Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 (21 page)

Frequent public ceremonies of celebration by the Germans, mostly for their own edification, were a related and notable aspect of the Occupation. Given the seriousness of the military situation, observance in 1943 of the tenth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power on 30 January was declared to be a “memorial day” (
Gedenktag
) rather than a “holiday” (
Feiertag
). Members of the High Command and the diplomatic corps dutifully assembled at the Palais de Chaillot in solemn commemoration, which, remarked Schleier, demonstrated “how much the Germans in Paris are vicariously participating in the struggles” on the Russian front.
²⁷
When the news spread a few days later that the battle of Stalingrad had ended in defeat, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop promptly ordered the organization of another memorial service for the Reich's fallen heroes, adding some instructions: “Especially, as always, the absolute confidence in victory by the entire German people and its leadership is to be emphasized.” But where should these ceremonies be held? One suggestion was to create a memorial plot for German soldiers in the Bois de Boulogne. The Embassy observed, however, that there was too much traffic (and, one may add, danger of desecration) because of strollers and racetrack patrons. The site was therefore “neither desirable nor feasible.” The distant cemetery at Ivry-sur-Seine was surely more suitable.
²⁸
In such ceremonies it was striking during the third phase of the Occupation that the Nazi Party played a much more prominent role than before, as Abetz remarked in regard to proceedings at Ivry in March 1944. Presided over by the Commandant of Greater Paris and attended as usual by staff members from both the military administration and the Paris Embassy, this
Heldengedenkfeier
was conspicuously populated as well, in a show of unity, by uniformed members of the Nazi Party. The same was evident in preparations to celebrate the Führer's birthday on 20 April 1944, which was to be marked by a gigantic gathering in the Gaumont movie palace at the Place de Clichy. The theme of that splendid occasion, announced by the Nazi propaganda chief in Paris, was “Solidarity between Army and Party.”
²⁹
Similar attempts at public display by the French were generally discouraged. A small and quiet observance for Jeanne d—Arc in May 1943 was permitted, but only with the proviso that she be praised not as the freedom-loving maid of Orléans but as the victim of English aggression at Rouen: just as RAF bombers destroyed that city, so Jeanne had forfeited her life there in fire at the stake. The Germans also found no reason to forbid a subdued gathering at the Palais de Chaillot in April 1944 to mark the hundredth birthday of France's most notorious anti-Semite, Édouard Drumont. But they were far less pleased when Pétain laid a ceremonial wreath at the grave of General Joseph Joffre, the hero of the 1914 battle at the Marne. The Embassy saw to it that initial newspaper reports of the act were repressed and that no further mention of it was made in the press or on the radio.
³⁰

Control of religious ceremonies was less strict and hardly necessary. Yet distrust of the clergy and suspicion of the Church hierarchy in France became more evident. The most contentious issue by far was Sauckel's labor recruitment program with its French offspring, the STO, regarded by Church leaders as a Draconian measure designed to kidnap French youth away from their families. When pastoral letters from various French archbishops registered a protest, the Gestapo prompted the Paris Embassy to contact Pierre Laval, who agreed to clamp down on such public utterances. Schleier also requested Pétain to lodge a criticism against the episcopate for the disturbance of Franco-German relations.
³¹
The effect was negligible. Heretofore a convinced supporter of collaboration, Cardinal Suhard now broke ranks to reassure the faithful that opposition to the
Relève
was appropriate. In general, Suhard remained loyal to the Occupation, Schleier explained to Berlin, but he could not support the “Sauckel Initiatives” without turning popular opinion against the Church. Still, in a direct confrontation with the Cardinal, Schleier vigorously promoted the Nazi creed. In every country where the Nazis and their cohorts had taken over, he said, a result had been the banishment of “the children of the Revolution”—meaning liberals, Marxists, Communists, Freemasons, and anarchists. Not coincidentally, all of them were sworn enemies of the Church, Schleier continued, and it was therefore imperative that Catholics support the common cause, especially against “the leader of the dissidence,” General de Gaulle.
³²
Reported back to Berlin, this outburst received an enthusiastic second from Sipo-SD commander Kaltenbrunner, who tended to blame “dangerous activities” within the French Church on the “particularly hateful” anti-German agitation by Archbishop Gerlier of Lyon (a former Paris barrister before entering the priesthood). Given Suhard's recalcitrance and the passivity of Laval and Pétain, it seemed likely that the clergy would now “take the side of the national resistance and other opponents of National Socialism.”
³³
The situation, in other words, was that most of the French clergy were at one with the populace in the expectation of an Allied victory. Cardinal Suhard's reassurances about “the good relationship” between the Church and the Occupation failed to persuade German officials in Paris that Catholic priests and laymen could any longer be counted on to stay the course.
³⁴

