Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 (5 page)

Once the Occupation began to operate through rationing and inflation controls, there was no end to complications. Prices were to be fixed by the French but regulated by the Germans, thus creating a broad zone for manipulation and friction between them. And prices had to be set in francs, since the rule (often ignored) was that no German currency could be paid out to French civilians.
²⁵
All this necessitated repeated, elaborately detailed negotiations that wandered through a maze of trivia. For example, one must imagine a grotesque discussion—which actually occurred on 19 February 1941—in which ten senior German military officers convened around a table to determine the price of champagne to be served in Paris nightclubs. The gathering could agree that the currently applied scale of costs was inoperable. They thereupon decided that the normal charge for a bottle of fine champagne would be 200 francs, with a proviso that cheaper brands be made available for 150 or 175 francs. A charge of 250 francs was allowed only in luxury establishments, ten of which (including the Lido, for instance) were approved. The length of this list was later doubled.
²⁶

A more serious and no less complex issue was the extent of the working week. Given the high rate of unemployment during the first months of the Occupation, French officials thought it wise to limit labor to a maximum of 40 hours a week. But the beginning of recruitment for work in Germany and the decline of unemployment figures in Paris in early 1941 caused a change of policy, although not without debate. Whereas one group in the Wi Rü staff wanted to increase the maximum hours in order to enhance French productivity, another argued that such a measure would be harmful to German interests, namely, in the effort to attract more French labor for shipment to the Reich.
²⁷
For its part, the French regime in Vichy favored maintaining the 40-hour maximum, both to cut unemployment and thereby to discourage further recruitment of workers for Germany. At last, on 26 March 1941, the working day for factory labor in the Occupied Zone was extended to ten hours, with a maximum of fifty-four hours per week. By then it was clear that high unemployment was a thing of the past and that German officials would need to open a more vigorous campaign to “comb out” excess workers from French firms to make them available for shipment from Paris.
²⁸

Guidelines for labor recruitment, twenty-seven pages long, were issued by the German military administration in mid-April. The program remained strictly voluntary, intended for those “willing and able” to live in Germany. Workers had to be between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Families with children would no longer be accepted. Foreigners, with the exception of “non-Aryans,” were welcome.
²⁹
So much for theory. By the spring of 1941, shipments to Germany averaged about 500 workers a week, and they brought many problems with them. Some were physically unfit or ill-adapted to their assigned jobs. Of 400 French laborers sent to a German airplane factory in early May, a large contingent was summarily returned to Paris. Those who remained were promised furloughs every three months to visit their families, and they were visibly discontent when that offer was withdrawn. Once a year was more often the rule.
³⁰
By the beginning of June, nearly 50,000 laborers had been transferred to the Reich. Incredibly precise (and perhaps therefore dubious) German statistics permit a general profile to be drawn. In terms of skills, 19,205 were metal workers, 18,947 were in construction, and 12,774 categorized as “others” were mostly farm hands. As for nationality, the total included 22,705 French, 7,464 Poles, 6,698 Russians, and an assortment of various Eastern Europeans. These numbers were disappointing for German officials, but no doubt recruitment was an imperfect and tedious process.
³¹

Far less precision was possible when evaluating the overall contribution of French production to the German war effort. Statistics were as yet scattered and at best symptomatic. One economic sector stood out and may be considered indicative of Germany's gathering success in harnessing French industry. According to a survey by Occupation authorities, the production of trucks in France between July 1940 and the end of March 1941 reached exactly 37,399 units, of which 29,782 were requisitioned by the German military command. If so, it is safe to conclude that France was supplying the armed forces with an approximate annual average of 24,000 heavy vehicles—not a negligible feat.
³²
This significance of France as an economic factor for the Reich was not overlooked by Hermann Göring, who signed a directive on 29 March again calling attention to the overriding need “to coordinate the French economy with necessities of the German war economy.” During the initial phase of the Occupation, he professed, this imperative was being adequately fulfilled, but as the war proceeded French productivity was certain to grow ever more important. Surely Göring knew whereof he spoke, since the planning in Berlin for an invasion of Russia was already well advanced, and he was therefore better able than anyone in Paris to peer into the future.
³³

