An Infinity of Mirrors (19 page)

I tried so hard, Willi, but now I am as ashamed that I was too cowardly to leave you before this barbaric night as I am ashamed to be your wife
.

Goodbye
.

Paule

As she sealed the envelope her eyes were hard and dry.

BOOK TWO

1940
=
1944

One

The first two truckloads of German troops entered the Porte de la Villette at five thirty-five
A
.
M
. on June 14, 1940. German footsoldiers moved along the rue de Flandre in the direction of the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l'Est, with the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower as their objectives. French newspapers had told their readers that the German Army was dressed in paper uniforms and carried dummy rifles; now Parisians stepped forward to finger the woolen uniforms and admire the cameras which every German seemed to carry.

The Occupation divided itself into two parts: the Kriegsverwaltungchef and the Oberkriegsverwaltungsrat under the Militaerbefehlshaber in Frankreich. These agencies controlled all military and administrative powers in France, and they supervised all branches of the French economy from two separate headquarters: the Military, based at the Hôtel Majestic on Avenue Kléber, and the Administrative, based at the Palais Bourbon.

The Military policed the demarcation line between the occupied and unoccupied zones. It was responsible for the upkeep of roads, railroads, bridges, and other engineering requirements. It also was in charge of propaganda, and throughout the occupation the army was successful in barring Dr. Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda from France. The aim of the German Army was to see that the administration of occupied France was carried out by the French authorities themselves, under German orders. No interference was visible in French domestic politics. No conqueror still engaged in widespread warfare could free manpower for such work.

The Administrative branch had one division for its offices' administration, another for collaboration with French police, the control of municipal finances and railways, and the supervision of schoolteaching, libraries, records, and museums. It had a Public Economy Division which Aryanized and regulated all industrial and commercial enterprises and controlled all prices, credit, labor, public utilities, and insurance, and supervised all banks.

The City of Paris and its environs were governed by a military commander for Gross-Paris who was directly responsible to the Military Governor.

An Oberkriegsverwaltungsrat attached to City Hall was put in charge of the Paris budget, municipal taxes, public assistances, and pawnshops, the city's public utilities, the Métro, and all markets.

The rate of exchange was fixed at one French franc to each five reichsmarks, and a law was passed that German money must be accepted throughout France.

On July 15, 1940, an order was issued requiring all art treasures whose value exceeded one hundred thousand francs to be reported to the German authorities within thirty days.

The army really believed that they had managed to exclude the SS from France.

On June 14, 1940, at five fifty-nine
A
.
M
., SS Standartenfuehrer Eberhard Drayst, temporarily detached from duty with the Security Police, arrived in Paris with a party of twenty which had been lodged in small military vehicles in the center of von Kuechler's Eighteenth Army.

As the body of the Eighteenth prepared to enter the city, Drayst's specialists hurried along the deserted rue La Fayette and across the empty Avenue de l'Opéra to settle into their preselected accommodations at the Hôtel du Louvre. Because they all wore regulation GFP uniforms of the Wehrmacht military police, the army was not aware that Drayst's group had accompanied the Eighteenth into France. The Fuehrer had solemnly agreed with the General Staff that the SS was to be barred from the West at the time that the SS had simultaneously occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland with the army. The criminal conduct of the SS in Poland had so shocked the world that the military believed that the Fuehrer had at last seen the monstrous black corps in its true light.

It was to offset this tactical disadvantage that the Reichsfuehrer SS ordered General Heydrich to organize a task force to establish a foothold for the SS in France. Because of his distinguished record, his ability to speak French, and his charm, SS Colonel Drayst was selected to head this independent special mission.

The Drayst unit had a quiet dinner at the Hôtel du Louvre. On the morning of June 15th, still wearing his GFP uniform, SS Lieutenant Gutwillig went to the French Prefecture of Police and requisitioned all French police files indicating the whereabouts of Austrian and German émigrés, all political personalities known to be hostile to the Occupation, and all Jews.

