Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 (12 page)

Initially, high unemployment in Paris and the promise of substantially increased wages in Germany were inducements to board a train for the Reich. But there were irritating difficulties that held down the number of volunteers. For one thing, it was far more dangerous to work in German factories because of heavier RAF bombing. There was also a question of families left behind in France, for whom adequate compensation was lacking. To this was added uncertainty about the duration of contracts. Recruiters would “try everything” to extend them to a full year, although most French workers were reluctant to sign up for more than six months. Likewise, concerns grew about guarantees of paid vacation for those who stayed on.
²²
The negative effect of these issues was compounded by stories circulating back from Berlin about the crowded living conditions to which imported workers were subjected—“all of them miserable” as one letter read—and about intolerable constraints on individual liberty. Such complaints probably explain the tepid support offered by the Vichy regime and the “passive behavior” of French recruitment officials in Paris, to the chagrin of the Germans. As Jacques Barnaud confessed, his ministry was willing to tolerate labor recruitment in the Occupied Zone while “always refusing to favor it.”
²³

It was not hard to tell where these circumstances would eventually lead. That path was anticipated at a gathering in the Hotel Lutétia in early February 1942, attended by the Abwehr, the Gestapo, and the military command. Their conclusion was simple: if France did not supply enough volunteers, it would be necessary to institute a draft. This program, the infamous Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), took shape in the months that followed. During that time, voluntary recruitment gradually lost its last chance. On 18 March, Dr. Michel met with French cabinet ministers Barnaud and François Lehideux, informing them that they would need to furnish 150,000 new recruits within a short time. To free up needed workers, the Germans proposed closing several non-essential factories and increasing the standard working week to 48 hours. But the prospects were not positive. When the Hermann Göring steel plant in Braunschweig signaled an urgent need for more hands, the German Labor Ministry sent a representative to Paris where, alas, he encountered “great difficulties” in a disappointing attempt to persuade workers, temporarily unemployed after the bombing of the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt, to accept jobs in Germany.
²⁴

Berlin would have to take charge. The man designated to enforce a tighter German recruitment policy was Fritz Sauckel, a veteran SS officer, a true believer in the Nazi creed, and a devoted—if not fanatical—servant of Adolf Hitler. From the beginning, Sauckel asserted that a labor draft would be necessary in France, although at first he held back in mid-April 1942 at an unsettled moment when Admiral Darlan resigned as premier in Vichy and was replaced by the resilient Pierre Laval. That respite was brief, and Laval was soon informed that a new German quota was fixed at 350,000, in what came to be known as the first “Sauckel Initiative” (Sauckel-Aktion).
²⁵
On 13 May 1942, Sauckel flew to Paris, where he conferred at length with Heinrich von Stülpnagel, Carl Oberg, and other Occupation dignitaries. He was not there to negotiate but to inform one and all of his demands. He had the Führer's blessing, which was all that really counted.
²⁶

A draft was still not formally in effect. Sauckel did relent somewhat, agreeing with Laval to reduce his initial quota to 250,000 and to return one French POW from Germany for every three skilled laborers sent there—the so-called
Relève
. For these measures, Sauckel obtained Hitler's personal support, although the Führer stipulated that the POWs would not actually be released but only furloughed to work on French farms. Meanwhile, Stülpnagel was instructed from OKW in Berlin to stay out of Sauckel's way. The MBF would be provided with any necessary information. When further recruitment nevertheless lagged, Laval was pressured into producing legislation that essentially introduced a draft for all French men aged eighteen to fifty and women twenty-one to thirty-five. Slowly and painfully, despite German accusations of French stalling and several bomb attacks at Paris recruitment offices, Sauckel's goal of 250,000 approached fulfillment.
²⁷