Virtually as a postscript, one further economic matter needs to be mentioned here. In late May 1941, 18,000 French coal miners in the departments of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais briefly went on strike to protest low salaries and tight rations. The German response was uncertain and hesitant. A long shutdown of the mines would severely reduce coal supplies to Paris—and shipments did in fact decrease in early June to half of normal capacity. What concessions, if any, should be made? Ambassador Otto Abetz confirmed that the miners—demands were partially justified, and he recommended modest raises in wages and food allotments. But there was apparently also a political aspect to the protests. It could not be the Occupation's policy to tolerate Communist agitators. Fortunately, most of the miners returned to their pits after forty-eight hours. Yet this troubling incident would henceforth need to be appended to the Occupation's long agenda of unresolved dilemmas.
³⁴

Chapter 4

C
ULTURE AND
P
ROPAGANDA

I
n the context of the Occupation, the juxtaposition of propaganda and culture was self-evident. For the Germans, culture was propaganda and vice versa. But the problem of managing the public sphere and of influencing public opinion in Paris was far more perturbing for the occupiers than that simple formulation might imply.

It is well to begin with high culture, in particular, the performing arts of opera, music, and theater, and to observe that the French capital has seldom in its history witnessed such a glorious display of creative endeavor as during the Occupation. Within weeks after the German entry into Paris, the old state theaters—the Opéra, the Opéra Comique, the Comédie Française, and the Odéon—were up and running on a regular schedule. This is not to mention the dozens of smaller stages in the city, which resumed in the autumn of 1940 with performances of Jean Cocteau, Paul Claudel, Jean Giraudoux, and Jean Anouilh, among many others.
¹
To this rich diet the Germans added a glittering display of talent, especially musical. Barely three weeks after the Occupation began, the Berlin Philharmonic held two concerts in Paris and another in Versailles. In November, the Parisian elite was treated at the Opéra to Beethoven's
Fidelio
, Mozart's
Figaros Hochzeit
, and Wagner's
Der fliegende
Holländer
, while
Parsifal
,
Der Rosenkavalier
, and Gluck's
Alceste
were announced on the program for January 1941. Orchestral concerts offered by ensembles from Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, and Munich were meanwhile frequent at the Palais de Chaillot and the Théatre des Champs-Elysées.
²
All of this cultural opulence was clearly intended to coax the discriminating Parisian public into a warmer appreciation of the Occupation and presumably therefore a more collaborative mood by presenting the best that Germany had to offer. One such occasion in late December 1940 deserves special mention. A Bach concert under the direction of Herbert von Karajan at the Chaillot was to be sponsored by Dr. Robert Ley's organization, Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy), but a personal request in Berlin by Ambassador Otto Abetz obtained permission for a transfer of sponsorship to the newly founded German Institute in Paris, attached to the German Embassy, with a welcoming speech by Abetz himself. As the first major event of the Institute, it was acclaimed by its director, Dr. Karl Epting, to be a rousing success of cultural prowess and effective propaganda.
³

Limited by the language barrier, theater was a less promising medium. Yet the Germans spared no effort or expense during the winter months by bringing to Paris, for example, productions of
Kabale und Liebe
performed by Berlin's Schiller Theater and
Ute von Naumburg
by the Lessing Theater.
⁴
Language was far less a factor when the Zirkus Busch visited Paris several times in the autumn of 1940.
⁵
Likewise reaching a broader spectrum of the populace were the many open air concerts by German military bands at such venues as the Parvis Notre Dame, the Tuileries, the Buttes Chaumont, the Jardin de Luxembourg, and the Place de la République. At the very least, Parisians must have concluded that young German men made excellent musicians.
⁶
All this was set against the backdrop of a flourishing Paris nightlife, strongly encouraged by the Occupation in the name of normalcy. One list in early 1941 gave the names of 32
variétés
—showgirl reviews, music halls, or vaudeville theaters—with famous names like the Folies Bergère, Mayol, Venus, and so on. These full houses were frequented nightly both by French patrons and by stationed or visiting German troops, for whom tickets were made available at half price.
⁷