Still less did the Germans evince confidence in French intellectuals, university professors, and
lycée
students. In addition to “cleansing” faculties, as well as the staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Sipo-SD made a practice of investigating various reprehensible individuals. The journalist Alfred Fabre-Luce, to name one, was considered “completely anti-German” and therefore “dangerous”—he was “an intellectual in the worst sense of the term.” Likewise, the historian Georges Bourgin was castigated for his “temporizing, not to say negative, attitude that most representatives of the French intelligentsia take vis-à-vis Germany.”
³⁵
Close watch was continued on schoolbooks, especially history texts, which were routinely expurgated or altogether forbidden.
³⁶
Yet the Gestapo in Paris was careful not to stir resentment by indiscreet displays of force, preferring undercover methods to keep the calm. In March 1943, the military administration approved a return from Lyon to the capital by the displaced École Polytechnique in order to separate its students from “irksome political influences” in the provinces and accustom them to “another climate” in Paris.
³⁷

But the generally degraded circumstances of the Occupation were such that a gradual deterioration in the education system became noticeable. One sore point, as noted, was the STO and the question of whether students could be conscripted for labor duties. The danger of bombings in the coastal regions required moving pupils to other areas, resulting in empty schools here, overcrowded classrooms there. Air raids caused a delay in opening schools in the autumn of 1943. Looking for a silver lining, the German Embassy remarked that scenes of aimless pupils loitering in the streets of Paris made good propaganda against Allied barbarism.
³⁸
At the beginning of 1944, the French Minister of Public Education prepared detailed lists of students and teachers arrested by the Germans. Because of sheer size, Paris naturally took the lead with a total of 141 since June 1940, but several other cities, such as Rennes (117), Poitiers (91), Bordeaux (87), and Besançon (84), had relatively significant numbers. A substantial percentage were soon released, while others were sentenced to only brief prison terms. In any event, all were subjected to Gestapo interrogation techniques that were bound, at the very least, to be unsettling.
³⁹
The accumulation of these factors—personal dislocations, air raids, censorship and surveillance, police arrests—created what French cabinet members called “particularly painful conditions,” which in May 1944 were serious enough to necessitate the cancellation of many
concours
, the terminal examinations that ordinarily climaxed the school calendar.
⁴⁰
By then the Paris education system was in the last throes of disintegration, as the following statistics demonstrate. During the 1938–1939 academic year, primary schools in Paris enrolled nearly 200,000 pupils. By December 1943, that total was down by half. On 20 May 1944, attendance was recorded for exactly 52,189, and on 5 June that figure was further reduced to 36,246. As the Allied invasion of France neared,
sauve qui peut
, nearly four-fifths of the city's schoolchildren had already been evacuated. In the meantime, students at the Occupation's own German school were being transferred to Berlin.
⁴¹

Finally, as for politics, little activity in Paris during 1943 and early 1944 merited that term. Two parties, Jacques Doriot's PPF and Marcel Déat's RNP, were the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the Occupation. Both were marginally useful for the Germans, but neither really enjoyed much popularity. The PPF was more overtly fascist, its paramilitary units clad in marine-blue uniforms, standing at attention with arms outstretched, shouting “Doriot, Doriot” and “Doriot au pouvoir.” But Doriot kept his distance from the Vichy government, refused open support for the Milice, and seemed mostly intent on remaining the uncontested leader of an isolated movement. Although rejecting overtures to join a unified political organization under government aegis, Déat's faction was closer to Joseph Darnand and actively recruited for the Milice, while Déat himself became Minister of Labor in the Vichy cabinet. None of this mattered greatly to the Occupation, except when party rallies led to “regrettable incidents,” as the Prefecture of Police complained, and resulted in “the most violent attacks” on French police.
⁴²
Otherwise, the landscape in Paris was populated by an odd assortment of quasi-political organizations, of which three deserve mention. The Groupe Collaboration was still in existence and indeed claimed to have 100,000 members in France, 10,000 of them in Paris, both dubiously round numbers. This group, led by Jean Weiland, was confined mostly to sponsoring lectures and concerts, for which it received modest subsidies in the name of propaganda. But the obvious problem was that its cause grew distinctly more unpopular as time passed, and it came under constant menace from a growing armed resistance. After being threatened that he would be “slaughtered like a dog,” Weiland requested weapons and was personally provided with a pistol. Still alarmed by “anarchy” in the provinces, he retreated to Paris, wondering what the use might be of his group's efforts if its cadres were “followed, threatened, and murdered.”
⁴³
Mention should also be made here of the Comité Ouvrier du Secours Immédiat (COSI), originally promoted by the military administration to distribute funds, collected from Paris Jews in the wake of the hostage crisis, in order to aid victims of Allied bombing attacks. This public beneficence was regarded by the Occupation as salutary propaganda, and Heinrich von Stülpnagel was persuaded in February 1943 to award an additional million francs to COSI to continue its charitable donations.
⁴⁴
To this uninspiring list may be added the Cercle Européen, essentially a high-minded and mostly honorary club encouraged by the Paris Embassy to jawbone Germany's defense of Western culture against the encroachment of Bolshevism. Its membership included 200 Germans, of which 33 were military officers, roiling yet another controversy between the Embassy (pro) and the MBF (con) about the appropriateness of the army's participation in “politics.”
⁴⁵

