A Train in Winter (3 page)

The terms of the armistice, signed after twenty-seven hours of negotiation in the clearing at Rethondes in the forest of Compiègne in which the German military defeat had been signed at the end of the First World War, twenty-two years before, were brutal. The geography of France was redrawn. Forty-nine of France’s eighty-seven mainland departments—three-fifths of the country—were to be occupied by Germany. Alsace and Lorraine were to be annexed. The Germans would control the Atlantic and Channel coasts and all areas of important heavy industry, and have the right to large portions of French raw materials. A heavily guarded 1,200-kilometre demarcation line, cutting France in half and running from close to Geneva in the east, west to near Tours, then south to the Spanish border, was to separate the occupied zone in the north from the ‘free zone’ in the south, and there would be a ‘forbidden zone’ in the north and east, ruled by the German High Command in Brussels. An exorbitant daily sum was to be paid over by the French to cover the costs of occupation. Policing of a demilitarised zone along the Italian border was to be given to the Italians—who, not wishing to miss out on the spoils, had declared war on France on 10 June.

The French government came to rest in Vichy, a fashionable spa on the right bank of the river Allier in the Auvergne. Here, Pétain and his chief minister, the appeaser and pro-German Pierre Laval, set about putting in place a new French state. On paper at least, it was not a German puppet but a legal, sovereign state with diplomatic relations. During the rapid German advance, some 100,000 French soldiers had been killed in action, 200,000 wounded and 1.8 million others were now making their way into captivity in prisoner-of-war camps in Austria and Germany, but a new France was to rise out of the ashes of the old. ‘Follow me,’ declared Pétain: ‘keep your faith in
La France Eternelle
’. Pétain was 84 years old. Those who preferred not to follow him scrambled to leave France—over the border into Spain and Switzerland or across the Channel—and began to group together as the Free French with French nationals from the African colonies who had argued against a negotiated surrender to Germany.

In this France envisaged by Pétain and his Catholic, conservative, authoritarian and often anti-Semitic followers, the country would be purged and purified, returned to a mythical golden age before the French revolution introduced perilous ideas about equality. The new French were to respect their superiors and the values of discipline, hard work and sacrifice and they were to shun the decadent individualism that had, together with Jews, Freemasons, trade unionists, immigrants, gypsies and communists, contributed to the military defeat of the country.

Returning from meeting Hitler at Montoire on 24 October, Pétain declared: ‘With honour, and to maintain French unity… I am embarking today on the path of collaboration’. Relieved that they would not have to fight, disgusted by the British bombing of the French fleet at anchor in the Algerian port of Mers-el-Kebir, warmed by the thought of their heroic fatherly leader, most French people were happy to join him. But not, as it soon turned out, all of them.

Long before they reached Paris, the Germans had been preparing for the occupation of France. There would be no gauleiter—as in the newly annexed Alsace-Lorraine—but there would be military rule of a minute and highly bureaucratic kind. Everything from the censorship of the press to the running of the postal services was to be under tight German control. A thousand railway officials arrived to supervise the running of the trains. France was to be regarded as an enemy kept in
faiblesse inférieure
, a state of dependent weakness, and cut off from the reaches of all Allied forces. It was against this background of collaboration and occupation that the early Resistance began to take shape.

A former scoutmaster and reorganiser of the Luftwaffe, Otto von Stülpnagel, a disciplinarian Prussian with a monocle, was named chief of the Franco-German Armistice Commission. Moving into the Hotel Majestic, he set about organising the civilian administration of occupied France, with the assistance of German civil servants, rapidly drafted in from Berlin. Von Stülpnagel’s powers included both the provisioning and security of the German soldiers and the direction of the French economy. Not far away, in the Hotel Crillon in the rue de Rivoli, General von Sturnitz was busy overseeing day to day life in the capital. In requisitioned hotels and town houses, men in gleaming boots were assisted by young German women secretaries, soon known to the French as ‘little grey mice’.

There was, however, another side to the occupation, which was neither as straightforward, nor as reasonable; and nor was it as tightly under the German military command as von Stülpnagel and his men would have liked. This was the whole apparatus of the secret service, with its different branches across the military and the police.

