Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 (10 page)

The beginning of 1942, according to the Prefecture of Police, brought “a brutal conflagration of Communist activity.” Indeed, consumed by a “burning hatred of Germans,” youth gangs had “redoubled” their efforts in the Occupied Zone, as another spasm of attacks and reprisals seemed in the offing. This heavily charged atmosphere was bound to produce the usual frictions between German authorities and French police. A conference called at the Hotel Majestic attempted to establish clear boundaries of jurisdiction with a declaration that the municipal police were to act strictly in accordance with French laws but “in no case” under German decrees. This hypothetical distinction proved of course impossible to sustain.
²⁵

Ten more hostages were executed by firing squad on 12 January 1942 in retaliation for the fatal wounding of a German army captain in Dijon a fortnight before. This event, although virtually a banality in the bloody context of the past several months, in fact provoked second thoughts about the Occupation's hostage policy. One suggestion emanating from within the administration was to avoid hostage executions in the future by sending all criminal suspects to military tribunals, which would hand down a generous number of death sentences. The condemned prisoners would be detained in a pool of available victims, who could then be executed whenever the occasion demanded, thereby negating the criticism of the Vichy government and the French people that the Germans were ruthlessly killing innocent civilians for crimes they did not commit.
²⁶

Stülpnagel himself recommended an alternative procedure to deflect such opprobrium. He began by citing as a fact that, of sixty-eight cases of attacks on German personnel, twenty-two had been solved and the killers brought to justice. Investigations proved that these perpetrators were invariably small Communist groups. The general French public was thus demonstrably not responsible for the incidents, and selecting innocent hostages from among them could not fail to have undesirable consequences for an orderly Occupation. Rather, it would be better to transport the majority of interned individuals to Germany or to “the East” where (about this he was conspicuously vague) they could be dealt with. As a result, Stülpnagel wrote with emphasis, executions would be conducted in France “only in a
limited
number appropriate to the circumstances” (again left to the imagination). Personally, he added for good measure, he could no longer reconcile the mass execution of French hostages with his conscience. Moreover, he explicitly requested that this message be conveyed to General Keitel in Berlin.
²⁷

This ostentatious fling of a gauntlet initiated the chain of events leading to Stülpnagel's resignation as MBF in mid-February 1942. Unfortunately for him, the crisis of command coincided with the most severe personal strain within the Paris military administration since the onset of the Occupation. That is, it occurred just as he found it necessary to reprimand two of his most trusted underlings, Jonathan Schmid and Werner Best, for airing differences and acting independently on the question of hostages in Nantes. In a fit of pique, Stülpnagel categorically insisted that it was his prerogative “solely and alone” to make policy decisions in Paris, and he sharply chastised Best for “a complete misunderstanding of the entire situation.”
²⁸

It was too much. On 15 February 1942, apparently after suffering a nervous breakdown, Stülpnagel proffered two letters of resignation. The first was a formal statement addressed to OKW in which he gave an explanation that recurrent illness had forced him to abandon his post. Although there was some truth to that assertion (hence his frequent absences from Paris), it was altogether unconvincing—as the second letter demonstrated. This was a private missive to Keitel in which he recounted in detail “the entangled situation” at the Hotel Majestic and cast a net of blame as widely as possible. In addition to members of his own staff (obviously referring to Schmid and Best), who did not always obey his orders, there had been problems with the Sipo-SD (Knochen and Dannecker) and their “not always useful dealings.” His choicest words of complaint, however, were reserved for the Embassy (Abetz and Rudolf Schleier), where dubious political manipulations had produced only a more rigid negative attitude among representatives of the Vichy government.

Yet in the end, it was unquestionably the hostage crisis that was the most crucial sticking point, because it had revealed both the impotence of Stülpnagel's regime and the essential difference regarding the Occupation as viewed from Paris and Berlin. Seeing the situation from afar and in the broad context of ruling various occupied territories throughout Eastern and Western Europe, Keitel was convinced that harsh retaliatory measures were necessary and justified to quell the successive waves of public violence. But, as so often noted, Stülpnagel's first priority was to promote collaboration in France by ensuring a firm but fair military administration, a policy he felt better able to formulate “through my intimate knowledge of the mentality of the French people.” Accordingly, he favored only a very few hostage executions in France, to be accompanied by the “deportation of great masses of Communists and Jews to the East.” This, he maintained, would actually strike more fear into the French and thus be of greater deterrent value than the uninformed and inconsistent instructions from Berlin (for which he specifically blamed Hermann Göring!) to execute large numbers of innocents. “Thus on these issues,” he concluded, “I sit among the various powers and, so to speak, among all the stools.” Hence, after fifteen months of “strenuous but successful work,” Otto von Stülpnagel chose to resign.
²⁹

