Voices from the Dark Years (19 page)

Posted to Paris as Kriegsverwaltungsabteilungschef, or department head of General Otto von Stülpnagel’s administrative staff, Helmut Rademacher later recalled his boss returning from shopping trips incognito to ask awkward questions like, ‘Why is the price of cheese so high?’ His multifarious duties embracing the live theatre, Rademacher once ordered Sacha Guitry, who was being courted as an example of
französiche Kultur
, to remove patriotic speeches from his production of
Pasteur.
It opened at the Madeleine Theatre on 31 July as an antidote to all the comedies playing elsewhere.

Rademacher’s spicier duties included the inspection and licensing of forces’ brothels, which could only employ girls holding a permit from his office. There were forty-five establishments in Paris where
la collaboration horizontale
was officially available – forty for German rank-and-file, four for officers below general rank and one for the generals. Rules for the inmates were strict: no Jewesses or Blacks, condoms obligatory and regular medical checks. Off the premises, the girls were watched to ensure they did not work ‘on the side’. Business boomed, German regulations taxing brothels at the same rate as boxing matches – a loop-hole that was slammed shut by
fisc
inspectors after the Liberation, when they demanded four years’ arrears with interest.
¹

Although One-Two-Two, the capital’s most expensive
maison de tolérance
never ran short of caviar or champagne, it was out of bounds for German military personnel. Any officer found there or in any other unauthorised brothel was immediately transferred from France for having ignored the obligatory notice outside the entrance:
Das Betreten dieses Lokales ist deutschen Soldaten und Zivilpersonen strengst verboten
. All ranks, on leaving a brothel, were given a card bearing the name of the establishment, the date and the girl’s working name, for medical follow-up if necessary. It was forbidden for military personnel to have any relationships with the whores, to divulge personal details or give them photographs or other keepsakes.

Between 5,000 and 6,000 street and bar girls also had bilingual ID cards declaring them reserved for German use, but the Kriegsverwaltung estimated that in addition to them and 1,600 to 1,800 licensed whores in the
maisons closes
, there were at least another 80,000 unauthorised female sex-workers in greater Paris alone, constituting a permanent source of venereal infection.
²
Nevertheless, the Wehrmacht’s unhypocritical policy paid off: there was no epidemic of gonorrhoea and syphilis such as followed the GIs’ arrival after the Liberation.

So many officers managed to wangle a posting to France that some wag invented the apocryphal JEIP travel agency, the initials standing for
Jeder Einmal in Paris
, meaning, ‘everyone gets to Paris once’. For newcomers,
Pariser Zeitung
listed places to avoid and hints on ‘what to do if …’ In Montmartre, nightclub settlements between the Corsican Mafia and the
carlingue
– thieves’ slang for the Gestapo’s hired gangsters – were so frequent that officers were advised to draw their side-arms at the start of a fight and form a human fence around the dance floor, weapons pointed outwards at the clientele until the police arrived. With SD identity cards in their pockets, the
carlingue
risked nothing in these fracas.

Pariser Zeitung
also carried paid publicity for nightclubs, restaurants and brothels where German money was welcome, but not all officers came for
les girls
: during the four years of occupation German opera-lovers purchased tickets to the value of 6.5 million francs. For them, the Opéra Garnier reopened on 24 August. Its first production, selected to celebrate the marriage of French and German culture, was Gounod’s
Damnation of Faust
inspired by Goethe’s
Faust
. Bookings were ten times better than for the last performance on 5 June.

White Russian ballet-master Serge Lifar had taken refuge during the German entry into the capital with a part-Jewish patroness of the arts, Marie-Laure de Noailles, who had remained in her town house to defend her collection of Goyas by waving at any approaching German a letter from US Ambassador Bullit stating that her house and contents were American property. Emerging when he thought it safe, Lifar directed the ballet company of the Opéra in an anodyne choice:
Coppélia
opened on 28 August. Later, he would even invite Baldur von Schirach – head of Hitler Youth – to open an exhibition.

Within days of the German arrival, gourmet restaurants like Fouquet’s and La Tour d’Argent saw takings soar through the roof. Maxim’s was quietly taken over by the Berlin restaurateur Otto Horcher, whose colleague Walterspiel also ‘administered’ forty or so bistros requisitioned from racially unacceptable owners. Another function of Rademacher’s office was approving their orders for champagne and fine wines, although everyone was aware that monthly consumption was systematically over-estimated so that the surplus purchased at the regulated price of 5 marks per bottle could be sold off on the black market at 20 marks a bottle.
³

Over a succulent Châteaubriand steak at his table in Le Catalan restaurant, Pablo Picasso held court for writers and artists like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Braque and Albert Camus. Throughout the occupation, he was left alone by the Gestapo, despite having a Jewish mother and known communist sympathies. Abetz even sent a lackey offering a supplementary coal allocation, which was refused by the man who had exposed worldwide the Condor Legion’s bombing of civilians in his painting ‘Guernica’. There is a story that one German officer looking at a copy of it asked the artist, ‘Did you do that?’ Picasso is said to have replied, ‘No, you did.’ Yet, those who look for any evidence of the Second World War in his work during the occupation, look in vain. Expressing contempt for the critics, he said afterwards, ‘Perhaps an art historian will demonstrate how my painting was influenced by the war. I don’t know.’
⁴

The English bookshop on the rue de Rivoli had an enormous sign,
Frontbuchhandlung
, tacked in front of ‘W.H. Smith’ and everywhere
Man spricht deutsch
replaced
English spoken.
At Longchamp and Auteuil the racing set in all its furs and finery, now swollen by Germans in and out of uniform, watched the horse races and placed its bets. The Jockey Club welcomed back its elite members and if the president’s box was now reserved for the Kommandant von Gross-Paris and his high-ranking compatriots, it troubled no one.

