Gestapo of Rue de la Pompe

From her perch on the edge of a bathtub, red-haired Denise Delfau swung her pretty legs and contentedly scribbled in a notebook. It was all quite jolly, except for the water that occasionally splashed on to her clothes when the naked, groaning creature in the tub thrashed in agony. And it kept Denise near her lover, a highly unrefined German named Friedrich Berger. For Friedrich, Denise performed the task of inscribing the confessions of French Resistance fighters who had fallen into the clutches of the Gestapo of Rue de la Pompe.

Day after day in 1944, Denise took her place in the bathroom of Herr Berger's apartment and inscribed notes, while Berger and his band of German and French accomplices methodically beat Resistance secrets--and sometimes the life--out of their captives. Their system for getting a victim to talk was simple but effective: they would hold his head under water and flog his neck and back with rubber hoses. Sometimes, when the captive was a woman, Denise would oblige by holding the woman's legs while torturers performed their varied rites.

Too Unhappy. Last week, after 6 1/2 years in jail, Denise Delfau, by now an untidy 35, sat in the gloomy Palace of Justice in Paris with 13 male comrades (eleven French, two German), to stand trial on an accumulation of war-crimes charges that filled a foot-high pile of documents. Herr Berger was absent, reportedly now in Germany, offering his specialized services to the Russian intelligence service.

When it came Denise's turn to hear the charges against her, she burst into tears and tried to explain. "I was too unhappy," she sobbed. "I had no money. I became Berger's mistress because he terrorized me. He was a madman. I wanted to escape but he came to find me and dragged me by the hair."

"You fell into Berger's arms pretty fast," snapped one of the nine judges of the military court. "Oh, no!" cried Denise. "Not very fast." Replied the judge sardonically: "Let us say, fast. You knew what he was doing."

A Bit of Rape. Grimly the judges ticked off the charges against Denise and her companions: treason (in the cases of all twelve French citizens), murder, espionage, association with criminals, and, here & there, a bit of rape. ". . . The Gestapo of Rue de la Pompe," intoned the court, "was . . . most infamous . . . The tragic figures can be translated thus: more than 300 arrests, 160 deportations to Germany, of whom 50 died in concentration camps, 40 shot as of Aug. 16, 1944."

For all the old horrors, the opening of the trial incited an out-of-the-ordinary reaction. "It interests no one" editorialized the conservative Le Monde, ". . . but it will arouse an exasperating astonishment that at the end of seven years there still remain in prison men whom we have not found a way to judge." By official count, 140 men & women charged with wartime collaboration are still in jail awaiting trial.

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