By 1944, only two political formations actually counted. One was the mutually wary alliance between Gaullists and Communists in what was now often identified as the “national resistance.” In propaganda leaflets and posters, General de Gaulle was effusively described as “the future leader and savior of France.” If they were hardly charmed by this notion, Communists in Paris nonetheless remained mostly quiet in the confidence, as the Prefect of Police observed, that they would soon be contributing to “a national insurrection and the German defeat.”
⁴⁶
The major opposing protagonist was represented by Darnand's
miliciens
. It was their purpose, no less, to pursue “the political, social, economic, intellectual, and moral recovery of France.” This daunting task would of course be accomplished within the context of Nazi Germany's New Order, “at an hour when everyone questions and doubts.”
⁴⁷
That hour struck at dawn on 6 June 1944 when the first Allied landing craft touched the shores of Normandy.

Chapter 15

A W
RETCHED
C
ONCLUSION

T
he Final Solution was underway in France well before the Allied invasion of North Africa, but it took a long while to evolve and did so erratically. Because of German personnel shortages, the fate of French Jews depended importantly on the collaboration of the French police with the armed forces of the Occupation. A police reform in late 1942 essentially returned oversight of Jewish affairs to the Prefecture of Police at the Quai des Orfèvres by abolishing a separate unit that had been detached for that purpose. Now a new Service des Questions Juives there was directed by Commissar Permilleux, who reported to the Prefect of Police in Paris, to the Ministry of the Interior in Vichy, and ultimately to the German Gestapo. Theodor Dannecker's successor, Heinz Röthke, was the man primarily in charge, and he repeatedly made clear that he would “very closely” monitor the implementation of Nazi racial policies. Thus, if the grudging complicity of the French police was beyond question, so too was the attentiveness of the Gestapo in supervising it.
¹

During the immediate post–Operation Torch phase of the Occupation, there was little friction between French and German law enforcement authorities for the simple reason that the police generally did as they were told. They continued to participate in razzias and to conduct routine interrogations, house searches, and arrests of Jews. But which Jews? Given the Vichy policy of protecting those with French citizenship, that issue was bound to create a complication in the chain of command. The first sand thrown into the machinery of deportation was a refusal by French police on 12 February 1943 to assist in the transfer of French Jewish inmates from Drancy to the nearby railway station at Le Bourget. The Gestapo was thereby obliged to request that a commando of thirty to forty men from the Ordnungspolizei appear the next morning at 5:00 AM to perform that task. Charged with keeping the trains rolling, Röthke was incensed, but he could not promptly obtain the willing obedience he required. “It is to be expected,” he wrote in March, “that henceforth the French police will no longer cooperate in the transportation.” In fact, this conclusion was unduly pessimistic, as later statistics on deportation were tragically to demonstrate. More often than not, the French police complied.
²

Yet the result was German impatience and a renewed determination of the Occupation to get on with the evacuation of all Jews from France. Agents of the Sipo-SD themselves therefore began in 1943 to make frequent arrests of Jews, and they did so under explicit orders to act without regard to nationality or other circumstances. They should take care always to apprehend entire families. Parents would be held responsible for their offspring, so that a misdemeanor committed by their children might send adults with them to Drancy.
³
There was meanwhile a basic shift in tactics. The original intention after Operation Torch was for the French police to herd all Jews in the former Occupied Zone into the Paris region, the departments of the Seine and Seine-et-Oise, where they could be more readily observed and controlled. As it became more obvious, however, that the Germans would need to take direct command in order to expedite the mass deportation of all Jews, the plan was altered to ship them straight to the transit camp at Drancy and then on “to the East.” Hence, the German policy gradually changed from relocation to removal, and the
Endlösung
became the undisputed order of the day.
⁴

