Voices from the Dark Years (27 page)

It was the right thing to say. The bored lieutenant waxed lyrical about the beauties of Zürich for a few minutes, handed back the identity card and waved goodbye. Hardly able to control his legs and not daring to look behind him, Rémy headed back to the farm with the uncomfortable feeling that the first guard was still watching him. Only by dint of reciting prayers unused since he had left junior school, did his breathing return to normal and the trembling stop. Back at the farm, he decided to borrow Rambaud’s bicycle, ride into Castillon and take the bus back to Bordeaux, which would at least corroborate his story of being there on business and keep Rambaud out of trouble.

Certain that Rémy would be picked up for breaking the curfew if he did that – and suspecting the guards were simply letting the dog run to see where it headed – Rambaud insisted that his dangerous guest must cross the line immediately, without waiting for darkness. Minutes later, while the old woman kept watch for anyone approaching from the road, their hot-potato guest was across the Lidoire stream, but not yet safe, because anyone caught within 7km of the border was arrested and handed back. Hardly had Rémy concealed himself in the bushes than the first guard reappeared at the farm with a squad of soldiers. At the top of his voice, to make sure Rémy could hear what was going on, Rambaud cursed them for bothering him when there was still two hours to go until curfew. Roughed up by the soldiers, who took him for a drunken old peasant, he succeeded in distracting them while Rémy put more distance between himself and the Lidoire.

A few weeks later, a party of Germans arrived to search the farm and outbuildings thoroughly. Nothing was found but Rambaud was arrested on the grounds that he ‘received too many visitors’ and driven away to Libourne prison, where he spent several weeks before being released for lack of evidence against him.
²¹

N
OTES

  
1.
  Ragache,
La Vie des Ecrivains
, p. 108.

  
2.
  Chabrier’s history is from the author’s conversations with the Chabrier family and Colonel Rémy,
La Ligne de Démarcation
(Paris, LAP, 1966), pp. 153–62.

  
3.
  Nossiter,
France and the Nazis
, p. 89.

  
4.
  For Laporterie’s full story, see J. Bacque,
Just Raoul
(Toronto: Stoddart, 1990).

  
5.
  Ragache,
La Vie des Ecrivains
, p. 120.

  
6.
  Referring to the colour car headlamps had to be painted.

  
7.
  Burrin,
Living with Defeat
, p. 53.

  
8.
  Webster,
Pétain’s Crime
, p. 124.

  
9.
  Arrested December 1941 but released in February 1942.

10.
  Le Boterf,
La Vie Parisienne
, Vol. 1, p. 37.

11.
  Pechanski,
Collaboration and Resistance
, p. 98.

12.
  Pryce-Jones,
Paris
, p. 63.

13.
  Unpub. MS on Prefect François Martin loaned to the author by Madame Gouzi:
‘Puisse le Maréchal Pétain avoir une vie suffisamment longue pour nous soutenir alors de sa haute autorité et de son incomparable prestige. Nous sommes totalement dévoués à l’œuvre du Maréchal.’

14.
  Quoted in a privately printed justification by the son of Prefect François Martin, loaned to the author by Madame Gouzi:
‘Nous estimons que le mouvement de de Gaulle est une erreur. Nous sommes convaincus qu’on défend mieux son pays en y restant qu’en le quittant. Autour du Général de Gaulle sont rassemblés maints éléments indésirables. En résumé, le MLN n’a aucun lien avec le gaullisme et ne reçoit de Londres aucun ordre.’

15.
  H. Michel,
The Shadow War
(London: André Deutsch, 1972), p. 123.

16.
  Originally Deuxième Bureau, it became Service de Renseignements and eventually le Bureau Central d’Action et Renseignements.

17.
  All the Gaullist intelligence officers chose
noms de guerre
that were names of Paris Metro stations.

18.
  Col Passy,
Souvenirs:
2
^e
Bureau London
(Paris: Éditions Raoul Solar, 1947), pp. 70–1.

19.
  Ibid., p. 173.

20.
  K. Doenitz,
Memoirs
(London: Cassell, 2000), p. 409.

21.
  Rémy,
La Ligne de Démarcation
, pp. 141–52.

12

O
F
C
ULTURE
AND
C
ROPS

On 15 March 1941 the SS pulled off a political coup, fusing Deloncle’s MSR with Marcel Déat’s Rassemblement National Populaire, a far-right party to which Laval gave some undercover financial support because it made him look like a liberal.
¹
On 1 April, with Darlan officially installed as deputy prime minister, one of the first laws that passed across his desk undid the loophole through which Reynaud had hoped to find marital bliss with the late Comtesse de Portes. In keeping with the importance attached to the family as a social institution by Pétain, and to reward the Church for its support, divorce was made more difficult once again.