After the protests of a number of his generals about the behaviour of the Gestapo in Poland, Hitler had agreed that no SS security police would accompany the invading troops into France. Police powers would be placed in the hands of the military administration alone. However Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, the myopic, thin-lipped 40-year-old Chief of the German Police, who had long dreamt of breeding a master race of Nordic Ayrans, did not wish to see his black-shirted SS excluded. He decided to dispatch to Paris a bridgehead of his own, which he could later use to send in more of his men. Himmler ordered his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, the cold-blooded head of the Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo, which he had built up into an instrument of terror, to include a small group of twenty men, wearing the uniform of the Abwehr’s secret military police, and driving vehicles with military plates.

In charge of this party was a 30-year-old journalist with a doctorate in philosophy, called Helmut Knochen. Knochen was a specialist in Jewish repression and spoke some French. After commandeering a house on the avenue Foch with his team of experts in anti-terrorism and Jewish affairs, he called on the Paris Prefecture, where he demanded to be given the dossiers on all German émigrés, all Jews, and all known anti-Nazis. Asked by the military what he was doing, he said he was conducting research into dissidents.

Knochen and his men soon became extremely skilful at infiltration, the recruitment of informers and as interrogators. Under him, the German secret services would turn into the most feared German organisation in France, permeating every corner of the Nazi system.

Knochen was not, however, alone in his desire to police France. There were also the counter-terrorism men of the Abwehr, who reported back to Admiral Canaris in Berlin; the Einsatzstab Rosenberg which ferreted out Masonic lodges and secret societies and looted valuable art to be sent off to Germany, and Goebbels’s propaganda specialists. Von Ribbentrop, the Minister for Foreign Affairs in Berlin, had also persuaded Hitler to let him send one of his own men to Paris, Otto Abetz, a Francophile who had courted the French during the 1930s with plans for Franco-German co-operation. Abetz was 37, a genial, somewhat stout man, who had once been an art master, and though recognised to be charming and to love France, was viewed by both French and Germans with suspicion, not least because his somewhat ambiguous instructions made him ‘responsible for political questions in both occupied and unoccupied France’. From his sumptuous embassy in the rue de Lille, Abetz embarked on collaboration ‘with a light touch’. Paris, as he saw it, was to become once again the
cité de lumière
, and at the same time would serve as the perfect place of delight and pleasure for its German conquerors. Not long after visiting Paris, Hitler had declared that every German soldier would be entitled to a visit to the city.

Despite the fact that all these separate forces were, in theory, subordinated to the German military command, in practice they had every intention of operating independently. And, when dissent and resistance began to grow, so the military command was increasingly happy to let the unofficial bodies of repression deal with any signs of rebellion. Paris would eventually become a little Berlin, with all the rivalries and clans and divisions of the Fatherland, the difference being that they shared a common goal: that of dominating, ruling, exploiting and spying on the country they were occupying.

Though the French police—of which there were some 100,000 throughout France in the summer of 1940—had at first been ordered to surrender their weapons, they were soon instructed to take them back, as it was immediately clear that the Germans were desperately short of policemen. The 15,000 men originally working for the Paris police were told to resume their jobs, shadowed by men of the Feldkommandatur. A few resigned; most chose not to think, but just to obey orders; but there were others for whom the German occupation would prove a step to rapid promotion.

The only German police presence that the military were tacitly prepared to accept as independent of their control was that of the anti-Jewish service, sent by Eichmann, under a tall, thin, 27-year-old Bavarian called Theo Dannecker. By the end of September, Dannecker had also set himself up in the avenue Foch and was making plans for what would become the Institut d’Etudes des Questions Juives. His job was made infinitely easier when it became clear that Pétain and the Vichy government were eager to anticipate his wishes. At this stage in the war, the Germans were less interested in arresting the Jews in the occupied zone than in getting rid of them by sending them to the free zone, though Pétain was no less determined not to have them. According to a new census, there were around 330,000 Jews living in France in 1940, of which only half were French nationals, the others having arrived as a result of waves of persecution across Europe.

