Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (32 page)

 

Charles Bedaux had regularly briefed both Counsellor Robert Murphy and First Secretary S. Pinckney Tuck at the American Embassy in Vichy. ‘Kippy’ Tuck’s telegram of 24 September 1941, in which he wrote that Bedaux ‘let it be known that he is cooperating on friendly terms with the Nazis’, was already part of an expanding file. Adding to the dossier was testimony from Charles and Fern’s friends Herman and Katherine Rogers, at whose request he had invited Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor to Candé in 1937. The Rogers were in Portugal in August 1941 to book passage home to the United States. A State Department official met them ‘by chance’ in Lisbon on 15 August, but he waited three months, until 24 November, to send a memorandum to his superiors. (It may not have been until then that he learned of Washington’s interest in Bedaux.) Katherine Rogers denounced Bedaux to the diplomat: ‘Mrs. Rogers stated that she had definite information that Mr. Bedaux was using his talents on behalf of the Germans in acquiring for the account of certain German individuals and for himself large properties in and about Paris, and that he traveled about without apparent restrictions and with all indications that he was
persona grata
to the German occupying forces.’ This was an unexpected turn in the friendship between the Bedaux and Rogers families. Herman Rogers had crossed British Columbia with Bedaux, Katherine had been a close friend of Fern’s and both couples had been witnesses at the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s wedding. Now, the Rogers were denouncing him to the American government as a Nazi collaborator.

The American official who sent this memorandum recalled meeting Bedaux in 1939 ‘in Rome, Italy, negotiating a contract with the Italian Government and [he] was introduced to attachés of our Embassy by the local representative of the Chase National Bank, Mr. Carlo Ruggieri, who entertained extensively for him’. The official offered ‘to elaborate this memorandum if it is found to be of interest’. Of Bedaux, he added, ‘He is a man of tremendous energy and apparent ability in his field of work.’

Bedaux was unaware of the interest he had aroused in Washington. From Candé on 6 December 1941, he wrote a two-page, single-spaced, typed letter to the American Consul General in Lisbon, Worthington E. Hagerman. Hagerman, while posted to France in 1940, had been the second of many diplomats to take up residence at Candé and had given Bedaux his drawings of the chateau. Bedaux’s letter to him concerned his income tax obligations. The tone was cordial, between two men who appeared to be on good terms. He wrote,

Bedaux offered to put his case before the ‘highest court in the land’. He wrote that he had ordered his income from most sources to be set aside to pay the tax demand if he lost the case. He mentioned that the Germans had seized his five companies in Amsterdam, the core of his international business. They were being run by a German engineer ‘whose health and faculties do not permit energetic management.’ In France and Belgium, though, his companies were not confiscated. They ‘are doing more business now than they ever did in peace time, this in spite of the defeat of the two countries above named. To this I have added the North African business opened by me during the year. This is a further proof that our income resulting from our work is earned.’ His energies on his recent Berlin trip were directed to replacing the manager in Holland, and he believed that he ‘will succeed fairly soon. It will enable me to meet our American tax obligations in full under the conditions described above.’

The letter noted that Hagerman had been urging Bedaux to return to the United States or risk losing his American citizenship. Bedaux responded that his citizenship could not be taken away for two reasons:

He pointed out that his wife’s citizenship ‘cannot be seriously challenged’. Fern, born in the United States, had American ancestors dating back to 1630. He added that his son, Charles Emile, had been born in the United States and could not be deprived of his citizenship. Charles Emile was with him in France, he wrote, working ‘in a remote village of occupied France, la Haye Descartes’. His son did not know until 4 December that the US consuls had left the Occupied Zone. ‘He wishes to return to the United States and asks your advice on how he should proceed.’

Bedaux wrote the letter on Saturday, 6 December 1941. On Sunday the 7th, he and Fern set out on the road to Roquefort. She was going to stay with him at his rented villa in Lencouacq to see his utopian experiment in ‘equivalism’ at work. They stopped for the night in Bordeaux, which, like Candé, was in the Occupied Zone. They went to Les Landes, where Bedaux mailed the letter to Hagerman. On Sunday morning, when Bedaux mailed the letter, the Empire of Japan bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. What President Roosevelt would shortly call the ‘day that will live in infamy’ was about to transform Americans in Paris from protected neutrals into enemies of the Third Reich. Even if Bedaux had obeyed Hagerman’s request to return home to the United States, it was now–as for the rest of the Americans in occupied France–too late.

