Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (22 page)

The Germans assigned soldiers to accompany the American ambulances that Polly, Jean and other volunteers drove to the prisoner of war camps. ‘At the camps,’ Polly wrote, ‘they insisted on distributing the goods, and would not tolerate any American supervision.’ To Polly, German interference in American humanitarian work meant only one thing: ‘The truth is that they were longing to get rid of the Americans residing in Paris. Too many stories were leaking out, told to the Press by Americans returning to the States. They were also accusing many of us of aiding the British prisoners to escape.’ The accusation, although Polly may not have known, was true. Some of the culprits worked alongside her at the American Hospital. ‘In any event, we were destined to become increasingly unpopular as Uncle Sam took bigger and better steps to assist England in the fight for freedom.’

Polly drove her ambulance in mid-September to a hospital for wounded prisoners at Rouen, near Paris. A physician there said that hospitalized French soldiers who were well enough had been taken to a train three days before, part of the German programme to transfer 1.58 million French prisoners of war to camps in Germany. When two French officers leaned out of one train to take a last breath of French air, a sentry shouted at them in German. The doctor thought that ‘they either hadn’t heard or hadn’t understood, for the two officers went right on looking, and talking to each other. The sentry addressed them again; still nothing happened. He then picked up his rifle and shot them both through the head.’ One was killed instantly, and the other died in the hospital an hour before Polly arrived.

The American Volunteer Ambulance Corps, forced out of service by German meddling, let most of its volunteer drivers go. ‘With no more work to do,’ Polly wrote, ‘I began thinking of packing my bags, but I couldn’t quite adjust myself to the thought of leaving the country, knowing it might be years before I was able to return.’ She was young and had enough money to live, so she stayed. ‘The first of October, ’ she noted, ‘found the schools opened. The streets and the “Metros” were crowded with children carrying their satchels full of copy-books and sharpened pencils. Most of the children had been removed from the Capital at the outbreak of war, and had only just returned. Their funny little faces were serious and composed: they too reflected the tragedy of defeat.’ Many Parisians remained traumatized by the German bombing of the refugee columns the previous June. In the Gare de l’Est, Polly saw a distracted woman clutching a blue flannel bundle. When a railway official approached her, she said, ‘You can’t have him.’ The woman was sobbing. ‘I have buried four of them. Four of them along the road … this is my youngest and my last … nobody shall take him from me!’ When the official looked inside the blanket, it was empty.

Sanctions against Jews in Paris became the norm. From 15 September, the Germans prohibited all Jews, as well as Africans and Algerians, who had fled Paris during the invasion from returning to their homes. The property and safe deposit boxes of the absentees were then seized. Polly witnessed a savage assault by French youths, who smashed the windows of Jewish-owned shops on the Champs-Elysées. Another American eyewitness to the pogrom, French
Vogue
editor Thomas Kernan, recalled, ‘One day in September, 1940, I happened to be standing on the balcony of my office in the Champs-Elysées, talking with one of my colleagues, when we heard shouting up toward the Etoile. A yellow roadster sped down the almost deserted avenue at 50 miles an hour, with a vaguely uniformed young man standing up in the tonneau yelling, “
A bas les Juifs!
” (“Down with the Jews!”).’ Kernan watched uniformed thugs hurling bricks through each window the roadster passed. ‘Before my startled eyes, the great windows of Cedric, Vanina, Annabel, Brunswick, Marie-Louise, Toutmain–a million francs worth of plate glass–fell into shards on the pavement. Most, if not all, of these shops were owned by Jews, and had been reopened by their faithful French employees, who stood trembling and weeping in the aisles.’ Kernan saw the perpetrators strut into the headquarters at 36 avenue des Champs-Elysées of the fascist
Front Jeune
, Youth Front. Its members, in Kernan’s words, were ‘pimply-faced youths of fifteen or sixteen years, of the Montmartre gutter type’. The police pretended not to notice, but a German officer coming out of the Claridge Hotel grabbed one of the brick-throwers. The youth handed the German a card. Kernan wrote, ‘What it said I do not know, but I saw the officer glance at it and then promptly release the prisoner.’

Kernan felt that ‘Paris had no stomach for this sort of vicious vandalism.’ The Nazi-controlled Paris dailies portrayed the attacks as ‘spontaneous outbursts of indignation by the populace against their Jewish exploiters’. (Most Parisians called their newspapers ‘the German press in the French language’.) Kernan detected the opposite: ‘The following days, behind boarded up windows, Toutmain and Annabel were filled with more customers than these shops had served for many months, customers they had never had before.’

