Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 (13 page)

The academic establishment proved to be rocky soil for the spores of German propaganda. The difficulties began in the Paris
lycées
, where the elite of French youth tested the limits of repression. The discovery of a revolver at the Lycée Charlemagne, for instance, brought a prompt investigation by agents of the Gestapo.
²⁷
But the center of agitation, without a doubt, was the fabled Lycée Henri IV. In July 1941, three of its pupils were arrested on a charge of abetting a female spy and were sentenced to death. Only a timely intervention by Fernand de Brinon managed to have the penalty commuted to sixteen years of prison at Rheinbach near Cologne.
²⁸
Intimidating as this was, it did not prevent a recurrence of “trouble” in the form of scuffles in the streets of the Latin Quarter between
lycée
students and uniformed proto-fascist youth groups such as the Jeunesse Nationale Populaire.
²⁹
Inevitably, the teaching corps was implicated as well. One
lycée
professor of English was executed in April 1942 because of his “active sympathy” with Communism; in this instance, pleas on his behalf went unheeded. Another faculty member at Henri IV was arrested that September after an enemy propaganda tract was found in his mail. His whereabouts, the provost of Henri IV reported, were unknown.
³⁰
Disorder and hard feelings were heightened throughout the Occupied Zone by German requisitions, which in some cases caused serious overcrowding. An estimated 40 percent of school buildings were seized for military barracks and office space—as many as two-thirds of those in Reims—although some were subsequently released for classroom use after standing empty. Because of the large number of vacant public buildings and available tourist hotels in Paris, the problem was less acute there than elsewhere.
³¹

University life was in the meantime subjected to restrictions and close observation by the Occupation. French students did not need to fear military conscription, of course, but during vacations they were recruited for farm labor. In the summer of 1941, for example, 415 of 505 students at Sciences Po were dragooned by the Service Civique Rural.
³²
Their professors came under scrutiny. Four of them were rounded up and subsequently released after an interrogation wrung from them the admission that they hoped for an Anglo-American victory in the war. But they maintained that such opinions had not been communicated to students in lectures, and the Abwehr was unable to prove the contrary. In general, the Germans concluded that strict censorship of lectures was in any event unfeasible, because it would create the impression that professors had been “bought.”
³³
On political or racial grounds, numerous instructors were nonetheless barred from the classroom, although ten eminent academic personalities in Paris, as well as four in the provinces, had this
Verbot
lifted in June 1942. Among them was France's most famous historian, Marc Bloch, whose reprieve, as we know, did not last.
³⁴
Occupation authorities remained suspicious of French academicians even when they tolerated them. Frédéric Joliot, as noted, was permitted to continue his laboratory work in nuclear physics at the Collège de France under military “protection,” even though both he and his wife Irène were considered to be “radical leftist and anti-collaborationist.”
³⁵
When a proposal was advanced in the summer of 1942 for the creation of a European association of university professors (
Dozentenbund
), it was immediately disparaged and rejected by the Paris Embassy with the explanation that the French professorate was the element of society currently least inclined toward collaboration. The project was therefore declared to be premature.
³⁶

Although a similar mistrust existed with regard to the Roman Catholic Church, the Church presented less of a problem for the Occupation—a fact that could be partly ascribed to its hierarchical structure and greater self-discipline. Closely monitored gatherings of French bishops in Paris during 1941 suggested to the Germans that the higher clergy was willing to accept collaboration. Paris Cardinals Suhard and Baudrillart were both rabid supporters of Marshal Pétain, and only Archbishop Gerlier of Lyon remained a strident critic of Vichy's religious policy. Indeed, on his deathbed in May 1942, according to Abetz, Baudrillart expressed his fondest hope to meet God soon and explain to Him why it was necessary to oppose General de Gaulle and support Pétain.
³⁷
Yet, as before, lower clergymen were regarded by the Occupation with a different eye. Symptoms of anti-German agitation among them were not difficult to detect, as Abetz reported to his superiors in Berlin, and therefore “they must be viewed in the future as our most dangerous opponents.”
³⁸
At a meeting of regional prefects in February 1942, a spokesman for the French Ministry of the Interior claimed that the attitude of the clergy was “excellent”—by which he meant that they remained quiet and neutral—although he deplored their “reserve” when it came to collaboration. It would be the duty of the prefects to dissipate fears about the diminished role of the Church in a New Europe led by Nazi Germany. No one was heard to challenge the implied assumption that such fears still abounded.
³⁹