All members of the Sonderkommando were outstanding men, and all except two were the personal choices of SS Colonel Drayst. The exceptions were the Gestapo commander, SS Captain Sperrena, a veteran police officer with eyes like brass carpet tacks, who had been chosen by General Mueller, and Captain Joachin Strasse of Section IV4b of the Gestapo, the Jewish-affairs section, who had been assigned to France by SS Lieutenant-Colonel Eichmann. Strasse was a top Jewish expert. He had been in charge of the first deportation of Jews from Stettin in February, 1940, when he took thirteen hundred of them into the Lublin area of Poland after they had voluntarily signed a general waiver giving up everything they owned. It had been a political test to see whether the Jews would be willing to walk to their own doom under their own power; to see what the general reaction of their neighbors would be when they discovered all those Jews gone in the morning; and to see how a foreign government would respond when they were suddenly presented with so many Jewish refugees. Everything had turned out very satisfactorily. There was no need for anxiety; the population at large, throughout the world, could not have cared less.

Drayst had two good men from the Waffen SS, Schwartz and Lazar, to do what Heydrich called “the hard details.” They were weapons and demolition experts whose gear included burglary tools and anti-personnel mines. They remained together at all times, as though to keep a careful watch on each other, and their conversations consisted largely of technical discussions of the merits of various guns, grenades, gas capsules, mortars, and other equipment.

SS Captain Wilhelm Gohrmann was Drayst's specialist in civilian police management, and SS Lieutenants Gutwillig and Megrau were college lads who handled the SD Ausland Section and the Economics Section respectively. They were both twenty-six years old and had been with the SD since 1935, but both had been at the university working for their degrees until early in 1940.

Each member of the task force represented some category of the complex files the Gestapo had maintained on all activities of the French police since 1935. The SS had been very thorough. For each section of files—administrative, criminal, cultural, political, religious, economic, and artistic—maintained by the French police, a corresponding section in Berlin had been created. After five years of day-and-night duty, filing and memorizing wholesale information bought from French agents, the SS men assigned to Paris knew intimately the regional psychology, the habits, and all there was to know about the private lives, financial holdings, inner convictions, personal peculiarities, and all other facets of character of all important personalities in France.

SS Colonel Drayst had spent the first eight months of 1939 in Paris, polishing his French, studying the press, meeting and evaluating political agents and informers. Drayst had become an important figure; he had been awarded the Iron Cross second class, in peacetime, for his wounds and for his heroism against the only pocket of armed resistance during the Jewish uprising in Berlin on November 9, 1938.

On the third day of the occupation, Colonel Drayst reported, most unexpectedly, to Dr. Sowa, director of the army's military police, to offer his credentials as an SS officer and to ask that his unit be placed under full army control. He apologized most engagingly for the presence of his little SS unit by explaining earnestly that he and his little staff were there on the track of German and Austrian exiles, Communists, Jews, and Freemasons. If it should turn out that any arrests were required, he would most certainly ask for army cooperation. Dr. Sowa was so flattered by Drayst's manner that, convinced the SS had learned its lesson, he gave his grudging approval. After all, Drayst's unit had only twenty men against twenty-five hundred GFP's—and that twenty-five hundred was about to become six thousand. Dr. Sowa could not foresee that when the SS, SD, and Gestapo became fully operative in France within a very short time, the GFP would almost entirely disappear—twenty-three out of its twenty-five groups would be disbanded and the men sent to the Eastern front.

A second unit of twenty SS joined the Sonderkommando in July, and a third arrived in August. Among them they spoke eleven languages, and they included a wine seller who could talk wine for hours the way the English could discuss the weather; a divorced countess who was an expert on the French aristocracy; and one female schoolteacher from the Sudeten-land who was put in charge of charwomen and all wastepaper. Her name was Fräulein Levinthal and she developed an uncanny gift for suppressing any scrap of information which might escape to the world at large.

The jurisdiction of the SS eventually stretched to twelve cities in provincial France. Though this enraged the army, they could not help but admire the way Drayst showed such enormous and detailed respect for all regulations which they imposed upon him. He did everything with correctness. There was none of the former, eastern SS brutality.