The anti-Semitism fostered by both the occupation authorities and the regime in Vichy repelled Polly. She wrote, ‘The newspaper
France au Travail
, which–like all Paris papers–was under German control –suggested that the Jews should be isolated on some island, such as Australia, Madagascar or England, where they could establish their own government.’ Anti-Semitic demagogues like Jacques Doriot, a former communist turned fascist, staged rallies at which they condemned Jews and blamed them for France’s defeat. Polly saw ‘No-Jews-Allowed’ notices in restaurants. Jewish businesses that failed to display ‘Jewish Enterprise’ signs were subject to fines and confiscation. American Jews, including Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who had left Paris before the occupation remained in the so-called Free Zone, where the Vichy government–to maintain cordial relations with Washington–did not discriminate against them as it did European Jews.

On 6 October, an American newspaper correspondent took Polly on an excursion that let her forget, for a moment, what Paris had become. The reporter had borrowed ‘a crazy little buggy’ with ‘four wheels, a steering gear and two sets of pedals; it was puce colour, and so small that instead of getting into it, we put it on like an apron. With a large American flag waving out of each door of the contraption, we pedalled frantically around Paris, alternately bringing one knee up under our chin, stretching out the other.’ Traffic police laughed, and ‘pedestrians hooted and grinned and when on the Avenue de l’Opéra we got caught in the middle of a convoy of large trucks full of Nazi troops, there was pandemonium. The officers and soldiers stared wide-eyed at the Stars and Stripes, and the ridiculous vehicle, containing two crazy Americans, and for once they laughed too.’

Polly and the journalist, falling in with the German convoy, circled the Arc de Triomphe. A lone French workman was pedalling a three-wheel cycle beside a Wehrmacht touring car. ‘Twice the grey car was stopped by red lights, and each time the man on the bicycle passed it. At the third light the car drew up at the kerb: the officer jumped out and halted the Frenchman, who was coasting along quite happily. He roared at him in broken French, accusing him of lacking in respect towards his superior, by passing him twice on the wrong side.’ The officer ordered his driver to take the air out of the cyclist’s tyres. ‘Crowds gathered to watch the ludicrous picture of the infuriated officer, the silent Frenchman and the soldier on his hands and knees unscrewing the caps of three pairs of tyres.’ The Germans drove off, leaving the Frenchman to refill his tyres. A mile ahead, the cyclist came upon the Nazi car again with its hood up and a soldier trying to repair the engine. ‘The cyclist rode past once more, this time with a faint smile on his lips.’

CHARLES BEDAUX REVEALED COMPLEX, contradictory facets of character from the moment the occupation began. Having no political loyalties, he openly conducted business with and for the German occupier. ‘The Germans were the only ones left in Paris to do business with,’ Bedaux explained. Janet Flanner later wrote, ‘This is probably the best and briefest definition of collaborationism yet put on record.’ Yet Bedaux endangered his wealth and his life to protect Jewish friends, employees and clients. He convinced the Germans that his Jewish secretary in France was a Christian. She worked for him throughout the occupation. He did the same for Alexandra Ter Hart, the manager of his Amsterdam international headquarters, who had helped Friedrich von Ledebur to escape via Rotterdam in 1939. Married to a Dutch decorator, the former Alexandra Lubowski was both Polish and Jewish. Bedaux also helped to save three textile firms that belonged to Jewish friends, Vogel, Schraft and Blin et Blin, from Nazi confiscation by putting the companies in his name. Their share certificates were hidden at Candé to be returned to their original owners when the occupation ended. To most Americans and others in France, German occupation was a source of shame, irritation and anguish. To Bedaux, it was an opportunity.

In October 1940, German Ambassador Otto Abetz provided Bedaux with an
Ausweis
, or pass, to cross the demarcation line between France’s Occupied Zone and the Free Zone. Bedaux’s mission was to consult Maréchal Henri-Philippe Pétain about reviving his scheme to increase coal production at Algeria’s Kenadsa coal mines– no longer for Spanish mills to produce steel for France to fight Germany, but to fuel trains in North Africa. The old Maréchal received Bedaux at his Hôtel du Parc headquarters in Vichy. They discussed various Bedaux projects, and Pétain granted his request to study the Kenadsa mines’ operation and evaluate the quality of the coal. Bedaux left Vichy to inspect mineshafts in the northern Sahara.