French politics remained in a mess, just as the Germans intended. The normal activities of a Western democracy—campaigns, candidates, elections, parliaments—were forbidden. What played out instead was a charade in which politics and propaganda were indistinguishable. With varying degrees of success, Occupation authorities pursued three objectives. The first was to prevent any sort of political monopoly. There should be no single unified movement—not even a pro-collaborationist one—that might eventually escape strict German control. Rather, the policy was to promote an “incredible flourishing of stillborn political splinter groups,” each of which would be, in Abetz's words, “as independent as possible.” In this effort, the Occupation largely succeeded, as evidenced by the inordinate number of bit players who crossed the political scene in Paris, usually leading a puny entourage of enthusiasts.
⁴⁰
Second, in France there should be no fascist party aping the Nazi Party. Paramilitary and unpopular factions like the Parti National-Socialiste Français were seen as unruly street gangs that disrupted public order and thus soiled the reputation of the military administration. Admittedly, questions arose as to which organizations fit this description. For the time being, Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Français was so identified at the Majestic and therefore banned. But the German Embassy pointed out that Doriot's youth groups were “especially active” in the cause of collaboration and that it might be “necessary” to allow their participation. In December 1941 that decision was reached with the proviso that uniforms and parades would be prohibited, a stipulation more readily stated than realized.
⁴¹
Third, it was thought useful to cultivate one right-wing political force that would be completely dependent on German directions and constitute a counterweight to the Communists. Initially chosen to perform this task was Marcel Déat's Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP), founded in January 1941, which absorbed Eugène Deloncle's Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire. The RNP seemed a likely candidate in view of its top billing in a police report as an “arbitrary and monstrous creation” of the Paris Embassy. Yet this coalition, in the German perspective, failed to develop the desired coherence or dynamism, especially as the Deloncle wing contained too many “diverse elements” to be reliable. The result was an alphabet soup of contending factions that all too well corresponded to the original intention of the Occupation to avoid a political monopoly.
⁴²

What conclusions or lessons can be drawn from this
tour d—horizon
? At the risk of stating the obvious, the first and simplest is that defeated people do not generally appreciate being occupied by a foreign power. And there is precious little that clever propaganda or political manipulation can do to change that fundamental circumstance. This is especially true when public security and adequate provisioning are not assured. Such shortcomings are unavoidably compounded by deficiencies of the occupying force, whether in terms of inadequate personnel, internal conflicts, or self-contradictory policy. Finally, and particularly relevant in this case, the role of exterior events can be crucial in the drift and flow of public opinion, breeding uncertainty, indecision, and disinclination to accept the currently prevailing conditions of occupation as final.

Chapter 10

E
ICHMANN IN
P
ARIS

D
ecidedly, when discussing the Occupation, there is no way around that grating word
Entjudung
, meaning an intention to eliminate all Jews—or at least what was called “Jewish influence”—from French public life. The effort to do so was slow to gather momentum, but gather it did once the Nazi war machine crossed the Polish border into Soviet Russia and began to add millions to the population of the Greater German Reich. Although distant, those events patently supplied a context for policies and actions in Paris that must always be kept in view.

The indecision, hesitation, and confusion that were evident before late June 1941 continued into the second half of that year. Whereas the concept of a “Final Solution” designated in a general way a commonly accepted ultimate objective of the German administration in the French capital, the method and pace of its implementation were still far from certain. That discordance was clearly expressed in a conference at the beginning of July between the Paris Embassy and representatives of the SS. Speaking for the former, Rudolf Schleier made a case for gradualism. Measures against Jews that had been realized in Germany only after years of Nazi agitation, he said, could not be enforced overnight in France without suitable preparation. It would therefore be well to begin with “energetic” steps to curb foreign Jews. The French themselves would then “one day” come around to applying the same standards to those who were still “temporarily protected.” Theodor Dannecker, the Gestapo's specialist for Jewish affairs, had heard this argument before and was obviously impatient. But he now professed to see some validity in it, although he stressed the need to reach an agreement about the proper tempo. Such agreement was in fact not achieved for months to come, so that one may observe—all the complexity notwithstanding—that a sweeping persecution and deportation of French Jews did not begin until 1942.
¹