All of this occurred amid gathering misgivings within the Occupation, where warnings were voiced that such an accelerated pace of recruitment was “technically impossible” and “economically unbearable.” These terms clearly referred to the antithesis between culling French labor and maintaining French production. Although it was not immediately apparent, those contrary poles would come to be personified by Sauckel and his ultimate nemesis Albert Speer. On a trip to Paris in June, where the two met, Speer, who was now the German Minister of Armaments and Munitions, was made aware of the increasing strain in the French labor market. At the time, his reaction, which he would later revise, was that both objectives—labor conscription and industrial production—could be fully realized.
²⁸
Besides, Sauckel was able to obtain another
Führererlass
in support of his recruitment program. Stülpnagel, although worried about the consequences in France, duly informed Vichy that any further reticence “must be ruthlessly broken.” Otherwise, he would be forced to intervene with “the most severe measures.”
²⁹
His orders failed to quiet the “strongest objections” within his own administration, however, and plagued by doubts he finally decided to send a telegram to both Speer and Sauckel, back in Berlin, asking whether they were in accord. Speer replied the same day, 8 October 1942, that he was “totally and completely” (
voll und
ganz
) in agreement with the shipment of French workers to the Reich. But he added a remark drenched with equivocation: “The transfer must of course be flexibly and sensibly executed.” This seemingly innocuous comment, as it would later become apparent, was to open a wedge between Speer and Sauckel. The two characteristics that Sauckel lacked were flexibility and sensibility. If Speer for the moment deferred to Sauckel's Führer-ordained prerogative, that was not to be the final word on the subject, which would be spoken at a later phase of the Occupation.
³⁰

The dichotomy of German economic objectives could not fail to have obvious repercussions within the military administration. Its staff in charge of manufacturing, the Wi Rü Stab Frankreich, had been founded on the assumption that harmony existed between the general health of the French economy and the armament needs of the German war machine. Each would enhance the other. To maximize production, and to assure German oversight of it, 917 French firms were designated by the beginning of 1942 as Rü-Betriebe, that is, enterprises essential to the arms industry. In addition, some 3,500 other businesses received a classification of V-Betriebe, meaning in effect that they were subcontractors and suppliers of the main industrial plants. In the Rü category alone, nearly 450,000 French workers were employed, mostly in the immediate vicinity of Paris. Because of fuel shortages, it became necessary to determine which of the ancillary enterprises were more essential than others—hence the creation of the rubrics “Va” and “Vb” in January 1942. The former would be spared from a reduction of 50 percent in the allocation of electricity that was imposed on less essential firms.
³¹

Berlin wanted further cuts and, given manpower needs in the East, demanded that the personnel of the Wi Rü Stab Frankreich be depleted by 20 percent. That was only a start. During his visit to Paris in June 1942, Speer raised the question of a general reorganization or, as he liked to put it, “simplification” of the Occupation's entire administrative structure in matters economic. This was the principal topic of his conversations with Laval, who agreed that a certain rationalization of the French economy would thereby be served, although it might create an even heavier burden on his government. Yet “in face of the Bolshevik menace,” Laval conceded, “France has an obligation to support Germany with all its might.”
³²
The upshot was outlined in a memo by General Keitel on 26 June. The Wi Rü Stab Frankreich would be divided, with Wi reporting to OKW in Berlin and Rü placed under Speer's ministry. Not only divided, it was soon abolished as a single unit, with its personnel redistributed and its offices and vehicles turned over to other agencies. These changes became effective on 20 July. Two weeks later, Speer's personal representative, Colonel (soon General) Max von Thoennissen, arrived in Paris to assume control of arms production in France—all of which, as Stülpnagel's staff noted with some detachment, “did not proceed without friction.”
³³

To speak of a crisis might be excessive. Yet it is clear that Sauckel regarded these developments with skepticism and that he had reason to do so. At a conference in Paris on 12 October, the telegram, sent four days before from Stülpnagel to Speer and Sauckel, was read aloud and analyzed. In response, Thoennissen commented—in a tone reflecting Speer's own expressed view—that he agreed in principle with the transfer of French workers to Germany but wished that it could be accomplished “at a different tempo.”
³⁴
Correctly sensing that a challenge to his authority was afoot, Sauckel returned at once to Paris to determine the reasons for “the hitherto highly unsatisfactory result” of labor recruitment. As of 20 October, he announced, shipments of labor to Germany must reach 7,000 a day, a quota to which Hitler had consented. Once more in Berlin, Sauckel then informed Stülpnagel that he was authorized by the Führer to send a delegate, Julius Ritter, to Paris who would thereafter supervise the operation and who would be “
directly responsible to me
.” Taking up his post in Paris, Ritter was accordingly admonished by Sauckel that he was “bound solely to my instructions.” Once more, in other words, the MBF would be the odd man out.
³⁵

