942, he was enlisted in the Bureau Central de Renseignement et d’action (BCRA, the Resistance’s secret service), working closely with agents of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE). The still-teenage Schlienger and his comrades in the BCRA moved to northern France – to Brittany and Normandy – to check out intelligence, first reported by Hollard, of a new Nazi rocket or missile pointed at the UK.
The subsequent accurate RAF bombings of V-1 launch pads led a furious Hitler to crack down on French Résistants and anyone suspected of helping them. Schlienger was detained by the Gestapo on August 5 1944, tortured for 10 days, including being subjected to what is now known as “waterboarding”, but he refused to talk. After a 45-minute trial, he was condemned to death by a Nazi military tribunal, though as he recalled: “In the middle of all these emmerdes (hassles), I was granted a reprieve and ‘allowed’ to go to Buchenwald.”
On April 11 1945, the 19-year-old Schlienger was liberated by advance reconnaissance soldiers of General Patton’s 6th Armoured Division. Though almost 6ft tall, he weighed only five-and-a-half stone. After the war he rarely spoke of his Resistance role or his camp experiences, adopting a motto he had learnt from British Intelligence agents he had served with in France: “Keep your secrets secret.”
Schlienger received many awards for his part in the Resistance, including the Croix de Guerre with palm, the medal of the French Resistance, the medal for Resistance deportees to the concentration camps, and, after old comrades revealed his wartime role, he was appointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour by President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2009.