Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 (23 page)

Such deals did nothing to offset the “disastrous consequences” of aerial bombardments and acts of sabotage that were reducing French railways to a shambles. Minister of Industrial Production and Communications Jean Bichelonne admitted that “a very bad situation” was developing despite the strenuous effort of 60,000 French and foreign laborers consigned to transportation repairs. By the beginning of July, the SNCF reported, only one-third of its rolling stock was still available. At the same time, so Berlin was told, over 600 locomotives, damaged or destroyed, were currently out of service in the race between Allied bombers and French repair crews. By the middle of the month, outside the already clogged war zone, the only main rail lines still open to Paris were connections from Lille and Reims. Cut off were the cities of Dijon, Metz, Strasbourg, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, and Bordeaux. Even if some of these routes could be temporarily reopened, it was evident to all that Paris was being strangled—“at the mercy of the slightest incident”—and that sending food and fuel by rail had become impossible. Henceforth, once again as in 1940, trucks would have to do.
²¹

At the beginning of August, one survey for the preceding month counted 724 separate air attacks against French railways, of which 158 were on stations, 130 on other installations, and 73 on trains. Furthermore, sabotage activity had undergone an “extraordinary increase.” For Paris, one particularly critical problem as a result was the damage to tracks leading to the city's northeastern section of La Villette, hindering the arrival of livestock from rural France and thus severely restricting the supply of meat available from the slaughterhouses located there.
²²

In the month of August, for the first time, a serious wave of strikes took place. French workers were becoming nervous and less willing to sweat for a lost cause and its masters. The first major break in ranks occurred on 9 August at an SNCF repair facility in St. Denis, where a thousand skilled technicians briefly halted work. Two days later, a similar strike erupted in another
atelier
at La Villette. This time the Gestapo promptly intervened and threatened immediate reprisals if the insubordination were not ended by afternoon. Although most workers reappeared by 5:00 PM, the trouble there sputtered on for several days. Also, after a work stoppage at Noisy-le-Sec, the Germans again made a show of force and arrested fifteen SNCF employees. Yet the strike reports continued to accumulate at the Majestic: from Montrouge, Ivry, and La Chapelle. At a meeting of SNCF officials on 13 August, it was agreed to avert a general strike in return for the release of more imprisoned
cheminots
. But in truth the dyke was cracking.
²³

The economic result of all this destruction and agitation was in part measurable. Statistics were gathered on coal shipments to Paris from the departments of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais. During the three months of February through April 1944, before the invasion, they had averaged forty trainloads of about 800 tons each, that is, about 32,000 tons a month. The total for May was seven trains and for June two. Thereafter, the capital city was running on reserves and fumes.
²⁴

Remarkably, industrial plants in the Paris region continued to produce armaments for the German war effort until 17 August, even as Allied tanks were arriving at the city's gates. In the eyes of the Occupation, that phenomenal performance could largely be attributed to the steady loyalty and cooperation of French business managers “about whose personal attitude [there was] scarcely ever reason to complain.” The same, despite scattered strikes, was true of the SNCF bureaucracy, whose obedience to German orders endured “to the last moment.” Likewise, such a positive evaluation applied to most French workers, whose usual comportment was summarized in a word by a retrospective German evaluation as “impeccable” (
einwandfrei
).
²⁵
Such comments tend to undercut later attempts by SNCF apologists to claim that their company had been animated by a “spirit of resistance” at all levels throughout the Occupation. Individual resisters there unquestionably were. Many
cheminots
were involved in passive or active opposition to German military rule. But the record speaks more certainly of institutional collaboration than of anything that could legitimately be characterized as Resistance.
²⁶