Therewith, more visibly than ever, the lines were drawn. Not for the first time, a power struggle in Berlin was to be replicated by proxy in Paris. Thoennissen and Ritter thus became surrogates in a contest between Speer and Sauckel. As matters stood, Sauckel still held the upper hand, a fact that he made unmistakably clear in a rambling two-hour speech before a gathering of German military officers on 2 November 1942, as Allied landing craft were approaching the shores of North Africa. The thrust of his oration was a vigorous defense of the substance and pace of quotas established for France, which, he commented, “we will fulfill…as long as there are human beings in Europe.” He understood that the measures imposed on the French would be hard to bear, but they were “correct and humane.” He would accomplish the task ordered by the Führer “against all resistance,” with the ultimate objective of ensuring that in all of Europe there would in the future be “
one
rhythm determined by Germany.” He then concluded grandly with a clinching sentence: “Whoever in Europe does not work should also not eat.”
³⁶

It would be difficult to conceive of a more unvarnished statement of single-minded dedication to a political cause. Whatever the opposition, and whatever the human cost, Sauckel was driven to acquit his duty. In that regard, he was not unlike Oberg, whose pitiless enforcement of law and order in Paris recognized no limits. Together, these two men epitomized the second phase of the Occupation at a time when Nazi Germany had taken on the world and set out to subdue all of Europe, determined to establish a New Order in which everyone would march to the same drum, struck in Berlin.

Chapter 9

A L
OST
B
ATTLE

M
uch like the evolution of the French economy, the progress of the propaganda war in Paris depended importantly on the weather. The reason was simple. After the invasion of Russia, it became axiomatic that German troops on the Eastern Front advanced during the warm season and retreated once the cold of winter settled in. Among the dozens of German staff reports and administrative memoranda that attempted to evaluate public opinion and popular attitudes (
Stimmung
, as they called it) in the Occupied Zone, there was one conclusion upon which all could agree: that much depended on events outside of France and, in particular, on the course of military action in the East. Hence, broadly speaking, those developments seemed to go well in the autumn of 1941, badly during the frigid months that followed, swimmingly again in the spring of 1942, and with difficulty once more as another chill approached in October and November.

Naturally, the Germans were keen not simply to record this ebb and flow but to influence it. Their efforts to do so were always complicated by the fact that, as with other facets of the Occupation, the nexus of culture and propaganda was handled not by one administrative agency but several. The predictable result was constant friction and rivalry. Turf disputes between the Hotel Majestic and the Paris Embassy continued to center on the latter's claim to control all matters political, a contention approved in principle by OKW in Berlin. Yet Otto Abetz wanted more. Military officials should be confined to censorship, while all “positive” activities, such as the planning of cultural events in Paris, should be left to him and to the Embassy's German Institute.
¹
Abetz's bald intention was not only to curtail the Stülpnagel administration but also to exclude interference from Josef Goebbels's propaganda ministry in Berlin in order to avoid useless duplication. Eventually, the Ambassador scored a notable victory in this regard when the Propaganda-Staffel Paris was disbanded in early November 1942. But in reality the altercation was never fully resolved, since the MBF's Propaganda-Abteilung continued to function and refused to abdicate its active, albeit weakened, role.
²

Given this conflictive undertone, generalizations about the effectiveness of German propaganda in France do not come easily. It is striking that the Germans usually expressed a sober and often negative view about the possibility of persuading the French to adopt their vision of a New Europe under Nazi aegis. As one propaganda official put it, any efforts to promote Franco-German entente must always reckon with “the resentments, even the hate” engendered by the war and the Occupation.
³
Food and fuel shortages, by instilling a “fear of winter,” tended to deepen “the old lethargy and indecisiveness” among Parisians, who remained obedient but “reserved.” These were hardly terms that bubbled with enthusiasm for collaboration, and German records ordinarily contained few illusions that the Occupation was succeeding in winning hearts and minds in any abundance, especially since the future of France in case of an ultimate German triumph was “completely unclear.”
⁴
Such uncertainty was only magnified after the United States entered the war. Memories of Yankee troops flooding French roads in 1918 were still fresh. However, the battle in the Pacific was far away, and, moreover, the Japanese seemed to be winning it after Pearl Harbor and the fall of Singapore. If the Allies might in the end emerge victorious, that prospect was still distant in 1942. The consensus among those Germans charged with propaganda was consequently that the French were hunkering down for a long Occupation that was generally to be characterized by “indecision and disorientation.”
⁵