GERMANY DECLARED WAR ON THE UNITED STATES on 11 December 1941, four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The Germans ordered all American citizens in the Occupied Zone to register with the nearest German Kommandatur by 6 p.m. on 17 December. As the deadline passed, the Nazis arrested 340 American men under the age of 60. Among them were the American Cathedral’s organist, Lawrence K. Whipp, and Dr Morris Sanders of the American Hospital. Dr Sumner Jackson, although liable to internment at age 56, ‘was permitted to remain at liberty’. Ninety-five of the internees were Jewish, whose American citizenship was respected by the Germans. The men were installed at Besançon in crude wooden shacks without heat or plumbing. Like the British internees in 1940, they were soon moved to better quarters at Frontstalag 122 near Compiègne. Compiègne, where Germany and France had signed the Armistices of 1918 and 1940, lay in a forest 50 miles north of Paris. Frontstalag 122, also called the Royallieu Camp, had been the barracks of a Moroccan Spahi regiment. It had heat, running water and kitchens. The Germans divided the camp into sections for enemy aliens, political prisoners, Africans, gypsies, Freemasons and European Jews.

The first American to be released was Gething C. Miller, a friend of René de Chambrun and the lawyer who had represented the defendants in the Teapot Dome oil scandal of the 1920s. ‘He came to tell me all the requirements of his compatriots who needed practically everything, ’ René recalled. ‘Josée visited the managers of two or three Paris Department Stores and was able to buy a great amount of supplies which had been concealed from the French public and the Germans and these we had delivered to the camp in Compiègne through the Red Cross.’

The Germans held the Americans while they determined how Washington treated Axis citizens in the United States. Charles Bedaux was not interned, but the Germans put him and Fern under house arrest at the Château de Candé. They cancelled his ‘equivalism’ experiment at Roquefort, and they seized his company files and other assets in France and the Netherlands. His friends in the German administration, Dr Franz Medicus and Ambassador Otto Abetz, were powerless to protect him. One week after the Nazis interned the 340 Americans, they deported the last American journalists in Paris, Edward Haffell of the
New York Herald Tribune
, Louis Harl of the International News Service and Philip Whitcomb of the Associated Press, to southern Germany. There, the reporters were interned with other American correspondents to await repatriation to the United States. The Germans did not disturb the rest of the Americans in Paris.

 

A distinguished, 70-year-old English gentleman walked into Shakespeare and Company on 17 December, ten days after Pearl Harbor and the final day for Americans to register at the Kommandatur. Sylvia Beach had known him since 1920 and had sold his books and magazines. The sudden appearance of Edward Gordon Craig, who had been an actor and director before he became a writer, could not have been more welcome. Sylvia had last seen him before his internment with his wife, their child and the rest of the British community in June 1940. Her persistence with the Gestapo brought his release, as the Gestapo officer had promised her, before Christmas. Craig was grateful and gave her a copy of Enid Rose’s
Gordon Craig and the Theatre: A Record and an Interpretation
that he signed ‘to Sylvia from E.G.C. December 17th, 1941’. The German who kept his promise to release the Craigs sent them coal for the fireplace in their hotel room, as well as winter clothing and a Christmas tree. Not all Germans were as obliging.

‘My German customers were always rare, but of course after I was classified as “the enemy,” they stopped coming altogether–until a last outstanding visit ended the series,’ Sylvia wrote in her memoir. ‘A high-ranking German officer, who had got out of a huge grey military car, stopped to look at a copy of
Finnegans Wake
that was in the window.’ The officer came into the shop and said to Sylvia in fluent English, ‘I want that copy of
Finnegans Wake
you’ve got in the window.’ She recalled the encounter in an interview: ‘“Well,” I said, “that’s the only copy left in Paris, and you can’t have it … You don’t understand that anyhow. You don’t know Joyce.” And he said, “But we admire James Joyce very much in Germany.” He was very angry, and he went out and got into his great car, his great military car, surrounded with other fellows in helmets and drove away.’

At Christmas, Sylvia was unable to communicate with her family in the United States. For friends in Paris, she made a list of Christmas presents: chocolates, which rationing had turned into luxuries, for Adrienne and her assistant, an aspiring young writer named Maurice Saillet, as well as to Adrienne’s mother and Paul Valéry’s wife, Jeannie Gobillard. Françoise Bernheim, the 29-year-old Jewish volunteer at Shakespeare and Company, received from Sylvia a bound copy of
Ulysses
. Then, just after Christmas, the Wehrmacht officer who had demanded Sylvia’s only copy of
Finnegans Wake
returned.

The entire contents of Shakespeare and Company were stored on the fourth floor, where no one could find them. Sylvia hid the rarest documents, including James Joyce’s original manuscripts, at Adrienne’s. Adrienne wrote in ‘A Letter to Friends in the Free Zone’, published in February 1942, ‘You ask me how Sylvia Beach is doing. She is still in Paris, which she never left. She had to shut her bookshop a few days ago. Now that she has leisure she is going to start her memoirs.’