Julien Lenoir - Collaborator from Caen

A veteran of the Great War, a businessman who initiated the Caen trade fair in 1933, the energetic and ambitious Julien Lenoir hoped to become a leading figure in the capital of Lower Normandy. Deputy mayor in 1935, briefly a member of Colonel de la Rocque's PSF, drawn fairly early to nationalist regimes, he showed himself to be favourable to the Third Reich from the very beginning of the Occupation.

A German speaker, enthused by a trip to Leipzig in September 1941, he soon afterwards founded a branch of the Collaboration group. Anti-Gaullist and anti-communist, sliding openly towards collaborationism, he set up a group of French auxiliaries at the disposal of the Gestapo in Caen, which became the sinister « bande à Hervé ».

In the turmoil of the bombardments, he fled a burning Caen on 9 June 1944 to make his way to Germany, swept along by the wreck of the cause he had chosen. In April 1945, he crossed the Swiss border before surrendering in France, and was imprisoned in his home city at the end of June 1945. The post-war purge did not spare him: indicted a month later for crimes against the external security of the State, Julien Lenoir cut his own throat on 15 August 1945, the eve of the verdict.

In the tradition of l'Ange noir de la Gestapo and L'épuration sauvage, Yves Lecouturier offers a book written in a fluent, highly readable and rigorously documented style.