Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 (7 page)

Chapter 5

G
ERMANS AND
J
EWS

I
n the little town of Breisach, overlooking the Rhine near Freiburg-im-Breisgau, there is a tiny plaque inscribed in remembrance of the German Jews expelled to France in 1940. Everything is said in one simple sentence: “In memory of the Breisach Jews who on 22 October 1940, together with all Jews from Baden, the Palatinate, and the Saarland, were deported to the camp at Gurs in the French Pyrenees.” Among other things, this inscription is a testimony to the incoherence of German policy regarding the treatment of Jews in France during the early months of the Occupation. Was it actually the intention of the Nazi regime in Berlin to use France as a dumping ground for displaced European Jewry? That appearance, we know, was deceptive and soon proved to be misleading.
¹

From the vantage of the Occupation, the fate of Jews in France was a complex tale of bureaucratic turf wars and personal conflicts. It was in many ways parallel to and related with disputes concerning the confiscation of paintings and documents from French museums, libraries, and archives. In a similar fashion, as the Germans invariably put it, “the Jewish question” provoked a triangular struggle among the military government, the Embassy in Paris, and (in a broad sense) the Gestapo. Thrust into the midst of this configuration, in addition, was the loose cannon of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg. Each of these powerful agencies held a somewhat different notion of the matter, and hence once again the Occupation cannot be said to have had a single policy but rather several. If they had anything in common, it was a shortage of personnel to implement effectively whatever decisions might eventually be reached.

The basic difficulty with the seizure of art and manuscripts was the impossibility of separating the public and private spheres. The Einsatzstab Rosenberg exercised the authority, derived straight from the Führer, to collect Jewish and Masonic documents, whereas the German Embassy claimed the right to search for treasures in abandoned villas, especially those belonging to Jews. For his part, Otto von Stülpnagel objected to any such actions without the express authorization of his staff. This is not to dwell on strenuous objections from the French that all of these operations amounted to nothing more than a flagrant theft of their national patrimony. Finally, at the end of January 1941, Stülpnagel threw up his hands, exclaiming that he wanted “nothing further to do with this question.” Bravely, he also criticized Hermann Göring's support for the confiscations as “not very fortunate.” Such seizures would only harm the Reich in world opinion, he wrote, because it was doubtful that there could be a legal justification for them. He therefore refused all responsibility for the actions of the others, which he regarded as incompatible with his duty to ensure an orderly Occupation.
²

Needless to say, no one paid much heed to Stülpnagel's tirade, and the looting continued. At one point a sort of informal alliance emerged between the Sipo-SD and the Embassy against the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, with whom a certain division of labor was arranged. For example, while the Embassy was left to deal with the delicate task of dividing works taken from the Jewish art house Seligmann (affiliated with a related private firm in New York), the Einsatzstab Rosenberg took over an extensive collection gathered at the Louvre, where a special exhibit was being prepared at the nearby Jeu de Paume for a viewing by Göring and Rosenberg in person. This confiscated trove was valued at no less than a billion Reichsmarks, besides which mention must be made of 6,000 cartons of “scientific material.” In all, thirty freight cars were readied for shipments to Germany.
³

These events and altercations were only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Beneath them lay two layers of anti-Semitic intention, one for public consumption and the other hidden from view in the halls of German administration. The former consisted of decrees, laws, and card files intended to identify all Jews in France and to begin a long process of separating them from the general populace. As this aspect of the documentary record has already been minutely recounted, it may be rapidly summarized here. The first step was a German decree on 27 September 1940 that required Jews to register with the police and to carry a light blue or green card stamped in red with
Juif
or
Juive
. Moreover, Jewish shops and businesses had to display a yellow poster identifying them as such. This census produced the habitually precise German statistics: the Department of the Seine contained 85,664 French and 64,070 foreign Jews, that is, nearly 150,000 in all. There were 7,737 individual enterprises (mostly Paris shops) and 3,456 jointly owned Jewish companies. Rounding these numbers off in late November, the Embassy recorded that 11,700 signs had so far been mounted in store and office windows—not bad for a start.
⁴

The second step, on 3 October 1940, was a comprehensive law from the Vichy regime (acting on its own initiative) that mandated the exclusion of all Jews from government service, liberal professions, and public education. For such measures the Germans supplied a suitably ugly word,
Entjudung
, to designate the elimination of Jewish influence from public life. This included, of course, the French economy, which was the specific object of another German decree on 18 October that forbad Jewish ownership, direction, or operation of all business enterprises. That date thus marked the essential beginning of what came to be called “Aryanization” (
Arisierung
), an ambitious program that would occupy countless man-hours and reams of paper until the end of the Occupation—a subject that will therefore require further study.
⁵

All of this enterprise, at German insistence, needed to be captured and quantified on paper. The result was the creation of the infamous
fichiers
, detailed catalogues that ultimately attempted to classify every individual Jew and Jewish enterprise in France. At a conference on the last day of February 1941, Helmut Knochen's assistant for Jewish affairs, Theodor Dannecker, reported on the progress of this mighty undertaking, conducted mainly at the Prefecture of Police in Paris. The count stood currently at 65,000 Jewish households in Greater Paris, with a total of more than 200,000 persons. Of these, Dannecker noted, about 75 percent were not French citizens. He thereby singled out the category that would draw the immediate attention of German authorities. A roundup of foreign Jews by Vichy had in fact begun in the Unoccupied Zone, where nearly 40,000 were already relocated into concentration camps (among them, those from southwestern Germany). Under German oversight, naturally, the French would be encouraged to undertake further actions.
⁶