It is of course impossible to quantify the effect of this great German charm offensive. If anything, Occupation authorities tended to exaggerate the salutary impact of officially sponsored events, of which two examples must suffice here. After obtaining clearance from the German Embassy, a predictably unflattering exhibit on European Freemasonry was opened at the Petit Palais in mid-October 1940. Enthusiastic German reports claimed that massive crowds estimated at 50,000 were in attendance daily, a stampede such that the show had to be extended by a fortnight into December. In all, the Embassy insisted, within six weeks over a million Parisians had attended the exhibit, where they were “hammered” by two principal themes: first, that Freemasons and Jews were responsible for all the miseries that had befallen France; and, second, that a French recovery would become possible only by a thorough cleansing of those elements and by adoption of the Nazi
Weltanschauung
. How the restrained and somber throngs, whose numbers were undoubtedly inflated, in fact responded to these blunt messages, the Embassy report could not say.
⁸
Less noteworthy but no less indicative was a concert of sacred music given by the Regensburger Domchor in April 1941 at the cathedral of Notre Dame, during which, according to Dr. Epting, 6,000 individuals were present. Although Notre Dame is a very large structure, to be sure, it is altogether improbable that so many persons could have been crowded into it at one time.
⁹

That the ill-defined public realm of culture and propaganda was not relegated to a single agency of the Occupation consequently produced its first serious internal conflict. This friction began with Adolf Hitler, who decided in August 1940 that the Paris Embassy should exercise full authority over “the treatment of all political questions,” including the most salient media of propaganda: press, radio, publications, film, and theater. These, Abetz was quick to specify, now fell “exclusively within the responsibility of my staff.” Visibly flushed with self-importance, the Ambassador conferred with Brauchitsch and Streccius, advising them that the military administration henceforth might handle only censorship duties and otherwise assist in cultural matters, albeit strictly under Abetz's supervision. Learning of this turn of events, the commander of the military's Propaganda Section, Major Heinz Schmidtke, immediately left for Berlin.
¹⁰
But his protest there was to no avail. The decision remained, commensurate with Hitler's decree, that the Embassy “alone” would control all matters directly related to political propaganda. Schmidtke would thus be obliged to take orders from Abetz, whose own definition of his expanding mandate seemed boundless.
¹¹

All of this bickering and personal in-fighting was further complicated by another intervention from OKW in Berlin. This involved Hitler's selection of Alfred Rosenberg to “secure” from French museums, archives, and libraries an unspecified number of art works as well as documents suitable for shipment to Germany. This arrangement was probably at the instigation of Hermann Göring and certainly with his connivance.
¹²
The upshot was a heated dispute between the Einsatzstab Rosenberg—a special contingent from Berlin established on the Boulevard Haussmann—and the German Embassy in the Rue de Lille. In the limited domain of paintings and manuscripts, as it turned out this time, Abetz was the loser. When he complained to the administrative staff of MBF that some actions by Rosenberg's underlings, such as confiscating the libraries of non-Jews, were politically harmful and that it was “urgently necessary” to restrict them, he was coolly informed by Jonathan Schmid that it was “foremost” up to the Embassy to iron out things with Berlin on its own.
¹³
The sharpness and at times the pettiness of these frequent bureaucratic exchanges gave a sense of the strains and rivalries engendered in the first phase of the Occupation.

The same reality was apparent when it came to censorship. One thing that all German agencies could agree upon was the effectiveness of Allied propaganda via British radio. What to do about it? Whereas the MBF ordered that listening to foreign broadcasts was forbidden and should be severely punished, the Embassy warned that strict enforcement would be politically inadvisable and in any case unfeasible. Attempts were made to counter Radio London by endowing Radio Paris with “a truly French face” and by avoiding an impression of tight German control over the news. Yet the issue was never actually resolved, and Werner Best's military staff gloomily conceded that “after 6:30 PM English radio rules the airwaves.”
¹⁴

Print was another matter. As for the newspaper press, whose daily circulation in the Paris region was nearly three million, censorship was largely self-governing. After all, the Occupation held all the trump cards. If a news report or editorial displeased German censors, an editor could be quickly informed that his allotment of raw paper (mostly imported from Germany and Scandinavia) was to be curtailed or stopped altogether. Nor would military authorities hesitate to order French police to raid editorial offices and simply close them down. All things considered, the press in Paris never proved to be a problem for the Occupation.
¹⁵