Policy was one thing, execution of it another. While the Germans were debating about procedures and making arrangements to implement them, daily life for the Jewish population in Paris was being degraded. The step from discrimination to persecution was short. Although many studies exist on this aspect of the Occupation, it is worthwhile to indicate briefly the kind of harsh and humiliating measures that fell on those Jews who escaped arrest and remained in the city. The tone was set by four recommendations from Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, now chief of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ): (l) in addition to wearing a yellow star, Jews should always carry an identification card stamped with “JUIF”; (2) Jews would be forbidden to change their address; (3) all Jewish organizations (except the compliant Union Générale des Israélites de France) were to be dissolved; and (4) any persons caught assisting Jews might be severely punished.
⁵
German decrees did the rest. Jews were permitted to frequent only certain designated restaurants and cafés. Separate “Jews only” shops were also identified; otherwise, in department stores and markets, Jews were allowed to make purchases only during the morning hour from 11 to 12. Jews could not use public phone booths. Jews had to declare their property (making confiscation of it easier), and so forth in a swelling program of segregation.
⁶

If such stipulations were relatively easy to enforce, far more troublesome was the Occupation's ambition to purge Jews from public administration, higher education, and the liberal professions. Again, the Germans were theoretically willing to leave this process in the hands of the French, but progress was aggravatingly slow. In July 1943, Darquier reported to Röthke that there were thirty-two Jewish pharmacies still operating in the Paris region. The
Journal Officiel
published lists of dozens of Jewish physicians who were also practicing—many of them, Röthke complained, with obviously Jewish names like Blumenfeld and Cohen. What was being done by the CGQJ to end this “intolerable condition”? If satisfaction was not soon forthcoming, he admonished, the Gestapo would be required to act “in a drastic manner.”
⁷
Individual cases of German intervention are of course too numerous to classify. One instance is illustrative. In spite of regulations for a complete blackout of Paris by night, light was emanating from the Hotel Ritz onto the Place Vendôme, illuminating the Ministry of Justice on the opposite side of the square. Investigation revealed that the director of the Ritz was married to a Jew, who was arrested one evening at Maxim's for repeatedly demanding aloud that the orchestra play “God Save the King.” The Gestapo was not amused, and the woman was sentenced to three months in prison.
⁸

An isolated case may inadvertently raise a general question. Why did the Hotel Ritz still have Jews in management? What had come of the much vaunted effort to “Aryanize” the French economy? For once, the problem was not lack of staffing. Located behind the Bibliothèque Nationale on the Place des Petits Pères, the CGQJ had opened in early 1941 with a bureaucratic corps in Paris of 170 (among 228 in all of the Occupied Zone). Another 179 were added in October 1941, and 102 a year later. A decree in November 1942 proposed 177 more. By the beginning of 1943, the Paris staff devoted to Aryanization numbered 543 members housed in three buildings, and they needed more space. If anything, Aryanization was eventually to drown in a bureaucratic swamp.
⁹

Big Brother was never far. The Economic Section of the MBF had several specialists devoted to the issue, one of whom was permanently detached to CGQJ headquarters, and they could always call on the assistance of the Sipo-SD. Appointments and dismissals of “administrative commissars” (
Administrateurs provisoires
or
Kommissarische Verwalter
), those directly supervising the liquidation or sale of Jewish business firms, were subject to German approval. And it was the German Treuhand that kept account of the proceeds. All of these scattered and fragmentary records testify that Aryanization had become big business, and a messy one.
¹⁰

Tempo mattered. Slowness was likely to be seen as weakness, it was thought at the Majestic. After early November 1942, the Germans would therefore need to kick the program up to a higher gear in the Occupied Zone and extend it swiftly into the former Unoccupied Zone as well.
¹¹
Yet the difficulties of doing so were legion. Both German administrators and French functionaries were forever struggling to determine whether a certain firm was Jewish or not. How could they rid France of “Jewish influence” if they could not even define it? There were endless problems with incompetent commissars, incomplete or incoherent files, overlapping laws and decrees, and legalities that produced constant friction between French and German bureaucrats. As a rule, the Germans preferred to remain in the background and leave individual transactions to the CGQJ. Just “do what is necessary,” Darquier was enigmatically instructed when a sale of Jewish property was suspected to have been obtained under false pretenses by a culpable straw man covering for the Jewish owners.
¹²