He was immediately replaced by his cousin, Carl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, an officer more patrician in bearing than his predecessor, whose clear intention was to calm emotions in Paris and to defuse the hostage issue. Yet Heinrich (as he was always called) had no
tabula rasa
, and he was far from successful in doing so. One of his first acts as MBF was to forbid the use of the word
Geisel
because the French equivalent (
otage
) implied taking into custody some prominent local notability. Instead, only the more technical term
Sühnemassnahmen
should be employed, thereby stressing the common sphere between persons committing a crime and those selected to pay for it. The new Stülpnagel likewise wished to eliminate from the Occupation's vocabulary “deportation” and “to the East,” expressions that he felt were evocative of camps in Siberia under the tsars.
³⁰

Heinrich von Stülpnagel also took pains to patch up relations with Abetz by reaffirming the nebulous policy that all political questions should be cleared by the Paris military administration through the German Embassy. Nevertheless, the evidence is that hard feelings between the two persisted, especially by proxy through their surrogates, Schaumburg and Schleier. Whereas the former found the Embassy's pretensions to control all propaganda and political matters to be “painful,” the latter snapped back that the MBF's strictures were “false and incomprehensible.”
³¹
Nor did the vicious circle of murderous attacks and harsh retaliations cease. On 10 March 1942, twenty Communists were shot, and another twenty had their death sentences deferred (until they were later granted a stay of execution). A month later, after a German sentinel was killed and a bomb was thrown into a German locale, twenty more Communists were promptly executed. If the perpetrators were not captured soon, the threat was that “a certain number” of hostages would meet the same fate.
³²

For good and obvious reasons, relations with the French police remained ticklish. When pressed on the problem, Vichy's current chief of government, Admiral Darlan, admitted that the French constabulary could not shirk the “especially sensitive duties” of transporting prisoners to detention camps, but they must use a maximum of tact in this “particularly delicate” operation. To this tortured statement he added a phrase that betrayed the psychological malaise created by the hostage crisis: the French police should obey orders “while manifestly leaving the entire responsibility for the measures taken to the German authorities.”
³³
Such caveats or not, it was evident that a certain routine had set in and that everyone was expected to do his part to push the campaign of repression. On 2 May another spectacular shooting occurred in Paris at the Clichy metro stop. Five “Communists and Jews” were executed at once. Another fifteen, it was announced, would follow if the assassins were not soon caught. In addition, without naming their destination, 500 persons would be condemned to forced labor.
³⁴
A nearly identical scenario was repeated after an attack on 27 May: ten persons would be executed and “a greater number” would be transported to a labor camp if the killers were not delivered to the police within ten days. In sum, Paris had become the scene of a roiling seismic insurrection that could neither threaten the public order imposed by the military Occupation nor be entirely repressed by it.
³⁵

Since there was no imminent end to this story, one can only draw an arbitrary chronological line in lieu of a terminus. The end of May 1942 was greeted by a flurry of statistics concerning the hostage question. Because of the many inconsistencies and discrepancies resulting from overlapping categories, it is impossible to untangle these data with absolute precision. Still, the generalization must stand that the number of hostages executed in the year since Alfons Moser had been gunned down at the metro of Barbès-Rochechouart was approaching the figure of 500. One report set the total at 434, another at 466, and a third at 473.
³⁶
Whatever the exact truth, there could be no doubt that the impact of the hostage crisis had fundamentally altered the ambiance of Paris and therewith inaugurated a new phase of the Occupation.

Chapter 7

A D
ANGEROUS
P
LACE

W
hile the hostage crisis naturally gathered all the headlines, daily life in occupied Paris ground on. The difference for the Occupation was a new tone of urgency and severity. Stimulated by the shocking news from the Soviet Union, German and French police conducted mass arrests of suspected Communists. Six hundred of them were taken into custody during the first week after the invasion of Russia. In addition to arrests by the Paris criminal police, the municipal constabulary fanned out in the city, stopping and interrogating citizens in the streets. One report in September 1941 recorded exactly 76,567 such confrontations that resulted in nearly a thousand detentions.
¹
These actions were accompanied by tighter and more strictly enforced curfews for bistrots, bars, and cafés. Cinemas and theaters were ordered, temporarily, to be closed by 8:00 PM.
²
Penalties for traffic violations were now to receive “strict application,” and instructions were issued to raise the level of alert for possible air raids. No public celebrations would be permitted for the national holiday, the
quatorze juillet
. In short, the grip of the Occupation was being perceptibly strengthened.
³

