Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (3 page)

JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON Thursday, 13 June 1940, two men walked out of the American Embassy in Paris into the vast and deserted Place de la Concorde. The French capital’s blacked-out streets presented a strange spectacle to Robert Murphy, the embassy’s counsellor, and naval attaché Commander Roscoe Hillenkoetter. The government, the army and most of the population had abandoned Paris. Two million people, including the vast majority of the 30,000 Americans that Murphy estimated lived in Paris before the war, had fled in fear of the conquering Wehrmacht. Thousands of victorious German soldiers were poised to occupy the undefended city at dawn. American Ambassador William Christian Bullitt, whom the departing French government had effectively appointed mayor of Paris on 12 June, had assured the Wehrmacht’s commanders that Paris was an ‘open city’. Open cities waived their right to resist in exchange for a peaceful occupation. Paris had already given up. Twelve hours earlier, at noon, Robert Murphy barely recognized the previously vibrant avenue des Champs-Elysées: ‘The only living creatures in sight were three abandoned dogs cavorting beneath the large French flags which still hung at each corner of the great concourse.’ On the opposite, Left Bank of the Seine, sheep belonging to refugees from northern France grazed on the Hôpital des Invalides’ ceremonial lawns.

Amid the forlorn expanse of the Place de la Concorde, its Egyptian obelisk swaddled in sandbags and its roundabout eerily devoid of traffic, Murphy and Hillenkoetter watched four spectral figures approach out of the darkness. Murphy recognized Chief Rabbi Julien Weill, religious head of Paris’s Jewish community. With the
Grand Rabbin
were his wife and two friends. Murphy appreciated their fears. As head consular official for the previous nine years until he became counsellor, Murphy’s responsibility had been the well-being of France’s American community. When the Germans began their rampage through the north of France in May, American citizens demanded embassy protection. At the same time, fourteen million Belgian, Dutch and French men, women and children took to the road ahead of the Nazis. Knowing of German atrocities in Poland during the Blitzkrieg of 1939, Parisians, especially Jews, were understandably fearful. Murphy reflected, ‘We in the embassy felt more sympathy for these victims than we did for a considerable number of Americans who became panic-stricken at the last minute and behaved as if they were particular targets of the Nazis. They had much less reason to become alarmed, since we were not at war.’

Rabbi Weill could have obtained an American visa and gone to New York, where his brother, Professor Felix Weill, taught French and was a United States citizen. Despite Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany and the lands the German Army had occupied since 1938, he had chosen to remain in Paris. Knowing now that the French government itself–including the tough and patriotic Jewish interior minister, Georges Mandel–had fled Paris, the rabbi was reconsidering his decision. Murphy thought that Rabbi Weill had ‘very understandable reasons’ for changing his mind. The rabbi asked Murphy and Hillenkoetter whether he and his family might find places in an embassy car, with its diplomatic immunity, leaving Paris. It was too late, Murphy said. German Panzer divisions surrounded Paris. The exiled American Ambassador to Poland, Anthony Drexel Biddle, Jr, and Embassy Secretary H. Freeman Matthews had departed with the fleeing French government for Tours and were following it on to Bordeaux. No other diplomats were leaving Paris that night. Nonetheless, Murphy lent the rabbi and his family a car whose chauffeur drove them to the city gates. There, German sentries ordered them to return.

The two Americans continued their promenade. No cafés were open, as some usually were at midnight. No light shone from any window or street lamp. The prostitutes had vanished from their usual posts along the rue Saint-Denis and up in Pigalle. The great nighttime gathering places, the markets of Les Halles and the jazz clubs of Montmartre, were closed. Many of the vibrant American ‘Negro’ community, like night club owner Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith and band leader Benny Carter, had left Paris in the autumn of 1939 or were about to sail on the last America-bound ship from Bordeaux. Even the most celebrated American woman in Paris, 34-year-old chanteuse Josephine Baker, had left–first as a Red Cross nurse aiding the war’s refugees, then for the safety of her country chateau. ‘The few people who remained in the city were buttoned up in their shuttered homes,’ Murphy noted. The only light Murphy could see was arching across the sky north of Paris, each burst of artillery reminding him of a shooting star. Commander Hillenkoetter similarly recalled, ‘Contrary to rumors, the night passed quietly, although artillery firing could be seen and heard in the northwest.’