There was an ominous foretaste of future violence in the report dated 9 April by the gendarmerie commandant in Blainville-sur-Orne in occupied Normandy: ‘Immoral behaviour by wives of POWs is to be seen wherever German troops are stationed. Girls younger than twenty are becoming prostitutes. This behaviour is difficult for officers to control, given the German protection certain women enjoy.’
²

Apart from promiscuity, women’s motives varied. Although one of the marshal’s slogans was ‘I keep promises, even those made by others’, it was now evident that his undertaking to ‘bring the boys home’ was empty talk and the wives and families were suffering: while a factory worker earned 1,200 to 1,800 francs per month, the allowance to a POW’s wife with one child was a mere 630 francs; it increased to 830 francs for two children and to 1,060 for three children, but was still insufficient as inflation bit.
³
With military personnel enjoying better rations than the civilian population, hunger alone motivated some women to find a German boyfriend, even before the adult bread ration in the Occupied Zone was reduced on 14 April from 350g a day to 275g.

Along the Channel coast, nightly bombing raids by the RAF added to the misery. Yet most public opinion blamed the Germans for making the ports strategic targets. Throughout the Occupied Zone, people who listened to the BBC passed its news on. A spate of V signs chalked on walls provoked frightened house owners to hastily scrub them off. Convinced Pétainists – and the vast majority of the population still supported the marshal – took to carrying a chalk in their pocket, ever ready to add two more strokes to a V and turn it into M, meaning
Vive le Maréchal!

The screw of anti-Semitism in the Occupied Zone was given another turn on 26 April with the proclamation by General Otto Von Stülpnagel of the second anti-Jewish ordinance. On 9 May the first of Vichy’s scapegoats for the defeat were brought to trial at Riom near Clermont-Ferrand in a courtroom packed with 300 enemies and with no chance of a fair hearing from a military tribunal headed by a judge who had been a member of Action Française. Only six witnesses appeared for the defence, including serving officers who courageously confirmed that defendant Pierre Mendès-France had been
ordered
to go to North Africa. One of the seven judges had the moral courage to dissent from the judgement that Mendès-France be stripped of his parliamentary privileges and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. A second Jewish defendant from the
Massilia
, Jean Zay, was sentenced to deportation. Of two gentile ministers who had been serving officers when travelling with them to North Africa, one was given a suspended sentence and the other acquitted.

That month, Darlan travelled to Berchtesgaden for secret talks with Ribbentrop and Hitler, seeking a reduction in the crippling occupation costs as a quid pro quo for help in Syria – in defiance of France’s neutrality, French airfields there had been placed at the disposal of the Luftwaffe flying support missions in Iraq for the uprising led by Rashid Ali against the British occupation of his country. Darlan’s second, economic, argument was that only 1.5 million German personnel were garrisoned in France, not the 4 million men originally budgeted for. Hitler’s Delphic reply indicated a possible 25 per cent decrease in daily occupation tax of 400 million francs a day, which was enshrined in a protocol signed at the end of May in the Paris embassy. It was indeed reduced to 300 million francs a day, but increased to 500 million after German occupation of the southern zone in 1942 – and to a crippling 700 million francs after D-Day.

Hearing a BBC broadcast in May, during which President Roosevelt expressed disbelief ‘that the French people was collaborating with its oppressor’, a group of theological students at a seminary in Lyon wrote a simple statement: ‘The French people does not collaborate.’ Signed with their initials only, it was to be posted or handed in at the US embassy, but became duplicated as a tract, inciting the Vichy paper
Action
to ask, ‘But who is financing all this?’

On 22 May Herbert von Karajan celebrated Wagner’s birthday by conducting
Tristan und Isolde
at the Palais de Chaillot. Karajan was a frequent visitor during the occupation, as were Eugen Jochum, Wilhelm Kempff and many other conductors, along with soloists of the quality of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and Lore Fischer. A new event was added to the cultural calendar when the Berlin Chamber Orchestra performed in the courtyard of the Palais Royal for Mozart Week, held in July. Of German conductors, only Wilhelm Furtwängler refused to come, saying that he preferred to conduct in Paris at the invitation of the French and not the Wehrmacht.

On 23 May, together with eight members of his network, Gaullist naval intelligence agent Comte Henri Louis d’Estienne d’Orves was condemned to death by a military court. Betrayed by his radio operator shortly after returning to France from London in December, he had been arrested in Nantes on 21 January. Before his execution at Mont Valérien on 29 August, he pleaded for clemency to be shown to the Breton sailors implicated in his arrest on the grounds that they had been motivated purely by patriotism. They were all transported to Germany. His last letter to a service comrade ended with the explanation that he had to cease writing because he and the two men to be shot with him were too busy telling each other jokes. On the reverse of a photograph of his wife and five children, taken at Quimper in Brittany, he wrote: ‘To my dear children I return this photo which gave me such joy in August 1941.’
⁴

With the Red Army observing German preparations for Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, the PCF and the communist parties in Holland and Belgium were brought into play by the Comintern, although still officially supporting the Franco-German friendship. A strike – ostensibly over wages, introduction of new technology and poor food – spread from the Belgian coal mines into France like a powder trail sparking from pit to pit in May and early June. German military governors reacted severely, deporting 224 activists and taking ninety-four hostages, of which nine were shot.
⁵
A pay increase of 18 francs per day was conceded before the last men eventually went back to work on 9 June.