The Germans also moved at once to regulate what survived of French political life. No new organizations would be allowed, and those that existed were prohibited from displaying badges, uniforms, and flags. Only a few political parties and “movements” would be authorized or tolerated, while three were explicitly forbidden.
⁴
A particular problem was posed by the so-called Légion de l’Europe unie, which was headed by Eugène Deloncle. Its members were supposedly being recruited as volunteers in the struggle against Bolshevism—not a principle the Germans had reason to oppose—but Occupation authorities were skeptical about encouraging any such formation, even in a good cause. Nor did the Vichy government support it. Yet after some controversy and delay, Deloncle finally received permission to hold a public rally at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, which was draped with the French tricolors (against orders) and enlivened by a marching band.
⁵
As it turned out, this gathering on 18 July was much ado about very little. The meeting hall was half-empty, and the loudspeaker system malfunctioned, causing many in the audience to leave before the conclusion. Afterwards, a few small groups struck up a chorus of the “Marseillaise,” but the cacophony was such that no police intervention was necessary to break it up. Recruitment for the Légion remained feeble.
⁶

To cover these immediate measures of public control, the Occupation meanwhile attempted to maintain a veneer of normalcy. Performances by the Circus Amar and a troop of puppeteers were permitted. And the Piscine Deligny, a swimming pool floating in the Seine near the National Assembly building, was reopened. A new list of authorized brothels for German military personnel was issued, from which the one near the concentration camp at Drancy had been discreetly removed.
⁷
A list of twenty-one nightclubs whose curfew was stretched to 5:00 AM was published in mid-July, and several weeks later seventy-one restaurants were accorded an extension to 1:00 AM, notably those most frequented by German officers, such as the Tour d—Argent, Maxim's, and Lapérouse.
⁸
A German tennis club was in full swing, with more members than it could accommodate, and ice-skating rinks were operated in the autumn. Large numbers of German troops from elsewhere in France continued to tour the capital—with instructions to “keep a distance from the French civilian population”—while steamships regularly transported hundreds of German soldiers on cruises up the Seine.
⁹

None of these amusements mitigated the wave of violence that swept the Paris region and some provincial towns in occupied France. In addition to the individual attacks on German personnel that provoked the hostage issue, French insurgents began to make more indiscriminate use of improvised explosive devices. Either pitched or planted, these small bombs at some times recalled the anarchists of late nineteenth-century Russia and at others suggested the methods of dissidents much later. From the standpoint of the Occupation, such incidents were recurring with dismaying regularity: in a garden on 18 August, at the Renault factory on 29 August, at the Paris flea market and in the Latin Quarter at a German bookstore in November, and so on.
¹⁰
During the two months of December 1941 and January 1942, according to one Abwehr report, seventeen explosions occurred in Paris in addition to eight personal attacks on German military persons. It was, as Commandant Schaumburg commented, “a dangerous development.”
¹¹

One instance was particularly noteworthy. In early October, lethal devices were exploded simultaneously in seven Paris synagogues. Speaking for the Sicherheitspolizei, Helmut Knochen immediately announced this to be “a purely French matter” that should be left to the Paris criminal police. But an investigation by the MBF soon proved otherwise. When interrogated, one of Knochen's subordinates admitted that he had assisted in the action on orders from Sipo-SD headquarters and that the explosives used had actually been supplied from Germany. Otto von Stülpnagel was outraged by Knochen's connivance “behind my back” and “contrary to my intentions.” Further cooperation with him would therefore be “impossible,” he notified Berlin, while demanding that Knochen be recalled from Paris. As it happened, however, Ambassador Abetz intervened, and Knochen was retained after all, as Stülpnagel was informed, because his “sensitivity” to French politics and his good relations with the German Embassy made him indispensable.
¹²