Books presented a more delicate and less manageable difficulty. According to German statistics compiled in August 1940, counting
arrondissement
by
arrondissement
, the inner city of Paris contained exactly 1,749 bookstores, 438 kiosks, 71 libraries, and 28
bouquinistes
along the Seine.
¹⁶
The first attempt to establish a grip on this abundance of book dealers was the “Liste Bernhard” of forbidden publications, drafted by the Germans, which was then in September incorporated by the French into the somewhat more extensive “Liste Otto,” printed in 40,000 copies and distributed throughout the Occupied Zone. On this basis, the first razzias were conducted by police in Paris, which, still more significantly, were followed by raids on seventy publishing houses. Of these, if we are to believe the remarkable exactitude of German reports, eleven were closed, while 713,382 books were seized and sent to warehouses.
¹⁷

The next step was school texts. In an effort to coordinate this special effort of censorship, a caucus (
Arbeitskreis
) was formed that comprised representatives from two MBF agencies, the Propaganda Staff of Paris (Propaganda-Staffel Paris) and a new unit called “School and Culture” (Schule und Kultur); Karl Epting, acting for the Embassy and the German Institute; and police officials of the SS and GFP. This example of bureaucratic overkill soon resounded with echoes of the disputes already in progress higher in the chain of command. On orders from Abetz, Epting seized the initiative, approving a ban on 187 school textbooks and prescribing alterations in 115 others.
¹⁸
These sweeping measures did not sit well with the military administration, which found reason to deplore “the vainglorious politics of the German Institute,” whose zealous exercise of censorship had resulted in “inaccuracies and incongruities.” The motto of the Hotel Majestic, by contrast, was “no unnecessary interference” in French schools, despite the “hateful insults” of some academic texts and the “widespread Germanophobia” evident in instruction.
¹⁹

A counterattack from the German Embassy was to be expected, and it came in a muted but insulting form. Abetz suggested that the MBF's Propaganda Section and its Paris offspring, the Propaganda Staff, should be restrained and renamed “Censorship Offices” (
Zensurstellen
), since the very word “propaganda” was a liability carefully avoided by the Embassy. The difficulty with this proposal, he admitted, was the political situation in Berlin—meaning that Joseph Goebbels was unlikely to tolerate such a derision of his own title and function.
²⁰
Willy-nilly, then, the Occupation's censorship continued in a muddle of mutual recriminations. If there was any evolution of policy, it was a more vigorous attempt to encourage the French to participate in spreading German propaganda. For that purpose, they would need to be persuaded of “the superiority of German culture, efficacy, and organizational skill,” thereby drawing them into full collaboration “from a feeling of their inferiority.” Just how this lofty ambition was to be accomplished remained unclear.
²¹

One bastion of French self-esteem, and also of perceptible anti-German sentiment, was higher education. In Paris, this term referred essentially to the Sorbonne, the Collège de France, and the
grandes écoles
: the elites of the university system in France. Paris was the obvious fulcrum of French intellectual life, as statistics showed. A census in the summer of 1939 had counted over 35,000 university students in the capital. By December 1940, that number was down to about 30,000, and, demographers noted, the proportion of women to men had markedly increased.
²²
The teaching corps was of international standing and precisely for that reason was deemed suspect by the Occupation. Yet during its initial phase, dark thoughts did not lead to much action. There was talk, for instance, of moving the École Normale Supérieure from Paris to the Unoccupied Zone, but German authorities soon thought better of it.
²³
At the Collège de France, the arrest of three professors was ordered in late October 1940, yet only one of them was actually incarcerated before being released several weeks later.
²⁴
The most dubious of Parisian educational institutions was Sciences Po (École Libre des Sciences Politiques), where the instruction of history, economics, and politics trod on dangerous terrain. Singled out at this institution as “not compatible” with German interests was the historian Pierre Renouvin, author of acclaimed works on the provocative thesis of German war guilt in 1914. Helmut Knochen, speaking for the SS, advocated closing the school altogether, a move opposed by the Embassy on the grounds that it would only create martyrs and cause more trouble than it was worth.
²⁵
Abetz did agree, nonetheless, that an investigation should be conducted of all faculty members “whose activity contradicts German interests.” Knochen was only too willing to comply, and his staff began collecting files on professors at the Sorbonne, the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and the Collège de France, as well as Sciences Po. Again, it was a controversial historian, Edmond Vermeil, known for his specialty in Franco-German studies, who attracted the most attention. After he had fled Paris, Vermeil's personal library was confiscated by the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, which vilified him as “one of the worst agitators against Germany.”
²⁶