Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944
Read Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 Online
Authors: Allan Mitchell
Tags: #History, #Europe, #France, #Germany, #Military, #World War II
N
AZI
P
ARIS
The History of an Occupation,
1940–1944
Allan Mitchell
Published in 2008 by
Berghahn Books
© 2008, 2010 Allan Mitchell
First paperback edition published in 2010
All rights reserved.
Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mitchell, Allan, 1933–
Nazi Paris : the history of an occupation, 1940–1944 / Allan Mitchell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 978-1-84545-451-7 (hbk.)—978-1-84545-786-0 (pbk.)
1. Paris (France)—History—1940–1944. 2. France—History—German occupation, 1940–1945. I. Title.
D802.F82P37535 2008
944'.3610816—dc21
2008020324
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.
Printed in the United States on acid-free paper
Photographs are courtesy of the Établissement Cinématographique et Photographique de
l’Armée, Ivry-sur-Seine (EPCA-Ivry), and the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz (BA-Koblenz).
For Catherine and Alexandra
“My love is like a red, red rose…”
C
ONTENTS
P
ART
I: Taking Over (June 1940–June 1941)
P
ART
II: Cracking Down (June 1941–November 1942)
8. Strict Controls and Stringent Quotas
P
ART
III: Holding On (November 1942–June 1944)
P
ART
IV: Pulling Out (June–August 1944)
Appendix: Classified French Police Files at the Archives Nationales in Paris
P
REFACE
I
t cannot be entirely coincidental that this study was researched and written during the American military engagement in Iraq. Even the most reclusive historian cannot ignore the daily association between newspaper headlines and scholarly pursuits. Surely all occupations of an invaded territory by a foreign power share some identifiable mutual characteristics, and the homilies to be drawn from a comparison of them soon become disarmingly simplistic: do not expect the conquered populace to throw flowers; beware of undue reliance on the local police; prepare to be blamed for absolutely everything that goes awry; and so forth.
Yet I have kept clearly in view that Paris is not Baghdad, and certainly that the 1940s had little in common with the initial decade of the twenty-first century. The evidence has therefore in no way been trimmed to support easy—and often misleading—generalizations. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Unavoidably, nonetheless, the vocabulary necessary to describe or analyze events often has much the same resonance. Use of the designation “terrorists” to identify insurgents was just as common in the four years after 1940 as it would become over six decades later. And, yes, there were in both instances improvised explosive devices, political assassinations, and well-documented incidents of torture—all of which were alternatively justified or condemned in similar terms. Still, the striking differences between then and now, here and there, are profound. One can ignore them only at great peril of distortion. Perhaps what we need to do is found an Institute of Occupation Studies in the hope that our political and military leaders will thereby be encouraged to think twice before embarking on a foreign adventure.
A number of colleagues and friends have offered me advice and encouragement along the way. I want to thank each of the following warmly for their help: Chantal Bamberger, Claude Blay, Karen Bowie, François Caron, Alfred Gottwaldt, Peter Hennock, François Jacquot, Larry Joseph, Joanne Karpinski, Shawn Kendrick, Annemarie Kleinert, Jürgen Kocka, Stefan Martens, Sylvia Roubaud, Tom Skidmore, and John Sweets. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge here also the unflagging support of my indulgent editor, Marion Berghahn, head of what she likes to call my
Hausverlag
.
I
NTRODUCTION
T
he notion of Vichy France is of course a complete misnomer. All of France was never governed from Vichy, and between June 1940 and November 1942 even the Unoccupied Zone south of the demarcation line was not really autonomous. For more than four years Nazi Germany ruled France, and it did so from Paris, which remained as always the heart and soul of the French nation. For the military administrators of the German Occupation, Vichy was a sometimes troublesome but temporary convenience that relieved part of the strain on their inadequate manpower resources. Besides, whenever important business had to be transacted, French ministers could be summoned to the capital.
