Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (20 page)

From the beginning of the Armistice, Bedaux organized local businesses, civil servants and labourers to rebuild the battle-damaged and fire-ravaged city of Tours and its nearby factories with assistance from the American Red Cross. Bedaux oversaw much of the work himself with Marcel Grolleau, a former lumberjack whom he had hired in 1927 after seeing him at work in a forest near Candé. Grolleau, 22 when he met Bedaux, had since become a Bedaux engineer and, unbeknownst to Bedaux, was active in the nascent resistance to German occupation. German privations impeded reconstruction. Not only did the Germans seize heavy equipment, they took most of France’s petrol supply for their army. Bedaux and Grolleau turned wood from the forests of the Loire Valley into charcoal for
gazogene
to run cars and machinery.
Gazogene
, less efficient and smokier than petrol, fuelled the few French cars that the Germans allowed on the roads.

Bedaux in the late summer went to Paris, where he discovered that the German Stadtkommissar’s Office of Locations had seized the Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme. Having lost their permanent suite to the Germans, Charles and Fern were reduced to a smaller hotel nearby. Most of its other guests were German officers. The German army also evicted Bedaux company engineers from their homes in Paris to make room for soldiers. A few of the engineers went to Candé, and others moved with their families into Bedaux’s offices at 39 avenue de Friedland, between the Arc de Triomphe and rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré. Bedaux had once again to placate the Nazis, this time to reclaim his employees’ houses.

Early in September, Bedaux chanced upon his old friend and former employee, the Austrian Count Joseph von Ledebur, in his hotel. Ledebur, now a Wehrmacht Rittmeister, or cavalry captain, had served in Poland. In the more desirable posting of Paris, he was delighted to see Bedaux. Bedaux was close to Joseph and his younger brother, Friedrich, although they were not on good terms with each other. Friedrich had condemned Joseph for wearing a Nazi emblem on his lapel in 1939. Bedaux arranged for Friedrich, who was avoiding military conscription by the Wehrmacht, to escape from Germany that August. In Berlin a week before Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Bedaux had given Friedrich false identity documents and a car to go to Holland. Friedrich said later that Bedaux was with him in Amsterdam. The Bedaux Company’s Dutch headquarters provided him with extra large clothes–the gangly Friedrich was 6 foot 9–for his disguise as a sailor. Alexandra Ter Hart, who managed the Bedaux office, drove him to Rotterdam harbour, where he signed on as an ordinary seaman on a ship bound for the United States. An excellent horseman and polo player, Friedrich took jobs in California, where he had lived intermittently since 1928, on ranches and training horses for Hollywood movies. Bedaux, who flew to Paris on one of the last civilian planes from Berlin before war was declared, said that he regarded Friedrich von Ledebur as more of a son than his own son.

Meeting again in newly occupied Paris, Bedaux and Joseph rekindled a friendship redolent of possible benefits to them both. After Bedaux related his woes about his engineers’ confiscated homes, Ledebur arranged for Bedaux to see Heinrich Otto Abetz, Germany’s Francophile ‘ambassador’ to France. (Under the Armistice, France and Germany had no formal diplomatic relations in advance of a full peace treaty. Abetz was married to a French former secretary of pro-Nazi journalist Jean Luchaire, Suzanne de Brockere. He functioned as ambassador in the old German Embassy, the Hôtel de Beauharnais, at 79 rue de Lille in the 7th Arrondissement. His opposite number was General Léon de la Laurencie, ‘Delegate General of the French Government in the Occupied Territories’, ostensibly Vichy’s ‘ambassador’ to the Germans in Paris.) Abetz had last seen Bedaux in 1939, when he arranged an interview for him with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop concerning Bedaux’s unpaid consultancy fees. Bedaux now found Abetz willing but unable to help in an occupied Paris governed by the military. The ambassador had little choice but to refer Bedaux to the army, which showed no interest in his problem. Bedaux refused to give up. Marcel Grolleau recalled this time in his employer’s life: ‘Bedaux was more dynamic than ever under this pressure. He worked non-stop to see that all engineers and associates were taken care of. Much of his time was taken with protecting the interests of Jewish clients.’

