The history behind Knock Twice

On the other side of the Rhône, in the École de santé militaire on the avenue Berthelot, the German security police had their headquarters. Its Gestapo section was run by Klaus Barbie. People taken there were questioned in the cellars. Many never came back up the same.

From there, prisoners went to Montluc, the military prison the Germans had taken over at the start of 1943. Some ten thousand people passed through it: resisters, Jews, hostages, young men who had refused the labour service. Since August, some of them had been driven to the firing range at La Doua, in Villeurbanne, and shot.

The Resistance fought with explosives as well as leaflets. On the night of the 29th of November, bombs brought down two high-voltage pylons at Saint-Fons, cutting two railway lines and damaging the lines that powered the trams. On the 2nd of December, three electricity transformers near the Guillotière were blown up. The railways carried German troops, and French workers to Germany.

The price was paid at La Doua and at Montluc. On the 29th of November, three men from Saint-Étienne, Fleury Dessaigne, Émile Mercier and Joseph Pépin, were shot at the La Doua firing range. On the 4th of December, Eugène Dandelot died inside Montluc. In the city, few people knew their names.

In Christmas week the newspapers printed the names. On the 21st, four men had been shot at the La Doua firing range: Maurice Percet and his father Jean-Pierre, who was seventy-three, Henri Mazuir and Henri Bardin. The Percets and Mazuir had been arrested in October collecting copies of the clandestine Franc-Tireur. On the 23rd, five young men from the Tréminis maquis, in the Isère, were shot there too: René Perrochon, André Coutelier, René Pinguet, Francis Lagardère and Jacques Casanova, who had refused the labour service. Francis Lagardère's father learned of his son's death from the paper, on the 26th.

Before dawn on the 27th, some fifty armed young men walked into the Sigma factory at Vénissieux, which worked for the Germans, and blew up its transformers and machines.

On the afternoon of the 10th, on the quai Saint-Clair at the foot of the Croix-Rousse, resisters of the FTP-MOI's Carmagnole battalion shot three German soldiers on bicycles: two were killed on the spot, and the third was badly wounded. That evening, twenty-two prisoners brought from Montluc were shot in the cellars of the avenue Berthelot; some had been arrested in the houses near the quai. A French policeman called there at one in the morning counted more than a hundred and eighty cartridge cases. The Germans said the prisoners had tried to escape. Nobody in Lyon believed it.

The curfew was set at eight. Cinemas and theatres were closed. People were searched in the street and at the stations.

From the first days after the landing, the Germans began to empty Montluc by night. On the 9th, nineteen men were shot in a wood at Communay; on the 10th, nineteen at Lissieu; on the 12th, more than twenty at Dagneux, in the Ain; on the 13th, nineteen at Villeneuve, where one man lived; on the 16th, Roussille. The gendarmes found them in the mornings and wrote their reports.

On the 17th the Gestapo and the Milice surrounded the Resistance's great print works in the rue Viala. Its chief, André Bollier, shot himself rather than be taken.

Early on the morning of Sunday the 20th of August, some hundred and twenty prisoners were taken from Montluc in two buses, on the orders of the German security police, to the old fort of Côte-Lorette at Saint-Genis-Laval, south-west of the city. There, German police and French miliciens shot them in small groups in the gatekeeper's house, then set it on fire and blew it up. One man lived. In the months after, seventy-four of the dead were identified; just over eighty are known by name today.

On the 22nd Cardinal Gerlier wrote to the German commander that those who had done it were "à jamais déshonorés aux yeux de l'humanité": for ever dishonoured in the eyes of humanity. The dead were buried on the 23rd, with the Cardinal there, while the Germans were still in the city.

Yves Farge, the commissaire de la République waiting in hiding to take over the region, warned the Germans that German prisoners held by the FFI would answer for any more killings at Montluc. In Haute-Savoie, eighty-four German prisoners were shot in reprisal at the end of August. Whether the warning saved Montluc's prisoners, historians still argue.

On the evening of the 24th of August, the German commandant of Montluc, who believed himself surrounded, arranged his own departure and handed the keys to General Chevallier, the oldest of the prisoners. He told him to wait until the morning. Nobody waited. Nearly a thousand prisoners walked out into the night, singing the Marseillaise and the Internationale, and hid in the city, in convents and in friends' houses, until it was free.