Voices from the Dark Years (22 page)

Propaganda photographs of senior officials and politicians shaking gnarled peasant hands and presenting medals could not obscure the fact that life on the land had never been so grindingly hard for 100 years or more. Even richer farmers who possessed tractors had no fuel for them. Some were converted to run from
gazogène
generators that produced a fuel gas from burning charcoal. On large farms, rusted steam traction engines were hauled out of barns and fired up, but on smaller properties the farmer and his wife had to work with horses or oxen to pull the plough, the harrow and the old-fashioned reaper. Even binder twine for tying the sheaves of cut corn was nearly impossible to obtain. Grandmothers rescued their distaffs and spinning wheels from the barn and went back to spinning and weaving the wool from their flocks. Farmers overhauled oil presses that had not been used since cheap groundnut oil began to be imported from the colonies and once again crushed their own poppy and rape seed to produce cooking oil.

Two days before the end of the month an apparently innocuous organisation was set up. The Légion Française des Combattants sounded like a harmless old comrades’ association, but its offspring would turn out to be far from harmless.

What was the Church doing all this time? If some individual priests were actively relieving grief and hardship, their superiors were mostly in wait-and-see mode. General Weygand was a devout Catholic and Pétain, as a pillar of law and order, appealed to the right-wing Catholic hierarchy. The Archbishop in France’s second city – a former pupil of Charles de Gaulle’s father named Cardinal Gerlier – declared in Lyons, ‘Pétain is France and France is Pétain’. In gratitude, Vichy passed a law on 4 September repealing the anti-clerical Religious Associations Law of 1903 and returning Church properties not already sold off by the state. Bells pealed and priests were free to go about in public clad in traditional cassocks.

Earthly communications were also slowly getting easier. The major northern industrial city of Lille had suffered such damage to lines and switching centres that only twelve telephones remained connected, all in local government offices. By the end of August 640 subscribers had been re-connected. Written communication with loved ones across the Demarcation Line was permitted, but only on thirteen-line pre-printed postcards reading:

At … … on (date)… /… is in good health / tired / slightly, badly / ill / wounded / killed / prisoner. … has died / is without news of … The family … is well / needs food / money / news / baggage … is back at… / works at … will return to school in … / has been received / to go to … on (date) … With love / kisses (signature).
⁵

More sophisticated reading material was also subject to German censorship. The first ‘Otto List’ of banned authors – named not after Abetz, but an eponymous Nazi professor – appeared on 27 August listing hundreds of books, including translations of works by German and Austrian authors such as Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger and Sigmund Freud. Bookshop owners had to hand over every copy for destruction by French police.

Censorship of new works was less intrusive. Even before the one-sided ‘Convention’ of 28 September laying down the guidelines, no sane publisher wished to annoy the government or the Germans. On 8 November – his 30th birthday – francophile linguist Gerhard Heller arrived in Paris to take up his posting with the Propaganda Staffel, running the
Referat Schrifttum
, censoring books submitted by French publishers. He was to spend the next weeks reading day and night to work his way through the backlog and issuing a
bon à tirage
authorising publication in most cases.

With Abetz’ backing, Sonderführer Heller passed almost every work submitted to his office, and was proud that, despite all the other materials in short supply or unobtainable, paper was never lacking for books by approved authors. His low-profile censorship was accepted even by best-sellers like Antoine de St-Exupéry and Albert Camus – who cut a chapter on Kafka from his first popular success
Le Mythe de Sisyphe.

Heller recalled being sent with a colleague to the Presses Universitaires de France to order managing director Paul Angoulvent to dump all his Jewish authors. Making the point that this was no request, the other officer took his pistol out of its holster and laid it on the desk, causing Angoulvent to go white as a sheet.
⁶
Heller was more subtle, as when ordering the publishing house Mercure de France to withdraw and destroy all copies of Georges Duhamel’s book
Lieu d’Asile.
Off the record, he told managing director Jacques Bernard to hide some copies wrapped up and labelled ‘Property of Lt Heller’, so that when the time came, he could republish it without problems. Aware that the heart problems which had earned him the Paris posting would be no protection from being sent to the Russian front, Heller knew he was treading a dangerous path.