The Bedauxs, despite losing their Ritz suite, maintained an active social life among German officials and the upper class French who had no qualms about mixing with the conquerors. The theatres, music halls and restaurants of Paris entertained the old rich, the rising collaborationist elite, newly wealthy black marketeers and Germans from the army and civil service. Jean Patou, working from the eighteenth-century Parisian palace where the Duc de Talleyrand had kept one of his mistresses, went on making dresses for Fern Bedaux and other rich matrons as he had before the occupation. For those with a financial buffer against the hunger that German rationing had imposed on most Parisians in September 1940, the dinner parties went on and on. Occupation restrictions did not affect the Bedauxs or most of their friends. They exchanged invitations to country weekends, lunched at Maxim’s and dined at La Tour d’Argent. Charles and Fern were regulars at the house of leading collaborationist Fernand de Brinon, whose Jewish stepson, Bernard Ullmann, recalled, ‘This millionaire, French naturalized American, boasted of having free access to Hermann Goering.’ Among the
beau monde
French couples who hosted the Bedauxs were André Dubonnet, a First World War French flying ace, race car driver and alcohol heir, and his American wife, Ruth. During a dinner party at Dubonnet’s in late September, Bedaux met the wife of François Dupré, owner of Paris’s George V, Regina and Plaza Athenée hotels. Ferevies Dupré, when Bedaux mentioned the problem of his staff’s houses, introduced him to a German official named Dr Franz Medicus. As assistant director of the Department of Administrative Economy with the military rank of general, Medicus controlled property, including that of Parisian Jews, seized by the Nazis. He invited Bedaux to dinner in the Majestic, the Nazi-requisitioned hotel where he lived.

The friendship that developed between Bedaux and Medicus made Medicus one of the three closest people in Bedaux’s life–the others being his wife, Fern, and Friedrich von Ledebur. Both men had American connections: Bedaux as a US citizen, Medicus as son of a father with such affectionate memories of living in the United States that he gave his son the middle names ‘Horace Greeley’. Despite Medicus’s involvement in drafting the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws of 1935 and in transferring French-Jewish businesses to Aryan ownership, Bedaux saw the Nazi functionary as a civilized scholar. Medicus had degrees in medicine and law and punctuated his French, English and German conversations with Latin and Greek aphorisms. He photographed France’s cathedrals in his spare time for a book he was writing. Bedaux excused Medicus for disposing of property stolen from Jews: ‘He is a man drafted and has to obey orders or die.’ Not everyone accepted Medicus’s self-portrayal as a gentleman-scholar forced to serve the Nazi cause. Even Pierre Laval, who became cordial with Ambassador Otto Abetz and other German officials, wrote in his diary, ‘During this preliminary period [autumn 1940] the Germans with whom I came into contact said nothing to which I could take offence, if I except General Medicus who reminded me that we had been beaten.’

After his first, jovial dinner in the lavish dining room of the Hôtel Majestic with Charles Bedaux, unconstrained by German rationing regulations, Medicus agreed to give Bedaux’s engineers back their houses. In return, Bedaux employed German army clerks in his avenue de Friedland offices. The Germans would thus have access to information on all of Bedaux’s clients, among whom were France’s most important industrial enterprises. Medicus supplied Bedaux with petrol ration tickets and ‘WH’ licence plates reserved for Germans, a cut above the ‘SP’,
Service Publique
, insignia granted to certain French doctors, actresses popular with the German high command and important allies of the occupation. Since 16 June, two days after the German arrival in Paris, all other cars had been requisitioned or otherwise banned from the streets of Paris. His dinner with Medicus at the Majestic committed Bedaux to work as much for Germany as for France. He convinced himself he was doing nothing wrong. To be safe, he kept Robert Murphy and other American diplomats informed of his activities.