At the time of the 1789 revolution, France had been the first country to emancipate and integrate its Jews as French citizens. All through the 1920s and 1930s the country had never distinguished between its citizens on the basis of race or religion. Within weeks of the German invasion, posters were seen on Parisian walls with the words ‘Our enemy is the Jew’. Since the Germans felt that it was important to maintain the illusion—if illusion it was—that anti-Jewish measures were the result of direct orders by the Vichy government and stemmed from innate French anti-Semitism, Dannecker began by merely ‘prompting’ a number of ‘spontaneous’ anti-Jewish demonstrations. ‘Young guards’ were secretly recruited to hang about in front of Jewish shops to scare customers away. In early August, they ransacked a number of Jewish shops. On the 20th, a
grande action
saw the windows of Jewish shops in the Champs-Elysées stoned. One of the Rothschilds’ châteaux was stripped of its art, which gave Göring six Matisses, five Renoirs, twenty Braques, two Delacroix and twenty-one Picassos to add to his growing collection of looted paintings.

But it was not only the Jews who attracted the interest of von Stülpnagel and his men. France had rightly been proud of the welcome given to successive waves of refugees fleeing civil wars, political repression or acute poverty. Poles in particular had been coming to France since the eighteenth century, and the 1920s had brought thousands of men to replace the shortage of manpower caused by the immense French losses in the First World War. Many had become coal miners, settling in the north and east. More recently had come the German refugees, arriving in response to every Nazi crackdown, 35,000 of them in 1933 alone; Austrians escaping the
Anschluss
; Czechs in the wake of Munich; Italians, who had opposed Mussolini. Then there were the Spanish republicans, fleeing Franco at the end of the civil war, of whom some 100,000 were still in France, many of them living in appalling hardship behind barbed wire in camps near the Spanish border.

To these refugees the French had been generous, at least until the economic reversals of the 1930s pushed up unemployment and Prime Minister Daladier drafted measures to curtail their numbers and keep checks on ‘spies and agitators’ while opening camps for ‘undesirable aliens’. France, under Daladier, had been the only Western democracy not to condemn Kristallnacht. The extreme right-wing leader of L’Action Française, Charles Maurras, spoke of ‘these pathogenic political, social and moral microbes’. Watching a train of refugees leave France not long before the war, the writer Saint-Exupéry had remarked that they had become ‘no more than half human beings, shunted from one end of Europe to the other by economic interests’. Despite the growing xenophobia, many foreigners remained in France; but now, in an atmosphere of uncertainty and hostility, they were stateless, without protection and extremely vulnerable. By late September 1940, many were on their way to internment camps, the German refugees among them branded ‘enemies of the Reich’ and handed over by the very French who not so long before had granted them asylum.

The treatment of the political exiles caused little protest. The French had other things on their mind. Initial relief at the politeness of the German occupiers was rapidly giving way to unease and a growing uncertainty about how, given that the war showed no signs of ending, they were going to survive economically. As more Germans arrived to run France, they commandeered houses, hotels, schools, even entire streets. They requisitioned furniture, cars, tyres, sheets, glasses and petrol, closed some restaurants and cinemas to all but German personnel, and reserved whole sections of hospitals for German patients.
Charcuterie
vanished from the shops, as Germans helped themselves to pigs, sheep and cattle.

What they had no immediate use for, they sent back to Germany, and packed goods wagons were soon to be seen leaving from the eastern Parisian stations, laden down with looted goods, along with raw materials and anything that might be useful to Germany’s war effort. ‘I dream of looting, and thoroughly,’ wrote Göring to the military command in France. Just as Napoleon had once looted the territories he occupied of their art, now Germany was helping itself to everything that took the fancy of the occupiers. Soon, dressmakers in Paris were closing, because there was no cloth for them to work with; shoemakers were shutting, because there was no leather. Safe-deposit boxes and bank accounts were scrutinised and, if they were Jewish, plundered. Rapidly, French factories found themselves making planes, spare parts, ammunition, cars, tractors and radios for Germany.