The focus on non-French Jews was not a new concept. As early as July 1940, German military authorities in Paris had ordered the Prefect of Police to begin “the identification and supervision of all foreigners.”
⁷
This measure suited the Vichy regime, given Marshal Pétain's outspoken desire to spare French citizens any unduly severe discriminatory measures—the law of 3 October notwithstanding. German police officials were eager to accommodate him, but they were not satisfied to limit such action to territory south of the demarcation line. Knochen considered it his assignment to include the internment of all foreign Jews in the Occupied Zone as well, despite the “considerable technical difficulties” of arresting and incarcerating at least 100,000 individuals in the Paris region alone. The French police should again be prodded to perform that task, while the German role would be to ensure its “complete execution.”
⁸
However, the mills of repression ground slowly, and German impatience grew. The French, it seemed, were displaying insufficient diligence, as Occupation authorities complained in the spring of 1941, and it was consequently decided to found a new central control agency to handle the Jewish question, which the Germans baptized the Zentralamt für die Judenfrage and the French called the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ).
⁹
But mass arrests in Paris did not begin until May. On 14 May, over 3,700 non-French Jews, mostly Poles, were apprehended in the capital—“selected” by the Prefecture of Police with German “support”—and sent to two concentration camps in the Loiret at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Meanwhile, sporadic arrests on city streets continued as both French and German police plied their trade of checking papers and identity cards. By mid-June, 166 such inmates were in detention at the Paris Centre des Tourelles, and dozens more were to follow in July.
¹⁰

Behind the scenes, the evolution of German policy toward Jews in France was more elusive. Yet a review of extant documents from the Occupation reveals a reasonably clear image of it. The starting point was a memo prepared by Ambassador Abetz in mid-August 1940 in which he outlined three proposals: (1) immediate orders should be issued to prohibit any Jews who had fled the Occupied Zone from re-entering it; (2) preparations should begin for “the removal of all Jews”; and (3) means should be determined for the expropriation of Jewish property.
¹¹
Safe to predict, this agenda promptly aroused a flurry of controversy in the Hotel Majestic, where Werner Best gathered contradictory reactions. The existing policy of the Stülpnagel administration was notably passive. As the Economic Section observed: “The fact alone that a [French] citizen is a
Jew
does not at present allow special measures against him,” although vacated and unclaimed apartments in Paris might properly be requisitioned.
¹²
In direct response to Abetz, another memorandum stated that the primary objective of the Occupation was to ensure the safety of its troops. “Hence, it is not a matter for the military administration to intervene positively (
verbessernd
) into the internal political conditions of France.” Above all, the impression should be avoided of an intention to annex the Occupied Zone, which might be created by the insertion of “the racial question.” Measures advocated by Abetz therefore stood “in contradiction” with instructions from General von Stülpnagel, since “their implementation would mean the abandonment of previously observed policy.” A change could be justified only if Jews presented a demonstrable threat to Occupation forces by spying, public demonstrations, or nefarious economic activity. In sum, whereas Abetz's first point might present no problem, the second was “impossible,” and the third would require at most “the elimination of Jewish business managers.”
¹³

This relatively moderate view did not pass without opposition. True, as one staff report remarked in early September, no aggressive measures had so far been taken to force Jews from public life, but the Occupation could not long remain static if it were to achieve “the ultimate goals of German policy.” Granted, those terms had not yet been precisely defined, but they surely implied that Jewish influence, especially in the French economy, should be “radically eliminated.” Such a process must necessarily be gradual, beginning with individual operations that would be all the more effective if completely arbitrary and thus unsettling. By these means, in effect, life could be made increasingly uncomfortable and intolerable for Jews in all of France.
¹⁴
The evidence is unambiguous that this line of reasoning soon prevailed, personally endorsed as it was both by General von Brauchitsch in Fontainebleau and by Reinhard Heydrich from Berlin. Further reservations expressed within Stülpnagel's staff were consequently superfluous.
¹⁵

Here was the opening for Dannecker, whose specialty it would be, as he unequivocally defined it in a memorandum dated on 21 January 1941, to prepare a “Final Solution” (
Endlösung
) for the Jewish question in France. Almost to the day, exactly one year before the notorious Wannsee Conference formally adopted this terminology, Dannecker and the Sipo-SD in Paris epitomized Hitler's intentions. Accordingly, they stressed that the formation of a new bureau for Jewish affairs, the CGQJ, was a matter of “urgent necessity.” It would be well, as Knochen explained a week later, to start by ridding Paris of all foreign Jews, thereby taking advantage of traditional French xenophobia and creating attractive economic opportunities for social climbers. To do so, admittedly, the Germans would need to organize the extensive police action that was a prerequisite.
¹⁶

Bureaucratic organization followed irregularly. The Prefecture of Police had already installed a euphemistically named “Jewish service” (
Judendienst
), which was busy compiling directories to identify the Jews of Greater Paris. The importance of these
fichiers
, as the Sipo-SD office chillingly confided to Heydrich, should by no means be underestimated “for a sooner or later intended general transport of Jews.”
¹⁷
But this project was too limited for a much grander undertaking that foresaw the French nation as but one element of a broader European campaign. For that purpose, a new central agency for Jewish affairs would be especially useful “in order to eliminate the reaction of the French people against everything that comes from the Germans.” Lamely optimistic, Best commented in a meeting with Dannecker that pushing the French to the forefront of this matter might even allow the military administration to deconstruct some of its decrees and to lean more on laws emanating from Vichy.
¹⁸