Another activity of the Occupation also lasted until its final day. In both of its principal aspects, deportation and Aryanization, the program of
Entjudung
continued. Arrests of Jews and their deportation via Drancy did not end with the Normandy invasion. In three respects, however, these matters were thereafter somewhat different. First, in addition to apprehending Jews, the Gestapo had its hands full with tracking down others: Resistance fighters, priests, functionaries, academics, and intellectuals. No certain tabulation of this increasingly frantic repression is possible, but it is likely that the resulting chaotic circumstances of this period enabled some Jews to escape detection and hence extinction.
²⁷
Second, as material conditions worsened, the German gulag itself began to crumble. Because the SNCF could no longer supply sufficient locomotives, moving prisoners from outlying camps to the Paris region was not as feasible as before. A preliminary plan, never realized, was consequently developed to relocate the entire penal system at Besançon in eastern France. Third, tragically, the Gestapo displayed a belated special interest in Jewish children, perhaps because they provided the most available targets. On 21 July, 240 of them were taken from Paris orphanages, and another 400—protected heretofore by the Union Générale des Israélites de France—were deported on 31 July. A supremely irrational waste of effort in the midst of a military crisis, this relentless and ruthless campaign did not cease until the day before Allied forces reached Paris, 17 August, when a last shipment of fifty-one Jews left Drancy by rail.
²⁸
Although a final reckoning can only be approximate, there is now a consensus that the total number of Jews deported from France reached slightly more than 75,000. About one-third of them were French, the rest foreign. This means that nearly 88 percent of French Jews survived the Holocaust, but barely half of the foreign Jews who had been resident in France before the Occupation did so. Of the nearly 59,000 shipped from Drancy, at most 2,500 returned. It is ironic, although all too appropriate, that a monument to the deported rests today behind the cathedral of Notre Dame on the eastern tip of the Île de la Cité, the former site of the Paris morgue.
²⁹

Aryanization likewise continued apace. Always a jumble, statistics became even more fragmentary in the final weeks. One report listed 126 liquidations or sales of Jewish firms in the second half of June, right after the Normandy invasion, but the compilation of reliable numbers was already in doubt and could no longer be provided. Like so many industrial plants in Paris, the CGQJ began shutting down. Since the Paris metro service was gradually curtailed for lack of electricity, the staff of the so-called Aryanisation Économique began working on a reduced schedule and spent much of its time in tidying up files or sending them, finished or not, to the Germans. A final report by the MBF's Economic Section on 15 August did little to dissipate the confusion.
³⁰
Undated estimates of the Treuhand, probably post-war, set the number of Aryanization transactions completed during the Occupation since 1940 somewhere between 16,000 and 18,000. It was the Economic Section's conclusion that the entire process of Aryanization thereby reached 43 percent of completion.
³¹

This contemporary evaluation by German authorities stands in contrast to the findings of a later French investigative commission that Aryanization was in fact virtually complete and the economy of northern France had effectively been cleared of Jewish “influence” by the end of the Occupation.
³²

Disposition of Jewish Holdings in the Occupied Zone
According to Estimates of the Mission Mattéoli

One hundred percent? For three reasons, the complete eradication of Jewish holdings in Paris and the rest of the former Occupied Zone is unlikely. First, there are all those unspecified categories—“other,” “unknown,” etc.—that accounted for nearly half of the recorded transactions. Only sales and liquidations were certain. Second, this paper trail became conspicuously cluttered and confused as the end of the Occupation neared. The statistical picture was blurred by repeated bureaucratic failings of the CGQJ resulting from irregular office hours, incomplete files, and unanswered memos. Third, as the correspondence of German supervisors made clear from the beginning, many of the recorded transactions were far from perfect. French functionaries were constantly being prodded to make more thorough investigations, correct faulty reporting, and provide further proof that Jewish personnel and stockholders had actually been eliminated and not hidden behind false claims and financial straw men. After all, we must recall that nearly three-quarters of the Jews in France survived, and it is doubtful that they had been entirely deprived of business connections and private wealth. Rather, it would seem that the Aryanization program, like deportation, had finally become bogged down in the morass of German military defeat. Nonetheless, estimates of the total amount confiscated from French Jews during the Occupation range as high as five billion francs.
³³