As for complexities, a full account of them would fill several volumes. Here it must suffice to enumerate briefly a few of the major obstacles to the formulation and execution of a comprehensive policy. Under German decrees, for instance, banks and businesses were permitted to retain some Jewish employees as technical advisers in subaltern positions, so long as they did not come into direct contact with their customers. Violations were frequent and irrepressible. Lists of Paris firms under Jewish ownership or management ran into the hundreds, and large corporations such as Air France and the Galeries Lafayette were difficult, if not impossible, for the Germans to fathom.
²
Likewise, Jews were tolerated “consciously or unconsciously” within major publishing houses, including Hachette, Calmann-Lévy, Nathan, Ferenzi, and Cluny. Attempts to arrange the sale of these enterprises to “Ayrans” were repeatedly frustrated, German propaganda officials complained, by “interference” from the Embassy, which sided with the French Service du Contrôle in three-quarters of the cases and “hindered [or] sabotaged” effective action.
³
A related problem was to identify stockholders, often widely dispersed, and to determine when the number of shares held by Jews had been sufficiently reduced to eliminate their influence. The German liaison officer with the Service du Contrôle was so disgusted about delays in obtaining pertinent information that he drafted a form letter of inquiry, to which French bureaucrats might respond by merely filling in the blanks. Whether this was evidence of deliberate foot-dragging or of sheer incompetence, no one seemed quite sure.
⁴

Another issue was mixed marriages. When was a firm to be considered Jewish? The short answer was gender. If the male Jewish owner of an enterprise was deceased and the management of it was taken over by his non-Jewish spouse, the firm would still be considered Jewish and should therefore be sold or liquidated. The possible resulting complications of settling ownership claims in extended mixed families are not difficult to imagine.
⁵
Even enterprises in which Jews were summarily dismissed from the directorate could also present confounding ambiguities. The large ship-building firm Penhoët, whose manufacturing facilities were in St. Nazaire and administrative offices in Paris, was a good example. The chief engineer was regarded as indispensable, although a Jew, because he was overseeing the construction of twelve heavy freight vessels under contract from the Reich. His removal would therefore cause “damage to German interests.” Less certain was the fate of another Jewish engineer, who would be retained only if Penhoët agreed to build an aircraft carrier for Germany. Once that project was completed or canceled, he could be dismissed. In any event, it was imperative, as an official of the military administration's Economic Section cautioned, to avoid “a clash between the interest of armaments and the interest of a rapid Aryanization.”
⁶

In December 1941, a new telephone directory for Paris was published. This hefty volume, containing 280,000 names, was promptly analyzed by the
Pariser Zeitung
. True, there were fewer Jews than before. Whereas there had been 747 entries under “Lévy” or “Léwy” in 1939, there now remained 477; under “Bloch,” there had been 270, and now there were only 170. Of “obviously” Jewish names, the newspaper commented, 1,400 were still to be found. Apparently, the Jewish question was far from resolved, and further evidence confirmed that fact.
⁷
The list of Jews who continued to exercise their profession in Paris under the German Occupation was long. Included were lawyers, government functionaries, physicians, surgeons, dentists and dental technicians, opticians, and so forth. For the most part, they were French citizens and long-time residents of the city whose services were essential to the quality of a civilized nation. Their expulsion would be no simple or painless task.
⁸

Direct action against Jews in the summer and autumn of 1941 was so sporadic and so entangled with the seizure of hostages and other arrests that an accurate statistical accounting is precluded. On 7 July, for example, the Prefecture of Police reported the detention of 750 persons over a span of ten days, 110 of which were identified as Jews, nearly all of them foreigners.
⁹
Gradually, this kind of razzia involving Jews became a category unto itself—
Judenaktion
. On orders from Dannecker, as retaliation for sabotages, mass arrests were conducted by French police in Paris on 20–21 August. As a result, 2,894 Jews were sent to Drancy, and a month later the German Feldgendarmerie incarcerated another 3,477 Jews from the Paris region.
¹⁰
Besides those held at Drancy and at the camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande in the Loiret, more than a thousand Jews sat in Stalag 22 at Compiègne. The Propaganda-Staffel in Paris reported that anti-Semitic elements in the French population “frequently” asked why the Germans did not more severely punish those guilty of the attacks and assassinations, “namely, the Jews.” Indeed, on occasion they did. On 14 December 1941, forty-three Jews were transferred from Drancy to Mont Valérien for execution.
¹¹

Yet despite the “positive cooperation” of French functionaries and police, the overriding reality for the Occupation authorities directly concerned was a frustratingly lethargic bureaucratic pace. They found reports and statistics of the Service du Contrôle too often incomplete, providing an insufficient basis for a decision about the Aryanization of French business firms. By mid-November 1941, of 3,185 dossiers gathered for that purpose, only 430 had been submitted for German approval, and even that number was suspect. As one Occupation official complained, many of those transactions were “purely for the form, whereas in actuality everything remains as before.”
¹²