Despite the censorship, the annual output of literary, art and scientific books published 1941–44 was no less than it had been pre-1939. Included were 300 translations from German, a speciality of the Aryanised publishers Nathan and Calmann-Lévy. The figure for 1943 was the highest in the world, with the French total of 9,348 books beating US publishing’s figure by more than 1,000 and UK output by 2,000. The reason? What else could one do when obliged by the curfew to stay at home night after night in that pre-television age?

The books most people were interested in were their new ration books. Curiously, the English word ‘tickets’ was used for the small squares that had to be cut out and collected by butcher, baker and greengrocer when selling the specified amount of food to each customer – while in Britain they were called by the French word ‘coupons’.

Entitlement varied with age, sex and work. Category C covered farmhands and others doing heavy manual work, with other workers in Category T. Category A covered all other adults between 21 and 70, while those over 70 were Category V. Infants were E, but children from 3 to 21 were graded J1, J2 or J3. Babies were entitled to milk and the old received a larger bread ration. The average adult received 350g of bread per day, 350g of meat per week and a monthly allowance of 500g of sugar, 300g of coffee and 140g of cheese. Although rations for babies and young children were supposed to be adequate, records show that boys maturing in 1944 were 7cm shorter than those of 1935, while girls were 11cm shorter than their older sisters. Teeth especially suffered.
⁷

As in Britain during the war, the rich could still sate their hunger in restaurants. For low-income workers and the unemployed, a chain of state canteens was opened in towns, similar to the British Restaurants across the Channel. These
rescos
offering balanced three-course meals with wine for 8 to 16 francs were patronised by as many as 200,000 Parisians. At the other end of the market, journalist and gastronome Jean Galtier-Boissière was paying 100 francs a head to entertain his friends to oysters and beef with a good cheeseboard and wine. Alas, by 2 August 1941 he would lament in his diary having to pay 650 francs for three friends and himself to enjoy fresh sole followed by slices of mutton. He estimated that restaurant prices quadrupled in the two years from December 1940 and were ten times as high by the beginning of 1944. A contemporary joke told of a madman released after thirty years in an asylum. Appalled at the wartime menu in a restaurant, he asks for special treatment and is given lobster, mutton chops and chips, a cheeseboard and pastry to finish with. The bill comes to 1,250 francs. Aghast, he tenders in payment the only money he had on him when locked up. It is a single golden
louis d’or.
The waiter bows and returns with change of 2,000 francs.

The value of gold had increased even more than that of food, but there were some things money could not buy. When Goering dined at Maxim’s, he was given a table by the orchestra while the favourite table of the Duke of Windsor and the Aga Khan was kept vacant for their return. He enjoyed the food enough to rule that the restaurant should be closed to all except high-ranking German officers, but lost interest in the idea once Eagle Day had come and gone without the destruction of the RAF. Released from internment, one politician’s British wife hired Fouquet’s for her celebration banquet – after which the gentlemen repaired to the cloakroom, to toast each other in black-market whisky, while she finished her meal with a Craven A cigarette ‘traded’ for food by her compatriots still behind bars in the St-Denis barracks.

As time went by, prudent French gastronomes avoided La Palette in Boulevard Montparnasse, frequented by the Resistance and watched by the Gestapo. Singer Tino Rossi was among the few uncommitted patrons at the Alexis bistro near Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, where one risked finding one’s table surrounded by Jacques Doriot and the top brass of the PPF. Few could do more than gaze through the windows. The
Journal Officiel
announced on 18 September a subsidy of 150 francs for seeds and tools to encourage everyone to take an allotment and grow his own food.