Hardly surprising, then, was the judgment of the MBF's administrative staff that economic
Entjudung
was faltering while growing increasingly unpopular. Most of the blame fell on Vichy. Darquier had drafted plans to hasten the process, but they were not promptly adopted. Because of “the persistently hesitant attitude of the French regime,” Aryanization was making “no noteworthy progress,” despite Darquier's good intentions. Little amelioration would occur, Stülpnagel's staff was forced to concede, “without German supervision and constant prodding.” By the summer of 1943, as a result, the entire program was stumbling in a state of oscillation.
¹³

How much was actually accomplished? The statistics were confused by French claims and German challenges. By July 1943, Darquier reported, over 10,000 Jewish firms and properties had been either liquidated or sold for a profit of slightly more than 300 million francs, of which at least three-quarters had changed hands in Greater Paris. Officials in the Majestic were skeptical, suspecting both dubious bookkeeping practices and possible corruption. Surely there should be much more revenue, given that the total value of Jewish possessions in France was alleged to be 22 billion francs. But a new statistical report in September was not more encouraging, causing Darquier to opine that at this rate complete Aryanization would take another ten years.
¹⁴
The rest was disarray. Records of the CGQJ became kaleidoscopic, without summaries to collect or collate them. Numbers from the Treuhand were not much better. One report listed the income until the end of 1942 at exactly 34,277,920.20 francs and at 46,457,955.35 francs for the year 1943. Adding to the confusion, another document attempted to separate seized enemy property (after the United States—entry into the war), a profit estimated at about 60 million francs in 1943, from funds collected by the ongoing Aryanization program. No wonder contemporaries and historians alike have responded to these approximations with some bewilderment. Decidedly, in any event, the great losers were Jews.
¹⁵

In these developments, the first half of 1944 was already prefigured. With a staff of only seven, the group at the Majestic specifically charged with supervising economic
Entjudung
was incapable of keeping track of the hundreds of French drones at the Place des Petits Pères. After an inspection of the CGQJ's accounting procedures, a member of the Treuhand office reported back that the bookkeeping was so chaotic, an overview of it was impossible. In view of the “numerous and grave difficulties” and “a general instability,” there was an evident need to regroup. But the administrative stress was structural and morale was low, the Germans concluded, because in a sense the CGQJ was working to eliminate its own raison d—être (once all Jewish property was confiscated), which was “a permanent invitation to inertia.”
¹⁶
An air of inevitability hence surrounded the dismissal of Darquier de Pellepoix in the spring of 1944. His fanatical anti-Semitism was no substitute for administrative skill. Yet his replacement, Charles du Paty de Clam, was no improvement. It was especially dismaying when he announced that his major interest, rather than Aryanization, would be the “spiritual struggle” against Judaism. The Germans could only comment that their worst fears had been realized: the CGQJ was paralyzed, and there was little prospect of anything beyond “French bureaucratic routine.”
¹⁷
The closer D-Day approached, the more disheveled the Aryanization program became. Appropriately, a conspicuous number of memoranda passing between the Hotel Majestic and the CGQJ were stamped simply “no response.” Thus, economic
Entjudung
remained virtually as incomplete as it was unjust.
¹⁸

The same generalizations did not quite apply to deportations. By 1943, the modalities of mass transportation of Jews to the East had been “considerably modified” and regularized. The Germans assumed complete control for administration in the interior of the prison facility at Drancy, relegating French gendarmes to guard duty on the camp's exterior perimeter. The inmates thus became “a floating population,” not to be detained there for an indefinite period but prepared for immediate shipment by rail at an irregular but frequent rate of 3,000 per week.
¹⁹
Directly commanding this vast operation of displacement were Helmut Knochen and Heinz Röthke, who instructed Sipo-SD officers at other camps to channel all available Jews henceforth through Drancy. As the number of locomotives made available by the SNCF was adequate, their only problem was to secure enough freight cars to contain the steady flow of prisoners, now including entire families with their children and the elderly. Talk of Auschwitz as a labor camp was no longer to be heard. Alas, Röthke wrote to the RSHA in Berlin, “transport in passenger cars is unfeasible because of the lack of guards.” He wondered whether freight cars could be deployed even during the months of severe frost. In essence, the answer to that question had been settled long ago and was reiterated in a message from Heinrich Himmler to Martin Bormann: whatever it took, all French Jews were to be deported.
²⁰