A disturbing question remains. Why was it so important, under such adverse conditions, to pursue the programs of
Entjudung
to the Occupation's last breath? The answer can probably be found in a final report of the MBF's administrative staff. Continuation of these efforts, it stated, was a sign of German strength. Hesitation to deprive Jews of property or to transport them to Auschwitz would be interpreted as weakness. At all costs, German authorities in Paris needed to demonstrate that they were still in command and that they retained the right and the power to impose their will on the French. This “success,” as the report concluded, would require alert surveillance and a determination to carry on. So they did.
³⁴

As was true from the beginning of the Occupation, repression of undesirables and dissidents could not function effectively without the collaboration of French police forces. The Germans were counting on Darnand's Milice, and they apparently had good reason to do so. Immediately after the Allied landing, Darnand announced the full mobilization of his elite corps. It was not a popular measure, however, since many had become
miliciens
by joining what they thought were to be reserve units offering attractive stipends but little action. Now they were being called upon to hunt and fight the
maquis
, who were daily carrying out sabotages, armed attacks on German military personnel (averaging well over fifty a day), and the seizure of weapons and munitions. The unavoidable results were unrest in the ranks and a notable reluctance of reservists to answer Darnand's summons to duty.
³⁵

As if these reports reaching Paris were not enough, horrific accounts meanwhile began to circulate of the most dreadful single incident of the Occupation, the slaughter at Oradour-sur-Glane, a small town near Limoges, where on 10 June 1944 villagers became victims of a reprisal by the SS: 642 men, women, and children were machine-gunned or burned to death. Within days, this heinous action was publicly condemned by the Bishop of Limoges “in the name of simple natural morality,” and relations between the Occupation and the Church sank out of sight. That deterioration was sealed by the arrest of six Catholic bishops and several other clergymen during the weeks that followed.
³⁶
Unable to ward off either attacks by partisans or excesses by the Germans, Darnand came under heavy criticism from Jacques Doriot's party, the PPF, as a “completely failed” leader. He faced charges that his mobilization of the Milice had only hastened recruitment for the
maquis
and that his Maintien de l’Ordre had become no more than an instrument of German repression. These recriminations soon translated into repeated street clashes in Paris that pitted
miliciens
alternatively against “terrorists” or the French police. Like everything else, it appeared, the Milice was contributing to disorder in the capital. In an attempt to squelch such trouble and to regain control of law enforcement in Paris, Darnand returned to the capital from Vichy in early August. He did so in vain, however, and was forced to flee in haste to Sigmaringen in southern Germany before the end of the month.
³⁷

One might imagine that the Nazi propaganda machine in France would be silenced by the successful Allied landing. Not so. Throughout June and July, the Germans kept up a steady drumbeat of news flashes about the slow advance and heavy losses of Anglo-American forces, bottled up as they were within the Normandy peninsula, and rumors were spread about the mounting devastation rained on Britain by Germany's secret weapons. The mood was thus ostentatiously upbeat at a huge anti-Bolshevik ceremony at the Palais de Chaillot on 22 June to celebrate the third anniversary of Nazi Germany's crusade against Soviet Russia. This theatrical exuberance was followed by a press conference at the German Embassy, where it was solemnly announced that the war had at last entered a “decisive phase.” Lacking enough space to maneuver on the coast, so the argument ran, enemy troops would be “obliged” to progress toward the interior of France and therefore away from their naval protection. This would enable the Germans to throw military reserves into combat in massive counterattacks inflicting more severe casualties. Translation: German defenses on the Normandy front were collapsing.
³⁸
Another propaganda release went further. The German army now had the Allies in a trap, since they must either achieve total victory or admit that Germany was invincible. True, in armament the Americans held a material advantage, but the Third Reich would meet it with “moral superiority.”
³⁹
There were just two problems. The Normandy breakout occurred on the last day of July, and, as the Embassy sheepishly conceded, “there are very few French any more who are really convinced of a German victory.” The best propaganda, it seemed, was the populace's fear of air raids. Accordingly, German press officials in Paris released bogus statistics that 80,000 French civilians had recently been killed by Allied bombers, a figure soon revised upward to 118,000.
⁴⁰