Not that Drayst did not have operational troubles. So much time was being wasted by placating the army that Colonel Drayst telephoned General Heydrich again and urgently recommended that he be provided with a “cover” officer of sufficient rank to put the SS on an equal negotiating footing with the army and other potential friction points. Within ten days Drayst was provided with the services of SS Brigadefuehrer Johannus Koltrastt, whose SS rank was the equivalent of major-general. Theoretically, Koltrastt was in charge of all SS, SD, and Gestapo operations for Northern France and Belgium, but Drayst ran the show and Koltrastt was a stooge.

Luckily, Koltrastt was used to being a stooge. He was a pink-skinned, small-boned, white-moustached, forty-seven-year-old fixer who dreaded responsibility, whose daughter was General Heydrich's mistress, and who was further related to the General through a grandson. He had been the first SS leader in Berlin eleven years before; his previous job had been at the city garbage dump, where he had been an “engineer.” To welcome him to Paris—and to annoy the army—General Heydrich personally addressed a mass meeting of French police officers.

Koltrastt's job was to wear his uniform and insignia smartly for negotiations with the army and the representatives of the Jewish Affairs Office of the Vichy Government, to act as the representative of the Chief of Police of the Sûreté Française, and to handle liaison work with Herr Abetz, the German “ambassador” to France (it was felt that the title of
Gauleiter
would not have gone down well with the French people). Koltrastt moved into a splendid building at 57 Boulevard Lannes, spent half of his time in France, half in Belgium, and three quarters of his waking hours in the bars and the
boîtes
of both:

Colonel Drayst was the Befehlshuber der Sicherheitsdienst. His offices and residence were in a palatial building at 72–84 Avenue Foch which was furnished with everything that systematic looting could provide. Altogether there were six Gestapo sections under Drayst's command. One of these was called Gestapo-France, because it was manned entirely by a French staff headed by Henri Chamberlin, a former mess orderly of the Paris Prefecture of Police, who had been interned in 1939 for his pro-German activities. He had been enlisted by the Drayst unit at the start, first as an informer, later as an interrogations leader. Under the name Lafont, he and an ex-police inspector named Bony picked for their underlings criminals serving sentences. These men were marvelously well-suited as interrogators, imaginatively departing from the standard Gestapo methods of torture. They were enthusiastic because some of them received reprieves of as high as twenty-seven years at hard labor, and because their new work provided them with a special identity card licensing them to carry and use arms.

Only SS Captain Strasse, Chief of the Jewish Affairs Section, lived and worked apart from the other members of Drayst's unit. Just as Colonel Drayst was not accountable to General Koltrastt, Captain Strasse, although a Gestapo officer, was not under the authority of Drayst. Strasse reported only to SS Lieutenant-Colonel Eichmann in Berlin, who in turn reported to General Mueller, chief of the Gestapo.

The SS and police tribunals were installed at Boulevard Flandrin in the sixteenth arrondissement. Captain Strasse decided which of those arrested were to be tried and which were to be deported without trial. The routine of arrest, interrogation, and trial was precise. Interrogations took place within ten days after arrest. The luckier ones—those not held for interrogation—were diverted to the internment camp at St. Denis.

Gestapo agents spoke very correct French, but many of them spent a great deal of time explaining that their accents were Alsatian or even Baltic. This hard core was augmented by an organized force of twelve thousand French informers who were paid for each arrest and who ranged in cast from prostitutes, to concierges, to members of the upper classes who could use the extra money. The third line of information came from the usual resources of the French police.

The Gestapo preferred to make arrests early in the morning. The Santé and the Cherche-Midi prisons held thirty-four hundred prisoners and were always filled. All prisoners had the right to counsel, but only from a reserve of attorneys who had been approved by the Gestapo, and the advocate could speak to his client only on the day of trial. To maintain an appearance of impartiality, the judges usually dismissed prisoners falsely accused, but then remanded them immediately to prison as a security measure.