For officers preferring the other kind of horseflesh, the Folies Bergères reopened with a new review of scantily clad dancers on 1 August, featured in the French-language edition of the propaganda magazine
Signal
to show how normal life now was in France. The revue was to become less erotic as the autumn drew into a coal-less winter and goose pimples on the girls’ shivering bodies were hard to disguise beneath sequins glued on strategic places. Nightclubs like Don Juan, Chez Elle, Le Tabarin and the Lido were doing a roaring trade, the management of one Montmartre dive sticking up a large notice outside: ‘The staff and performers in this establishment are all Aryan.’ Outside Le Moulin Rouge, soldiers queued to see the high-kicking dancers expose their frilly knickers, unaware that the Cancan music had been composed by a Jewish composer.

With ‘Paris By Night’ now ‘
Paris bei Nacht
’, Sacha Guitry and Maurice Chevalier had no qualms about performing for the occupying forces. Nor did Édith Piaf spurn their money. Like Maurice Chevalier and Charles Trenet, she also accepted tours in Germany. Life was harder for the
chansonniers
in cabarets, who had to word their satirical ditties carefully. Stand-up comedians with no wish to offend either the occupation authorities or their own humourless government targeted poor performance by Mussolini’s troops during the invasion. Everyone appreciated the joke about the Italian airborne attack when a Forza Aerea plane invaded French airspace carrying twelve strong men, all highly trained to throw the single reluctant parachutist out when over the drop-zone! More risky was the story of Mussolini asking the Führer what the German eagle signified. Hitler replied, ‘The head of the eagle with its piercing eyes, is me – the brains of the Third Reich. The heart is Goebbels, who guides the soul of the great German nation. The two wings represent Reichsmarschal Goering, master of the Luftwaffe. The belly is Dr Funk, in charge of food production.’ At this point Italian Foreign Minister Comte Galeazzo Ciano clutches the Duce’s sleeve: ‘Let’s leave now, before he reaches the arse-hole. That’ll be us!’
⁵

If theatres and the opera had to advance the start of performances by an hour or more to ensure the curtain came down in time for the last Metro train, priority given at the cloakroom for those with a connection to make, in nightclubs many clients were deliberately distracted by the hostesses until they had no choice but to continue drinking and paying for the ladies’ drinks until 5 a.m., when they could depart with lightened wallets. Typically Parisian,
système
D
– the initial being for
débrouiller
, or ‘wangle’ – saw curfew-exempt Post Office vans taking routes that enabled the drivers to collect patrons from nightclubs and drop them off at home for cash.

Guitry, in between buzzing around town sometimes in a little electric car to get around the shortage of petrol, said in his film
Donne-moi tes yeux
, ‘Before these marvels (of Impressionist art and music created despite the occupation of France by Germany in 1870) we have the … right to consider that such creations are equal to a victory.’ Intended as a justification for business-as-usual in the arts and entertainment industry, this and other indiscretions were to cost him two months in prison after the Liberation.
⁶
Maurice Chevalier tried to play it both ways, photographed in
Signal
singing for POWs at the same camp where he had been imprisoned 1914–18 but also protesting a blind obedience of the marshal that got him into trouble after the Liberation.
⁷

At the top end of the cultural scale were the senior officers, whose personal interest in Paris lay in her artistic riches. The Hague Conventions imposed on the victor in war the duty of safeguarding works of art. This enabled General Keitel at OKW to order the first military commander of Paris, General von Vollard-Bockelberg to take possession of all works of art belonging to the French State and those of émigré Jews and other runaways. Using the logic that all the paintings, statues and smaller valuables were being taken under the protection of the Wehrmacht, the fight began despite an ordinance of 15 July signed by the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich:

1. No work of art may be removed from its present place nor modified in any manner without the written authority of the military administration;

2. Removal of any work of art must be authorised by me in advance;

3. Works of art whose value exceeds 100,000 francs must be registered in writing by their owners or present holders before 15 August 1940.

There were always conflicting chains of command emanating from the Führer. Thus, Ambassador Abetz acted on instructions from Ribbentrop when informing Gen Vollard-Bockelberg on 6 July that the responsibility of looking after the works of art fell to the embassy. Accordingly, Gruppe 540 of the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP) was charged with entering private homes and art galleries belonging to Jewish runaways and placing everything valuable under Abetz’s care. Within hours the Paris home of Baron Edward de Rothschild was a shell, empty frames hanging on all the walls, furniture, tapestries and even curtains disappearing into the ‘protective’ maw of the Reich. Army trucks pulled up in front of the art galleries with famous names – Seligman, Bernheim, Rosenberg – while they too were emptied of their treasures.

Before the afternoon was out, Abetz had been over-ruled. Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Speidel, acting directly for OKW, invoked the Hague Conventions – under which the Kunstschutz or Wehrmacht art protection service was to take charge of all works of art in the conquered territory. Museum curator Comte Franz Wolff Metternich was placed in charge of the operation and carried it out so conscientiously that he was dismissed in the summer of 1942, and was later the only German of the occupation administration to be awarded a French decoration.

On 17 July a counsellor at the Legation, SS-Sturmbannführer Baron von Kunsberg arrived with a team of Foreign Ministry ‘experts’ to restart the official looting. He was soon replaced in the game by Dr Carl-Theo Zeitschel, also an SS-Sturmbannführer and an officer in the GFP, who outranked Abetz both in age and seniority as member of the Nazi Party.