In framing an investigation of that topic, as is apparent above, I have finally decided to capitalize the word “Occupation” in reference to the German administration, a practice frequently adopted by French historians of the period. The reader will surely understand that this usage is strictly a literary device to avoid repetition of awkward circumlocutions. By no means does it imply that German authorities in Paris always adopted the same policy or constantly acted in unison. On the contrary, one of the basic themes of this study is necessarily the lack of political harmony and frequent personal clashes among German officials. In many regards, as the evidence will show, the Nazi Occupation was dysfunctional from its outset to its demise.
In recent years, historical treatment of the Second World War in general, as well as occupied France in particular, has undergone a profound and permanent transformation. Many earlier writings were based to a considerable extent on personal memoirs, written or oral, that supplied an invaluable wealth of anecdotal evidence. But the generation of witnesses—those who experienced the events in question as adults—has largely passed away, and their testimony has in any case been amply recorded. Now, much more systematically than was possible before, the documentary record has become available to scholars, who are able to test or flesh out hypotheses and personal impressions of the past. To be specific, in regard to the Occupation, two large guidebooks to the most pertinent archival collections were simultaneously published in the year 2002: one for the holdings of German documents at the Archives Nationales in Paris and another for complementary sources held in the German military archives at Freiburg-im-Breisgau. A search of these materials housed on both sides of the Rhine is henceforth essential for any scholarly investigation of the Occupation.
1
Such sources need to be supplemented by other repositories, which are indicated in the bibliography of this volume. Obvious and indispensable among them are police files, ministerial papers, and statistical records conserved by the Archives Nationales. Not to be overlooked in Paris as well are the holdings of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, valuable not only for light they shed on the fate of French Jews but also for information about the conduct of the Occupation's military administration. On the German side, apart from Freiburg, the main centers of research are now in Berlin, especially at the Foreign Office archives but likewise at the Bundesarchiv, which has consolidated documentation previously scattered during the war at outposts in Potsdam, Merseburg, and Coswig. The Bundesarchiv in Koblenz contains only a few items of direct relevance.
To list these various locations is to suggest that current researchers unavoidably face a daunting task. They must also seek a special niche amid a staggering quantity of secondary historical literature. Among those scholars who have concentrated mainly on the French experience during the war years, a fairly clear pattern has emerged. The first narrative of note was written by Robert Aron barely a decade after the liberation of Paris. Aron took the view that the French, defeated but defiant after 1940, were virtually all sympathetic to, if not indeed active participants in, the Resistance. Their nearly unanimous reaction to the German Occupation, in short, was revulsion.
2
That version of the story was sharply attacked in 1972 by the most influential book ever to appear on the subject, Robert O. Paxton's Vichy France, which instead portrayed the majority of the French and their leaders as docile if not quite enthusiastic collaborationists. Paxton thus made what he called “a grave moral case” against French elites because of their complicity with the Occupation, which reached far down into the population.
3
Most of French scholarship during the balance of the twentieth century wavered between these two poles, with a noticeable albeit not uncritical tilt toward Paxton. So many books, often excellent, have treated the history of wartime France that it seems almost invidious to single out but a few. Yet if one must choose, the three most important general accounts appear to be those of Jean-Pierre Azéma, Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, and the Swiss historian, Philippe Burrin.
4
In addition, note must be taken of the extraordinary outpouring of works devoted (as the Germans invariably put it) to the Jewish question. Although the plethora of fine monographs precludes an adequate listing here, the incredibly meticulous sleuthing of Serge Klarsfeld surely deserves special praise.
5
Curiously, German historians have produced a much less impressive body of work on the subject. Three texts require emphasis. First, the pioneering study of Eberhard Jäckel provides a general context, although it lacks solid footing in the primary sources of the period because it appeared very early.
