Transcripts For CSPAN3 An Aristocratic Spy In World War II F

The executive director of the institute for the study of war and democracy here at the National World War Ii Museum we are the humble group of scholars that bring your programs such as this and it is our actual pleasure to have paul with us here tonight. The institute, what do we . Do apologize to the veterans that here this every few weeks but the institute serves as the Research Corps in the Higher Education center of the museum, we like to call us as a community of scholars, our job is to build bridges to academics and other authors and experts around the world to help make them part of the Museum Family and plug them into the program such as this. To produce college of our own as our multiple Award Winning Senior Historian has done with him who is not here he celebrating a 60th birthday tonight hes done that with all ten of his. Books we also offer a wonderful new service the World War Two veteran Research Project and service would you cannot find on the website. We can trace the individual history of world war ii participant throughout the war, put that package together from archival documents and create a, unique customized biography to help your family connects world war ii, we are really proud of that one. Another program we are exceptionally proud proud of his or Public Programs which is tonight, to meet the author. Exceptionally we are lucky to have great friends and connections to help us bring the world for most and best authors and frankly the most interesting presenter is to come here to the stage and talk to us. Let me start by our usual traditional we recognize that we have any do we have any world war ii veterans or confront workers with us tonight . The please rise. [applause] and veterans of any other areas. [applause] thank you all and i hope you will indulge me is i think my very favorite veteran my wife sarah who i hope is watching from home. Many of you have been here for a large number of these wonderful meet the author events. This is a great milestone for us in the history of this program, this illustrious an important speaker series. For the first time, we have a sponsor and were very grateful to welcome the Straight Foundation from houston. We want to certainly thank the Straight Foundation and george w. Straight junior for their generous support of the 2018 2019 with the other series. We hope they will continue that relationship for many years to come. applause tonight speaker for me is an example of the two things i always urge everybody who comes to me for a speaker to. Find youre gonna bring me somebody who can deliver quality scholarship. Its got to be top quality, best work, best research hard work, delivers a beautiful narrative. Its got to be well written, the book has just got to be good. And then the thing i am personally guilty, of it cant be boring. We have got to be able to deliver a great presentation. Were very proud to say thats a nice presenter, paul kix the Deputy Editor of espn the magazine, is heavily involved in the content for ethiopians platforms i challenge anyone to call espn. More you might have seen is writings in the new yorker, gq, mens journal and wall street journal, just to name a. Few i hope you all have heard of. Those paul was originally from iowa, was in boston are now resides in connecticut with his wife sonia who is an exceptionally nice person, who has actually been helping out with the event tonight, you cant beat that, and their three wonderful children. Tonight paul is going to present for us on a really great book about one of those fascinating characters. I wont steal his thunder. It sounds like this has got to be a movie. And maybe it will be. And if it is, were going to invite you to the premiere of that at the National World War Ii Museum. Not to talk about his book, the salvatore, the aristocrat who became france is most daring anti nazi commando, please join me in welcoming paul paul kix to our stage. Got applause thank you everybody for coming tonight. This is fantastic, it is great to see this many people here, its great to see this many people interested about world war ii in general about france in particular. It was great to when i was asked months ago to come down here on the citys 300th anniversary. It seems fitting for me and thankfully was fitting as well for the museum. I want to start actually with a question that i, get i will be taking questions after awhile, but one of the first questions i get is wait a minute, how exactly does a guy who edits and writes about sportss how does he do a book on that guy . And what is that guys name . So we will take the second part first which is that guys name is Robert Delarosa foucault. And how i got into it, one day in 2012 i was reading the New York Times just flipping through on my phone, and i saw an obituary and the obituary said world war ii command dough and spy who dressed as non who sabotaged his way across Southern France and worked for a secret group of british commandoes dies at 88. And i said, well im going to keep breeding that obituary. The story of robert even an obituary form was remarkable. It was so good that National Public radio did a story based on the obituary that appeared in the times. It was so good that there is a website called and you have to excuse the language for a second, there is a website called bad but of the week that said this guy is the greatest bad but we have ever had. So, the thing that interested me was, this is a guy whose family history, im assuming there are some people here who have been to france, right . Are there just by show of hands, how many people here are familiar vaguely with the Robert Delarosa foucault name. For those of you who arent, the Robert Delarosa foucault family is the fourth oldest family in france. Its lineage literally shaped france. My favorite story of what delarosa family, is imagine yourself in 1789 in versailles and he sees the pitchforks coming. And he turns to innate and he says is this