It was not long before the Germans gave the Château de Candé back to Bedaux. American Embassy staff moved in again, and German officers stayed at weekends. The chateau became a salon for Germans, Americans and French, who mingled under crystal chandeliers with drinks served by footmen in livery. Dr Franz Medicus was a regular weekend guest. So was the Comtesse de Brinon, wife of Comte Fernand de Brinon. Before the war, de Brinon had written pro-Hitler propaganda in the French press and sent intelligence to Berlin while simultaneously accepting subsidies from Parisian Jewish bankers Rothschild and Lazard. De Brinon and Abetz had been colleagues in a pre-war Nazi-front organization, the
Comité Franco-Allemand
. The Germans declared de Brinon’s Jewish wife, Lisette, whose name at birth was Jeanne Louise Rachel Franck, an ‘honorary Aryan’. This attractive divorcée, whose first husband had been a wealthy Jewish banker named Claude Ullmann, had her first marriage annulled and converted to Catholicism to marry de Brinon. Her sons, Pierre-Jérôme and Bernard Ullmann, were not accorded Aryan status. Bedaux gave Pierre-Jérôme work under a false name to avoid Nazi scrutiny, while the younger Bernard remained with his mother. De Brinon himself found it inconvenient to be seen with his Jewish wife, although he maintained contact with her through Bedaux and other friends. (His wife’s absence afforded him more time with his secretary and mistress, Simone Mittre.) For her part, Lisette de Brinon socialized as comfortably with the Germans as she did with Robert Murphy of the American Embassy. Before the war, her circle of acquaintances included the Jewish socialist ex-prime minister Léon Blum and the anti-Semitic writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. Much of the French collaborationist set, who doted on their German masters, found a home at Candé. Charles Bedaux navigated among his French, German and American guests with less interest in their politics than in keeping their champagne glasses full and his eye open to business opportunities.

ON 6 JULY 1940 , AN AMERICAN AMBULANCE brought two wounded French prisoners to Neuilly from the Hôpital Foch in Suresnes, which the Germans had just requisitioned. One of the two casualties was André Guillon, classified as dying from wounds he received fighting on 6 June at Beauvais. Guillon noticed, as he was wheeled into the Memorial Building, ‘the flowers, the walkways, winding through impeccable lawns, the very beautiful trees, an oasis of calm and silence, and yet something troubled us the moment we entered this magnificent hospital … the coldness of our welcome’. He soon realized that what he took for indifference was ‘neutrality that we quickly understood and that was absolutely necessary’. Another aspect of the hospital made a stronger impression: ‘There were no sentries at the door and no one controlled the entrances or the exits of the hospital.’ The Germans, however, had established their Neuilly headquarters, the Kommandatur, opposite the hospital’s main gate.

One of the first patients Guillon met in his ward was a Jewish officer he called Captain M., who told him, ‘Because I’m Jewish, someone [a German officer] refused to accept my word of honour as a French officer. Now, morally, I must try to escape.’ He asked Guillon what he should do. Guillon advised him to flee. ‘That, moreover, is what he did.’ As Guillon observed, Captain M. was not the only one. Dr Sumner Jackson, far from discouraging escape, looked the other way and falsified hospital records to say the men were terminally ill or had died.

Neither Guillon nor any of the other French prisoners saw Donald Coster, the American ambulance driver, in his basement hideout. Some time in mid-July, Sumner Jackson brought him documents to cross the Line of Demarcation and the Spanish border. Then, like Captain M., Coster disappeared from the hospital. When he reached Lisbon, his fellow drivers George King and Gregory Wait were waiting for him. They said that their fourth colleague, John Clement, had gone to Switzerland to work for the Red Cross. Coster returned to the United States. Writing about his experiences in the
Reader’s Digest
, he did not say why he went back to Paris from Belgium or that Sumner Jackson had helped him. Later, it was revealed that Coster was in the American consular service.

Sumner Jackson examined André Guillon’s wounds, which were not healing. Guillon wrote, ‘I remember Dr Jackson, who advised me to use sun therapy to reabsorb my wounds which were extensive and infected with a green pus bacillus. I went out every day to expose myself to the sun on the terraces of the hospital.’ Little by little, the wounds dried and healed.

During his time at the hospital, Guillon grew fond of Elisabeth Comte, who was sometimes called ‘Head Nurse’ but was listed on the hospital register as ‘assistant to the director’. Guillon observed two types of nurses, professionals and volunteers. Many of the latter were ‘daughters of Paris high society’. The rest were Swiss, American, Australian, Norwegian, Austrian and White Russian. ‘This ethnic group in particular … very much sympathized with the wounded, maybe a little too much for the Administration. There were flirtations, even marriages. We came to know the many varieties of caviar and vodka!’

Guillon appears not to have done much flirting himself, probably because his fiancée was visiting him. He got to know one French nurse who had worked in a leprosy colony in Madagascar and another who had been a race car driver. Two Canadian sisters, who were only 18 and 16, worked long hours as nurses and tended to his wounds. They had moved to France in 1939 to study the organ with the virtuoso organist of Saint-Sulpice Church, Marcel Dupré. The Germans had interned them in a concentration camp with other enemy aliens, but they escaped to the hospital.