The night sky was at last clear of a week’s all-pervasive black smoke including that from the burning files of the French government and British Embassy. Most of the conflagration had come from the Standard Oil Company’s petroleum reserves. Standard’s man in Paris, William Dewitt Crampton, had set the stocks alight at the request of the French General Staff only after checking with the American Embassy. Robert Murphy, rather than let a full month’s supply of petrol fuel German tanks, had told Crampton to go ahead.

Murphy, the red-haired Irish Catholic diplomat from Milwaukee, and Hillenkoetter, a 43-year-old Annapolis graduate from St Louis, returned to the rue de Boissy d’Anglas at the northwest corner of the Place de la Concorde. They heard, coming along the Seine from the east, the gigantic bells in the Cathedral of Notre Dame’s spires tolling midnight to herald the new day, 14 June 1940. The embassy’s iron gates, opposite the façade of the now-shuttered Hôtel Crillon in its brooding Palladian majesty, opened to admit Murphy and Hillenkoetter. They entered the chancellery, where, along with Ambassador Bullitt and a skeleton staff, they waited for the German army. Theirs was the last walk anyone took through free Paris.

The American community in Paris, the largest in continental Europe, had little to fear from the Germans. The United States stood aloof from the war between Germany and the Allies, and it enjoyed the respect of both sides. Although Ambassador Bullitt had advised American citizens without vital business to leave when France and Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, about half had elected to stay. The
drôle de guerre
, which the Germans called the
Sitzkrieg
and the British and Americans the ‘phoney war’, dragged on for the next eight months. Only the occasional air raid drill or the sight of sandbags around the monuments disturbed their routine. In May 1940, the German advance through Holland and Belgium into France was so swift that the Americans who feared life under German occupation fled south from Paris. Three weeks before the city fell, as the French and British armies retreated,
The New York Times
’ front page announced, ‘Most Americans Staying in Paris’: ‘The United States Embassy said that of the slightly more than 3,600 Americans in the Paris district on Dec. 31, about 2,500 are still here. They are mostly businessmen and members of their families and newspaper men, more of whom have been arriving recently.’

The journalists were not the only American arrivals. American Field Service ambulances, funded and directed by the indefatigable sister of New York financier J. P. Morgan, Miss Anne Morgan, ferried wounded British and French soldiers to hospitals from the front throughout the Battle of France. As soon as the Wehrmacht invaded neighbouring Belgium on 10 May, hundreds of young American men rushed to France. They swore to defend democracy, just as 17,000 Frenchmen had answered the Marquis de Lafayette’s call to fight for American independence. So many Americans attempted to join the French Army during the Battle of France that the French could not accommodate them all. Twenty-seven-year-old Tom McBride of Queens, New York, and twelve aviator colleagues attempted to reconstitute the old Lafayette Escadrille, the squadron of American pilots who fought for France in the Great War. When they reached Paris on 1 May 1940, they were welcomed by General Aldebert de Chambrun, a direct descendant of Lafayette, and the air minister. ‘They showed us all over Paris,’ McBride said, ‘then dropped us cold.’ He complained, ‘All the Air Minister would say was, “Wait. Wait. Wait.”’ The French Air Corps commissioned McBride a lieutenant, but he never got the chance to fly against the Luftwaffe. Undeterred, he went to Canada and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force.

American citizens who remained in Paris had little to fear. The embassy issued more than 1,000 red certificates, signed by Third Secretary Tyler Thompson, to indicate which houses and businesses belonged to American citizens and could not, under international law, be touched. The Americans’ institutions–the American Hospital in the fashionable western suburb of Neuilly, the American Library in the rue de Téhéran, the American Cathedral on the avenue George-V, the American Church on the Quai d’Orsay, the Rotary Club, the American Chamber of Commerce and many other clubs and charitable societies–were still functioning. The American Church bulletin had announced the previous Sunday, ‘The American Church will continue its activities and remain open throughout the days to come. The building will be open daily and the various groups will meet as usual.’ The Americans’ newspaper, the
Paris Herald Tribune
, went on publishing until 12 June, the last paper sold in Paris before the Germans arrived. The American Ambassador, despite White House and State Department entreaties, refused to leave. ‘No American ambassador in Paris has ever run away from anything,’ Bullitt cabled President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ‘and that I think is the best tradition we have in the American diplomatic service.’ That tradition dated to Gouverneur Morris’s decision to stay during the French Revolution. Elihu B. Washburne continued it throughout the German occupation of 1870. In 1914, when Germany’s offensive put Paris within range of the Kaiser’s artillery, every ambassador except the American, Myron T. Herrick, fled. Bullitt would not to be the first to cut and run.