On 21 October, Clara and Aldebert de Chambrun had lunch in Paris with Pierre Laval. Laval, already Pétain’s vice-premier, had just been named foreign minister as well. Their children, René de Chambrun and Josée Laval, were in Boston seeking American aid for children and refugees in the Free Zone. Laval told Clara and Aldebert that Abetz had just invited him to meet a senior German official: ‘He must be speaking of [Foreign Minister Joachim] von Ribbentrop, I believe. He is somewhere in the offing, and, it seems, has more influence with Hitler than anyone else.’ The next day, Abetz told Laval he was taking him to meet, as he had suspected, Ribbentrop. A German car drove the two men out of Paris, past Rambouillet, to the Loire Valley. It was then that Abetz admitted to Laval that he would see, in addition to Ribbentrop, Hitler himself. Laval blurted out, ‘
Sans blague?
’ ‘No joke?’ They went to a nondescript village, Montoire-sur-Loire, chosen for its proximity to a tunnel in which the Führer’s private train, the
Amerika
, could hide in the event of RAF bombing. Hitler and Ribbentrop, who received Laval in the train’s dining car, invited him to return in two days with Maréchal Pétain for the first post-defeat summit between the German and French leaders.

In the meantime, Hitler had a rendezvous with the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, at Hendaye in French Basque country beside the Spanish frontier. Franco, who had taken power with German military assistance in the Spanish Civil War only the year before, resisted Hitler’s demand that he repay the debt by joining the war against Britain. The Spaniard’s prevarication scuttled German plans to send troops through Spain to conquer the British Mediterranean fortress at Gibraltar. Hitler responded by denying Franco, who had occupied Tangier on the day the Germans entered Paris, permission to occupy other parts of French Morocco. Franco left Hitler in a bad mood to receive Pétain and Pierre Laval on 24 October back in Montoire.

On the
Amerika
, Hitler asked Pétain, stung by the British attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in July, to declare war on Britain. Pétain said he was not yet in a position to go that far in cooperating with Germany, but he asked for a peace treaty so that ‘the two million French prisoners of war may return to their families as soon as possible’. Like Franco, Pétain would not commit his country to war against Britain. But he would not resume the fight against Germany either. His goal was to keep France’s fleet and colonies out of both Allied and Axis control, while cooperating with the Germans to obtain a gentler occupation. After the meeting, Pétain broadcast a speech that introduced the notion of ‘collaboration’: ‘This collaboration must be sincere. It must exclude all idea of aggression. It must carry with it a patient and confident effort … Follow me. Trust in eternal France.’ At the same time, he sent a message to Winston Churchill, via the Portuguese Ambassador in order to conceal its contents from Pierre Laval, that Vichy’s collaboration with Germany would not be military.

Charles Bedaux returned from North Africa a few days later to hear first-hand from Laval what had transpired at Montoire. Gaston Bedaux, who attended dinner in Paris with his brother and Laval, wrote, ‘I was placed to the right of the President [Laval retained the title ‘President’, having been President of the Council of Ministers, or prime minister, several times before 1936], my brother was at his left.’ Laval recounted at length that evening details of his meeting at Montoire. Laval, who had kept ‘careful notes’ of the meetings on 22 and 24 October, told the Bedaux brothers of ‘his differences with the Maréchal and the efforts he made to save the French in explaining to the Germans what one meant by collaboration. He also told us particularly how he succeeded in taking out of German hands some Frenchmen who, in the course of a football match, had mistreated their German neighbours after a conversation purely about sports.’

Laval did not seem to understand that, whether or not he cajoled Germany into minor concessions, much of French, as well as American, public opinion perceived him as a German puppet. ‘Laval was happy with the success that he achieved in this affair in declaring that collaboration was not subordination,’ Gaston Bedaux recalled, adding Laval’s view ‘that it was necessary to live together and it was not necessary for one blindly to obey the other. The partner had to understand that to collaborate did not mean to exclude contradiction, discussion and even dispute.’ Laval, who was proud of his skill as an orator, assured the Bedauxs, ‘So long as I have my vocal cords, I’ll get out of trouble.’ Charles Bedaux was bored by Laval’s exposition of the politics of collaboration. When Laval criticized Vichy’s recent decision to reduce civil servants’ salaries, Charles the efficiency engineer came to life. He argued that only increased productivity would achieve both higher salaries and a reduction in the cost of living. Gaston took from the dinner the impression of Laval as ‘a lively intelligence and a man who sought to perform a difficult task’. He was also a valuable ally for Bedaux in the Vichy administration.