a revolt . And the eighth says no sigh or this is the revolution. And that aid was roberts great great great great grandfather the de la Roche Foucault family has a street named after them in paris the de la Roche Foucault family spruced writes extensively about the de la Roche Foucault family, they have been idolized within the military, they have been recognized by the Catholic Church for the roles they played during the reign of terror there have been de la Roche Foucault who have it martyrdom. It is a very rich, very old family. Some of this is in that obituary that im reading in the New York Times. I didnt do anything with it though, and thats because i was an editor at espn, the magazine. My wife and i had three kids including twin boys who were probably less than six months old at the time. And perhaps most importantly, i didnt speak french. So i thought there is no way i could actually do this book, the summer of 2012 becomes the fall of 2012 and you have to understand something, i just love really good stories for the sake of stories, and i have been wanting for sometime to tell, to write my first book. Ive been wanting to write books since i was about seven years old. And so by the fall of 2012, i cant get this story out of my. Head and so i went to my wife when i said ive got to do it. The very first step during for me trying to do it was to find roberts memoir. He had written a memoir about his war it had never been translated in english and the very first thing my wife and i did was we founded on amazon and it cost about 200 euros it was rare at the time its now not as rare. And we said about trying to figure out how to pieces together, but of course, neither was spoke french, so we used cocoa translate. We [laughter] how many people here have used it for more than a sentence or phrase . What do you start to see when you do . That you see that, boy, you have really no sense of what is going on here. That is what happened. Page after page i would get back, and it was very hard for me to figure out what was going on. So we retransmitted. What we would throwing it back into the Google Translate mushy until finally we had something that i thought was about 85 , i could understand about 85 of roberts story. And i said okay, this story is unbelievable, and then the cynical journalist in me kicked in. And i thought, wait a minute, this story is literally unbelievable. Before i wrote a proposal, before the book was optioned by dream works and we can talk about that afterwards if youd like, i had to figure out all right, is this a story that is even worth doing . I had some friends in boston who had friends in paris. They were journalists. I said okay well roberts is at the end of the book that he received all of these commendation from the french government. If he actually received them, if there is a paper trail that i can follow at least he has been vetted by the french government. So at least i can start. Now who here has been to france . Oh we actually iraq asked this question. Who here has dealt with french bureaucracy . Who here knows what is . Like and again this became a very labourious process almost as labourious as transiting the book itself but ultimately. After four months. I got a call and sophie was her name, the journalist helping in france and she said paul it is wonderful, he is who he says he is and im, like he is. And she sends me the email, he actually received all the accommodations that he said that he received and the memoir. Then the real work began. So let me tell you a little bit about the. Im going to sort of talk a little bit about roberts life and then im going to read a short snippet of the book itself. Robert comes from a very prestigious family very rich family, and one of the first things that i had to try to figure out is why does he choose to fight . Because he couldve done something that the mass majority of the french did, which was absolutely nothing. Scholars have later contended that perhaps as few as 80 , perhaps as much as 90 of the french populace neither aided the allies nor aided the fascists. About 10 of the french populace were openly collaborating with the nazis. A much smaller percent of that, perhaps as few as 2 of the french populace according to scholarly estimates, were active in the resistance. Robert was one of them but what really fascinated me was he did not he did not have to. Be again, the money along, the connections alone couldve meant that he couldve gone to neutral, spain couldve meant that he couldve found a nice farm in english countryside, couldve meant that he couldve had the wherewithal to get to the states without too much problem, but he did not do that. He did the hardest thing possible, which was to actively participate in the resistance, and to do so would mean if they were captured by the, germans they were killed. They were not treated like prisoners of war. In fact, it was far worse than an immediate death. It was torture. It was excruciating torture. So . Why why does robert do . This this actually became one of the animating questions and part of this was because of the storied family history. Roberts father was a decorated world war one officer, who was actually recommissioned at the outbreak of world war ii. He was captured after the battle for france was lost. In fact, captured five days after that battle, at a point where he was still fighting, so say eight his military records. So that gives you a sense of the de la Roche Foucault family there are other considerations to the family home and it was actually commandeered by the germans. And robert was an angry 17 year old man trying to find a way for himself in this new and scary world and he was confronted every day which are one officers who were literally in his home there was a third consideration and that was his mother his mother can swell adjust to give you a hint of sort of the character that she was there was a high ranking german army officer who was part of the nobility and germany and he came to stay