Signs of strain became evident before the end of the year. One telltale symptom was increasing friction between Dannecker's SS detail and CGQJ chief Xavier Vallat, who stood accused of protecting rather than persecuting the Jews by making far too many exceptions for French veterans and others with special pleas. Dannecker consequently saw to it that a “specialist” from his office was attached to the CGQJ—over Vallat's objections and denials.
¹³
There was meanwhile growing German pressure for the French to pass additional anti-Jewish legislation, perhaps allowing the Germans thereby to withdraw some of their own decrees. To have a French façade on Aryanization was “a desirable circumstance” for the Occupation, it was thought, if only Vallat's subordinates would function with more alacrity. In any event, the mutual primary goal, as they were instructed in emphatic terms, must be “the expulsion of Jews from France.”
¹⁴
These words were written just as the hostage crisis was reaching its peak. The guilt of “Jewish-Communist” terror gangs was not in doubt at the Hotel Majestic, and Otto von Stülpnagel did not shrink from drawing an appropriate conclusion, proclaiming “the necessity…of severe and comprehensive measures against the Jews.”
¹⁵

The scene was now set for the tragic events that befell the Jewish population in France during 1942. That development, although of one piece, can best be divided into three main aspects: segregation, Aryanization, and deportation.

Who was to speak for the French Jews? The answer emerged in late January in the form of the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF), which has been compared with some justification to the Jewish councils of elders (
Judenräte
) meanwhile created in Eastern Europe. To Marshal Pétain, the UGIF promised “with emotion” to serve in a representative capacity, while adding an unconditional caveat that “it is impossible for us to recognize the principle that the French of Jewish religion should be excluded from the national community.”
¹⁶
Yet this was precisely the Nazis—objective: to separate the Jews from others. One may properly speak of a specifically Nazi initiative in this instance, because it clearly emanated from ideological hard-liners in Paris and Berlin. Occupation authorities in France generally remained quite reluctant to defy or humiliate the Vichy regime by moving directly against French Jews. Rather, their policy would continue to be—as Dr. Carltheo Zeitschel, the Paris Embassy's chief of Jewish affairs, indelicately put it—to concentrate on “especially detestable” persons, meaning the more than 200,000 Jews who had recently immigrated to France, at least since 1919, or who lacked French citizenship. The others should be largely spared from drastic actions until the French populace was better prepared by anti-Semitic propaganda to cope with them.
¹⁷

This view was definitely not shared by Helmut Knochen, Theodor Dannecker, or their Sipo-SD staff in Paris. On 10 March 1942, Knochen and Dannecker participated in a conference in Berlin, attended by Adolf Eichmann representing Heinrich Himmler's Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), at which it was determined that all Jews in Holland, Belgium, and France would be required to wear a yellow Star of David, the very symbol of racial segregation.
¹⁸
The only difficulty was to gain the indulgence of Vichy. For the Paris Embassy, Zeitschel and Schleier argued that “in no case” should the Occupation simply override Pierre Laval's opposition but instead attempt “to harness the French regime.” Only if that failed might the star be stipulated by German decree. Dannecker disagreed. There was no need for negotiation or a public explanation, he contended. Rather, the measure should just be announced by decree “in the framework of the Final Solution of the European Jewish question.”
¹⁹

A change of heart at the Embassy did not occur until early May. Three factors played a role. One of them was circumstantial: a violent shooting incident in Argenteuil, northwest of Paris, created, as Zeitschel had to concede, a “politically very favorable situation.”
²⁰
The second was Vallat's dismissal from the CGQJ and his replacement by Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, a veteran anti-Semite from whom a less mincing conduct in the matter could be expected.
²¹
The third was the simultaneous arrival in Paris of Carl Oberg. Already on 12 May, three weeks before officially taking command of all police operations in France, Oberg conferred with Zeitschel and Dannecker on the modalities of enforcement. Three stars would be handed out to each Jew in the Occupied Zone after they had been manufactured by a French firm in Paris. At Oberg's bidding, Heinrich von Stülpnagel then signed a decree—without any accompanying French legislation—that required all Jews, French and foreign, to wear a star as of 7 June. With his customary immodesty, Oberg thereupon proclaimed that he was hereafter in charge of preparing “the solution of the Jewish question in Europe.”
²²

This brief narrative is sufficient to establish that the star was imposed over objections by the French (who still refused to allow it in the Unoccupied Zone) and despite serious reservations from within the Occupation. The decree marked a decisive turn toward the more radical means of segregating French Jews that henceforth came under consideration: isolating Jewish schoolchildren, excluding all Jewish teachers from the classroom, squeezing Jewish students out of higher education, declaring a special curfew for Jews, prohibiting Jews from being seated in restaurants, bistrots, theaters, cinemas, race tracks, bathhouses. In the Occupied Zone, there would be, as Oberg imperiously announced with another decree in mid-June 1942, no exceptions. Doubtless in fact there were some. But Jews were now more vulnerable, more conspicuous in the street, and more easily singled out for discrimination than ever before.
²³