6
The same does not apply to Hans Umbreit's superb analysis of the Occupation's military administration. If somewhat narrowly conceived, without consulting documentation gathered in France, Umbreit's depiction of the invaders—regime in Paris is nonetheless grounded in a myriad of details scrupulously drawn from German archives, and it remains generally reliable.
7
Third, the monographic treatment of the complicated interaction of French and German police forces by Bernd Kasten represents an original contribution to our understanding of collaboration.
8
This listing could of course be longer, and my apologies are due to other authors whose writings are cited only in the notes and bibliography.
Where, then, does this study fit into such a large and crowded field? The best answer can perhaps be given by comparison with two books, one mentioned and one not, that must rank high in any review of volumes concerning France's dark years of German Occupation. The first is Paxton's Vichy France. Well-researched and vigorously written, this early account indisputably remains a reference point of interpretation. Yet the author made a small but telling error (corrected in his later work), because he did not realize at the time of publication that there were actually two German military commanders in Paris named General von Stülpnagel—the cousins Otto and Heinrich. As a consequence, he conflated their careers and awarded them only one confusing entry in his index. This mistake by no means vitiates the powerful main argument of Paxton's book, but it does indicate that he was still far from uncovering the inner administrative workings of the Occupation in Paris. In the main, my purpose has been to fill this research lacuna, which is easily explicable due to Paxton's lack of access in the late 1960s to all of the German archival resources that are now catalogued in Paris and Freiburg and that constitute the basis of my study. The resulting difference is largely one of tone, since in my view Paxton did not fully recognize the extent to which French functionaries were monitored and dominated by their German counterparts, an insight that might have led him to nuance some of his judgments about collaboration.
The second tome, appearing nearly three decades later in the year 2001, is the perceptive and remarkably comprehensive overview by the British historian Julian Jackson. There is no better synthesis of the French experience during the Occupation and no shrewder summary of the previous historical literature on that topic. But this weighty volume fundamentally differs from my approach in two crucial regards. First, Jackson concentrates exclusively on the occupied, whereas my focus is mostly on the occupiers. This basic distinction between our viewpoints explains much about our respective narrative voices and modes of analysis. Furthermore, whereas his conclusions are based entirely on secondary sources and published memoirs that are to be found in a library, my research was largely conducted among primary materials that can be gathered only from archives. To be precise, Jackson has neither cited nor apparently read a single one of the hundreds of German documents that provide the foundation and the framework of my investigation. Again, this is not at all to disparage the genuinely significant scholarly contribution of a fellow Anglophone outsider but to point out its understandable limitation. My objective has therefore been not to contradict Jackson's findings but to complement them by providing a missing element.
9
A word should be added about the structure of the work in hand. It is divided into chronological periods, based on the assumption that the character of the German Occupation of France evolved with the progress of the war. Within each of the three main phases before the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, five themes are developed. These thematic chapters are presented in the same order in each phase. Thus, it is possible to read the text either horizontally (phase by phase) or vertically (theme by theme). Anyone particularly concerned, for example, with problems of the French economy could tackle
chapters 3
,
8
, and
13
; or, for the Jewish question,
chapters 5
,
10
, and
15
. Presumably, however, it makes more sense to peruse the text from start to finish. I can only hope, in any event, that the reader will discover this subject to be as interesting as I found it to research and write.
Finally, the notes. Although I have attempted to organize them in a unified and consistent manner, the sheer variety of sources—drawn from several different archival collections in two countries—defies that effort. Moreover, there are frequent and delicate problems of attribution. It is not trivial to know whether a certain dispatch or memorandum was personally composed by an individual in a position of authority or was simply sent in his name by a faceless bureaucrat as a matter of routine. Are we really dealing with the banality of evil? That question obviously arises in particular regard to the execution of hostages or the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. When I could be certain of authorship, I have indicated that by name; when not, by title or office. After all, the main purpose of the notes, as I understand, is to enable another researcher to locate readily a given document in order to check its content. Such has been my intention, however imperfectly realized.