Just as the civilian population was thinking itself safe from the violence of war, a new enemy appeared. From bases across the Channel, RAF bombers raided ports where German invasion preparations were going on. From there, the targets spread to submarine bases, factories and airfields, many of them in or near centres of population. Between September and May of 1941 the naval town of Brest suffered seventy-eight raids, causing the mayor to appeal to Pétain: ‘The women and children have to take refuge at night in the caves in the cliffs around town and in a tramway tunnel.’

At the eastern end of the Channel coast in Dunkirk, where 82 per cent of houses had been destroyed in the May fighting, the first RAF raid on 28 July was followed by a massive raid on 8 August. The occupation troops took priority in the shelters, leaving most civilians cowering in cellars beneath the ruins of their homes. Few people in Britain knew or cared that between 60,000 and 67,000 innocent French civilians were killed and around 72,000 seriously wounded
⁸
by bombs which bore cheeky messages scrawled in chalk like ‘Here’s one for Adolf’. The addressee was for the time safe; each mis-directed delivery merely adding to the misery of his French victims. After Mers el-Kebir it was yet another reason to wonder who was the real enemy and posters all along the Channel coast asked, ‘And these were your allies?’

With big business seeking new opportunities, the occupation administration was one step ahead, requiring each section of industry and commerce in August to form a Comité d’Organisation Nationale. The initials CON were unfortunate, since
con
is both a female body part and a rude word for ‘silly’ – as in English. Even after it was reabbreviated to CO, there was no doubt for whose benefit these organising committees had been set up, although they were ostensibly intended for updating business methods and re-equipping factories to prepare French firms for competition in a German-dominated United States of Europe.

A series of laws dated 18, 20 and 31 October and 9 and 16 November 1940 completely revised French corporation law. As in the European Community, which Britain joined in 1973, young and ambitious businessmen snatched the opportunity to enhance their careers by working for the COs. In the absence of trade unions and parliamentary democracy, considerable power accrued to them, largely through their authority to impose sanctions on companies who failed to march in step with the New Order. The inherent problem from the start was one endemic in totalitarian economies: a proliferation of ‘organising bodies’ whose members had to pay the costs of a flood-tide of time-wasting paperwork. Some companies belonged to more than one CO; others had no idea to which they belonged. Many companies believed they were being discriminated against when the restricted resources were carved up. Whilst major companies could keep abreast of all the bureaucracy, smaller ones found that they were pawns being moved now by German orders or lack of them, now by the OCPRI – the central office for distribution of industrial products. It was a dream-world, in which the Germans insisted on by-passing the COs and placing orders direct, reducing them to collecting statistics for their German masters.

Some COs did work. Banking, then with no need of raw materials or expensive machines, was enjoying a boom in export credits to cover orders from the Reich. Henri Ardant, MD of Société Générale, considered it so vital for French banking to integrate itself into the new united Europe that he jumped at the chance to run the banking CO established on 13 June 1941. His connections with the SS hierarchy were so close that the former SS-Standartenführer Helmut Knochen said at his post-war trial, ‘He gave us all the information we wanted from the point of view of both banking and finance.’
⁹

Money is money, whether German or French, so that remark should be taken in the context of Dr Schaeffer’s memories of hospitality and warm personal relationships with the directors of most of the major banks during the time he ran the Bankenaufsichtsamt. By 15 September 1940 everyone holding a bank account had to provide proof of Aryan descent before being allowed to use it. Safe-deposit boxes of all Jews who had not returned to Paris were opened and contents confiscated. The result was a harvest for the Reich because in 1939 Paris had had the largest Jewish population of any city except Warsaw and New York, including 150,000 to 200,000 stateless refugees from Nazi Germany and Poland. That bedfellows are not always lovers is demonstrated by the management of the Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie being very close to Schaeffer for business reasons, yet protecting Jewish employees from the second Statut des Juifs in June 1941 by finding work for them to do at home and continuing to pay their salaries.
¹⁰