In this dark tableau one may nonetheless detect a few patches of false optimism. Rapid German advances in Russia during October 1941, for example, misled one German propagandist to speculate that the French were bound to realize “that the military decision has been definitively attained.”
⁶
Similarly, early successes by General Rommel in North Africa and the Japanese in Asia caused the MBF's Kommando-Stab to conclude that the French would gradually come to accept that Germany represented the only hope to oppose Bolshevism in the defense of Europe and that they must therefore join with the Reich.
⁷
Such gauzy optimism reappeared in the summer of 1942 when the
Relève
, allowing a return of several French POWs, initially produced a “somewhat friendlier” public disposition in Paris that could be interpreted as acceptance of “the necessity of a pro-German attitude.”
⁸
Yet these remarks were exceptional, and the rule was better summarized in November 1942 by the office of the Commandant of Greater Paris, only a few hours before the first Allied landings in Morocco. Ever following the war closely, the report stated, the French tended to see Stalingrad as another Verdun. Thus, most of them refused to believe that Germany would finally prevail, and their comportment accordingly remained “cool, hesitant, and negative.”
⁹

Against this backdrop of fluctuating public opinion—for which no scientific polling existed—we may set the specific attempts by Occupation authorities to steer French attitudes. One of these was the control of publications, the daily press, and radio. Censorship of books and magazines was relatively easy. The “Liste Otto,” originally released in 1940, was regularly updated but little changed. It largely determined which writings could be printed and also those that were to be removed from bookstores and library shelves. Incidentally, this included, for unstated reasons, Margaret Mitchell's
Gone with the Wind
, declared by the Gestapo to be “undesirable”—presumably because the story portrayed the liberation of an enslaved people by an invading army.
¹⁰
The newspaper press, now with a daily circulation in Paris of nearly 1.5 million, likewise remained under close military surveillance and could be controlled by increasing or decreasing allocations of paper. For this purpose, an organization called the Messageries de la Coopérative des Journaux Français was created. A front for German censorship, it allowed the French Office des Papiers de Presse to fuss over details of rationing so long as favorites of the military administration received their ample share of allotments.
¹¹

Still a new and untamed technology in the 1940s, radio was another matter. The Germans could neither confiscate all the radio sets in occupied France nor effectively disrupt their reception of broadcasts from Britain. In Germany it was possible to enforce a restriction on hearing foreign news by radio (
Abhörverbot
), because the sympathy and discipline of the home audience could be counted on. But as Chief of the Military Administration Jonathan Schmid remarked, in France “conditions are precisely the opposite.” Indeed, Werner Best's staff determined that an attempt by the Germans to forbid Radio London was already “a lost battle” and that a decree to that effect by the military regime, if unenforceable, could only hurt its reputation. This was therefore a matter best left to the French.
¹²
After appropriate pressure was applied to Jacques Benoist-Méchin, one of Vichy's representatives in Paris, French legislation was passed on 29 October 1941 that imposed a broad range of fines (200 to 10,000 francs) or prison sentences (six days to two years) for illegal reception of radio broadcasts from abroad. This measure was considered insufficient in the Hotel Majestic, however, and the French were informed that harsher measures should be imposed, including the death penalty. To this imperative the Vichy government responded in January 1942 that it was unlikely to achieve the desired objective. In fact, there is no evidence that the Occupation obtained any satisfaction or that the reception of illicit radio programs was substantially impaired.
¹³

Film was another medium that merited careful German attention. Of course, part of this propaganda was censorship. In some cases, only minor cuts in films were required. For instance, in the colonial epic
Brazza
, scenes involving Georges Clemenceau and a Jewish banker were excised. There would also be no display of the British Union Jack.
¹⁴
In addition, as with books, lists of forbidden films were compiled with a coded system of designations: “H” for the German word
Hetz
, meaning any films containing anti-German agitation; “D” for politically or ideologically unsuitable dogma; and “J”
for those featuring Jewish actors or producers. By the beginning of 1942, these classifications had been applied to over 200 films, among them, for example,
La Grande Illusion
(D), which was deemed unduly pacifist.
¹⁵
Understandably, synchronized German films appeared much more frequently on Parisian screens than before the war, but German censors complained that the average Frenchman still preferred to see old French films with stars like Fernandel and Danielle Darrieux, “even when he has seen them two or three times.”
¹⁶