Born in Philadelphia in January 1891 to a WASP family of rich lawyers and railroad magnates who traced their American ancestors through Patrick Henry and Pocahontas, Bullitt spent much of his youth in Europe. His mother’s family, the Horowitzes, was originally German Jewish. The family spoke French at home, and he learned German in Munich. Graduating from Yale in 1912, Bullitt covered the world war in Russia, Germany, Austria and France as a correspondent for the
Philadelphia Public Ledger
. When America entered on the Allied side in 1917, the State Department hired him to conduct research for its intelligence section. President Woodrow Wilson took him to the Paris Peace Conference in 1918 as part of the American commission. Bullitt resigned, along with historian Samuel Eliot Morison and six other diplomats, to protest the terms of the Versailles Treaty. He pointed out to Wilson that the treaty, with its other flaws, left three million Germans under Czech rule and abandoned thirty-six million Chinese in Shantung to Japan. His resignation letter lamented, ‘But our government has consented now to deliver the suffering peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjection, and dismemberments–a new century of war.’ He predicted, ‘This isn’t a treaty of peace. I can see at least eleven wars in it.’ Political oblivion followed, but he had the funds to enjoy himself in a palace in Istanbul and luxurious apartments in Paris. His only novel,
It’s Not Done
, sold 150,000 copies in 1925–prompting Ernest Hemingway, whose books were not selling as well, to mention him in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1927 as ‘Bill Bullitt or Bull Billet, a big Jew from Yale and a fellow novel writer’. He married Louise Bryant, whose late husband, John Reed, had died in Russia after documenting its revolution in
Ten Days that Shook the World
. Bullitt and Louise had one child, Anne, and divorced in 1930. When his friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1933, he appointed Bullitt America’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union. Bullitt’s initial enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution collapsed in the face of Stalinist repression.

In 1936, FDR assigned Bullitt to Paris, where the French admired his style. He employed an excellent chef, served only the finest wines, dressed immaculately and flirted in flawless French. Bullitt rented the Château de Vineuil-Saint-Firmin in thoroughbred country at Chantilly, where he entertained France’s senior politicians at weekends. Ernest Hemingway, who had left Paris in 1929 but visited during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939, came out occasionally to shoot clay pigeons. During the week, Bullitt lived with his daughter, Anne, in the embassy residence in avenue d’Iéna. He negotiated vigorously in Europe for American interests, while advocating the French cause in Washington. No foreign ambassador was closer to the French cabinet, many of whom confided personal and state secrets in him. After three years in France, during which the country received persecuted Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, Bullitt hated Hitler as much as he did Stalin. In March 1940, the German Foreign Office released a ‘White Book’ of transcripts seized in Warsaw in which Bullitt told the Polish Ambassador to Washington, Count Jerzy Potocki, that ‘the French Army is the first line of defense for the United States’. The German press accused Bullitt and Ambassador to Britain Joseph Kennedy, despite Kennedy’s reputation for appeasement of Nazi Germany, of ‘using all their influence to aggravate the atmosphere of hostility in Europe’. The Nazis regarded Bullitt as the American diplomat most hostile to Germany, and they were probably right. No one fought harder to persuade America to send planes, tanks and other armaments to France. He had even arranged for French pilots secretly to test fly the latest American warplanes.

When the French government left Paris on 10 June, Bullitt telegraphed Secretary of State Cordell Hull: ‘This Embassy is the only official organization still functioning in the City of Paris except the Headquarters of the military forces, Governor and the Prefecture of Police.’ Italy, seeing that Germany would win, declared war on France and launched an invasion from the south that the outnumbered French repulsed. A few hours later, at the University of Virginia, Roosevelt declared, ‘On this tenth day of June 1940, the hand that held the dagger struck it into the back of its neighbor.’ He had borrowed the phrase from Bullitt. Gallup published its latest poll the same day: 62 per cent of the American people believed that, if Germany defeated both France and Britain, it would attack America next. The following day, Bullitt cabled Roosevelt: ‘I have talked with the Provisional Governor of Paris, who is the single government official remaining, and it may be that at a given moment I, as the only representative of the Diplomatic Corps remaining in Paris, will be obliged in the interest of public safety to take control of the City pending arrival of the German Army … Reynaud and Mandel just before their departure requested me to do this, if necessary.’