at the family house this was while it was being wall so they were living among the care La Rochefoucauld and the story goes that he walked up the front steps. Can swallow was a short stocky woman and she doesnt take any gruff from anybody and she is standing there and she is scowling at the man and he is being his most chivalrous and he takes off his glove. He says madam de La Rochefoucauld, it is a great pleasure to stay in this wonderful home. Your name travels far beyond the french border. And as he extends his hand, she slapped some across the face. And there is another officer with them that says, madam an introduction like that could risk deportation. But she did not care, and neither did her 17yearold son, who wanted to find a way to fight. Of course by 1940, after the battlefronts was lost, everything had been turned over to the germans, all the way down to hunting knives, so roberts interest in joining the resistance could he could not actually do it. But on the bbc, there is one general who had fled france before the fall, and from the pulpit of the bbc he said every night, i want the battle for france to carry on. Robert listened in silence to those broadcasts. And that general was the most junior general in france and his name was charles de for gaulle. Robert was so taken with what de gaulle had to say, that he found a way to get to london. He had to do it by first sneaking his way south through spain because you could not actually cross the channel. There was no way that that could have happened. He gets there, and he is interrupted, as the british like to say. There was a new force whose colloquial name was the ministry of ungentlemanly warfare i. Am a big fan of british understatement and the ministry of ungentlemanly warfare is about as understated as what this organization actually did, it was not a special Operations Executive and ian fleming, the offer author james bond will ultimately base his character on the man the men and women of this only soe was not exactly beloved by the other secret agency in part because of what it did and what it did was anarchy by any means, as always jobs like anything the worlds had anything seen before. It would train for nationals and all legal and illegal means of warfare law parachute them back into their native lands, and then watch as they fomented revolution. Robert decided that even if well, he wanted to still fight for de gaulle, but he ended up deciding that perhaps the best way to do it was to align himself with the british. What he learned from the british was how to break thumbs, how to properly kick a man in the testicles, how to properly break his, back how to properly slice a knife across his throat, how to properly roll out of a train moving at 40 miles an hour how to do something called silent killing. Thiss tactic of silent killing so enraged hitler that he issued what was known as a commando order in 1942 and that commando order was directed at the british and if it said, if anyone is found to have been trained by them, these bandits of the british are to be killed immediately. Robert flew back to france in the summer of 1943, having been trained in all sorts of warfare, and he flew back confident, knowing that he had a skill set that so few people actually had. His First Mission was a very interesting one, he was to just simply sabotage facilities in france that were essential to the nazi war machine he carried it out with absolute aplomb, but the last mission of soe right before they got on the plane to get back was one of humility. Robert had to keep that in mind as summer of 1943 turned into the fall of 1943. Soe brass gave every soe agent a cyanide pill. They said, there have men many brave agents that have come before you, and you need to remember the odds will start to work against you after about six months in country, and if ever you are captured, swallow this quickly because we dont want you giving up any information. Fall of 1943 turns into late fall of 1943, and now robert sees what they mean. The nazis, in particular the gestapo, were very effective in infiltrating resistance cells in france in 1943. Robert was working for one known as noahs ark. It was actually run by a woman, and it was the largest resistance cell in all of france at the time. Marie ended up leaving france just as robert entered it, she ended up calling 1943 the terrible year because she literally forgot how many agents were arrested. Was it 300 . Was it 400 . Was it 500 . And robert in country there in central france, he is seeing the people that hes working with one day, and then he doesnt hear from them again, and so he has to imagine well he knows, that he will probably never see them again. Egg so paranoia sets. In am i next . Guilt sets in. Why have i not been captured . Hes still only 19 years old. But he has to start to think about this cyanide pill. He ends up moving to a barn hay in the small village, where he can hide some of the guns that have been parachuted down with him. Because he still thinking that maybe theres a way that i can carry out my work, even though his resistance cell had been decimated. And one night asleep in the barn, he was jostled awake. He saw a half circle of men around him in felt hats and leather jackets and then smiles on their faces. They said, how are you this evening . And then they started to beat him. They did not stop until he was tied up, he said, like a sausage. And then one of the gestapo agents went immediately to a corner of the barn where he had hit in the guns, and he said what is this . And robert said thats not mine. He smiles again and said yes, it is. Roberts initial fear of who gave me up, how did they know this . Was replaced by a much, much darker fear. Where am i being taken . And what is going to happen to me when i get . There says for those of you havent read the book yet, robert is taking to a prison dog and whatever you imagine the nazis doing to try to extract information from a resistance fighter like robert, it happened. I had a c