No less significant than censorship was the encouragement of film production. This effort was mounted under the broad umbrella organization of the Alliance Cinématographique Européenne, founded in 1926, which loosely bound both the German UFA and the French Continental Films. Objections were raised among French filmmakers that the Germans were using this arrangement to take over the industry, but Abetz countered that they should be delighted to receive German investments, now that Anglo-American capital had been banished.
¹⁷
Particular importance was attached to the propaganda value of newsreels. German reports noted the spontaneous applause in French cinemas at the showing of military action in Russia. Yet such documentaries should take French sensitivities into account: the graphic depiction of Soviets burning a church was preferable to scenes of German troops using flamethrowers.
¹⁸
The German Institute began the practice of showing newsreels at social occasions to which Laval, Fernand de Brinon, and other Vichy luminaries were invited, along with French artists, intellectuals, and professors. Except for the university types, they were, so Rudolf Schleier believed, “extremely impressed.”
¹⁹
Once more, it was thought better for German propagandists to control the news whenever possible without appearing to do so. No doubt that explains the lengthy negotiations to form a single newsreel production company in Paris, which came to be called France Actualités and which was declared to be owned 60 percent by the French and 40 percent by the Germans. The actual balance of power, as everyone knew, was rather different.
²⁰

The promotion of cultural life in France—above all, in Paris—remained a high priority for the Occupation. The list of musical presentations was long and illustrious, including acclaimed pianists (Wilhelm Kempff and Walter Gieseking), operas (
Tristan und
Isolde
and
Der Fliegende Holländer
), operettas (
Die Lustige Witwe
and
Die Fledermaus
), the Berlin Philharmonic and the Wiener Sängerknaben, a Mozart Week and a Richard Strauss Week, and so on.
²¹
Two aspects of this intense artistic activity are noteworthy. First, it reached a crescendo during the second phase of the Occupation at a time when France's own lyric theater “now finds itself moribund,” as was admitted, with some exaggeration, by Vichy's official information office. The cost of producing an opera (about 50,000 francs) or operetta (at least half that amount) was becoming prohibitive for the French. By offering subsidies to mount these productions, the Germans thus enjoyed a growing monopoly on high culture, and they were proceeding with pride to exercise it.
²²
Second, the same rivalries that plagued other sectors of the propaganda war also surfaced in the artistic sphere. Once again, the German Embassy was attempting to muscle the military administration aside. Concerts and other cultural events should never have a military face, so the argument ran in the Rue de Lille, because “even the mildest and fairest occupation, in a country like France, will be unable to prevent a negative stance of the population.” Hence, all “positive” measures such as musical presentations should be left to civilians, that is, to the Embassy. And increasingly they were.
²³

Parenthetically, let it be added that far less attention was meanwhile lavished on public lectures and theater productions imported from Germany for the obvious reason that they could not avoid butting against the language barrier. Thus, there was little or no resonance when the noted Berlin historian Wilhelm Windelband appeared one evening in the Hotel George V to give a talk entitled “Bismarck und Frankreich 1870.” The same response met a German-language production by Berlin's Lessing Theater of Shakespeare's
As You Like It
.
²⁴

Besides music, the most successful German propaganda efforts in the public realm were exhibitions. Few of these concerned the arts, simply because Germany had little to trump the international supremacy of French painting. An exception was a much ballyhooed show of sculpture by Arno Breker in the early summer of 1942, attendance at which was estimated (or exaggerated?) at 65,000. Privately, Abetz took full credit for it, although he insisted that in public the Breker exhibit should appear to be under French sponsorship.
²⁵
For the most part, exhibitions created in Paris during the Occupation were dedicated to didactic purposes with the aim of encouraging acceptance of Nazi ideology, as a brief listing—“Le Bolshevisme contre l’Europe,” “La Vie Nouvelle,” “La France Européenne,” “Le Juif et la France”—makes perfectly clear. The Embassy was particularly pleased with these well-attended events and gratified by the expanding role of its Information Section in sponsoring them, even though their impact was admittedly not measurable.
²⁶