Another striking feature of the “resistance movements” (a term now more common) in and around Paris was a series of attacks on railway installations. Lines were cut, gates disabled, railway ties loosened, and occasional bombs exploded. German authorities suspected French
cheminots
of abetting such actions but lacked definitive proof of their guilt.
¹³
All that could be done, it was decided, was to post guards along the tracks. The difficulties of implementing that policy were patent. A map of the Paris region revealed that it contained thousands of kilometers of railway. An initial proposal was to post a guard every 300 meters. Werner Best even advocated that guards be placed every 100 meters, where their posts would be manned each night from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM. Clearly, there were not enough policemen available for such a scheme, and so citizens were to be recruited for the task at a ratio of five to one. But should they be armed? Only with wooden batons (
Schlagwaffen
), it was decided. All of this came to nothing. Gendarmes promised by the Prefecture of Police never arrived in sufficient numbers, and civilians—understandably disinclined to sit up all night—shied away from recruitment. Once again, for lack of adequate manpower, a German program could not be sustained. It was finally determined that mobile guard units rather than stationary posts should watch the railways and that only certain bridges and tunnels would remain under constant observation. Acts of sabotage consequently continued.
¹⁴

Besides these troubling episodes, the Occupation soon had to deal with bombings by the British Royal Air Force (RAF). Two of these raids occurred just before the start of Germany's Russian campaign: one at dawn on 17 May at Le Bourget airport and another at the Dunlop tire factory in the night of 15–16 June 1941. Both were relatively harmless and seemed to be no more than a random alarm. The same was true of a stray bomb dropped on the Avenue Foch in October without apparent purpose.
¹⁵
That changed in early 1942. On 3 March, approximately eighty RAF planes attacked and severely damaged the Renault plant in the western suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. Estimates as always varied, but twelve German soldiers and nearly 500 French civilians were killed, and 200 houses in the vicinity were destroyed.
¹⁶
Another major attack, also in the western
banlieue
near Colombes, occurred at the end of April, once again with heavy casualties and extensive damage to vital firms such as Alstom and Goodrich. To the consternation of German military authorities and propaganda officers, the population of Paris responded to these losses with stoic indifference. Such air raids, it was generally acknowledged, were a necessary part of the war effort and an unavoidable sacrifice if France were ever to be liberated.
¹⁷
A later military report outlined the damage from a similar raid at nearby Courbevoie and Gennevilliers on 30 May, and it added a convenient list of violent incidents around Paris during the summer and autumn of 1942:

Although there is no way to reconstruct a complete record of all the violent acts committed in Paris during the Occupation, such sporadic glimpses suffice to suggest that the capital had indeed become a dangerous place for all concerned. It is no wonder, then, that steps were taken to bolster the city's police force or that the Germans took a keen interest in hastening them. The current Prefect of Police, Admiral Bard, proved eager to please, initiating a reform and recruitment effort after firing fifty officials on his staff who were suspected of Communist or Gaullist sympathies.
¹⁹
Yet he had to endure pointed criticism from Schaumburg that the French police were too often “passive” and that their performance on the streets seemed “reluctant and lethargic.”
²⁰
Two innovations stood out. First, a mobile unit called the Service de Police Anti-Communiste (SPAC) was organized and specially equipped with weapons and vehicles in an effort to provide additional public security through quick response.
²¹
Second, regional police brigades were attached to the offices of prefects throughout the Occupied Zone to reinforce the function of
police judiciaire
attached to the French court system.
²²
Besides the normal duties of police units in a large city, the French were prodded into performing special tasks: a search of nineteen metro stations in early October 1941; a raid on illegal gun dealers (with 36 arrests) a fortnight later; removing graffiti from traffic signs; thwarting incipient demonstrations on Armistice Day; raiding a Communist nest in the Rue Ferdinand Duval, where 250,000 illicit political tracts were seized; and so forth.
²³

If these actions and the German supervision of them transpired without much overt friction, there was always an element of ambiguity. Let it be recalled that altogether about 40,000 to 50,000 men were involved in the
gendarmerie
and the various police forces of the Paris region. Since the Germans lacked such numbers for regular law enforcement and special assignments, as Best noted, they were “forced” to cooperate with the French Ministry of the Interior and the Prefecture of Police, which required close and constant oversight.
²⁴
Hence, despite the recurring grumbles by the Germans about the “failure” (
Versagen
) of the Paris police and the absence of “satisfactory results”—for instance, in suppressing “wild” prostitution—the Occupation continued to count on the French to make up for the German deficiency of manpower.
²⁵
A good illustration of this symbiotic relationship was a campaign mounted under German orders to search the sewers of Paris. In view of the fact that the city had over 2,000 kilometers of underground passages with nearly 5,000 entrances, this project was well beyond the capacity of the German secret police and uniformed Gestapo forces. Necessarily, therefore, it was conducted by French police units, who claimed the seizure of 16,000 revolvers and rifles plus 19 machine guns from the beginning of September 1941 to the end of March 1942.
²⁶