Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 (6 page)

Such details serve to document a certain German preoccupation with conducting an academic purge in Paris. To this as yet unrealized intention must be added a distinct strain of collaborationism within the French professorate itself. One noteworthy example was Bernard Faÿ, a historian at the Collège de France, who became director of the Bibliothèque Nationale (BN) in October 1940 after his Jewish predecessor was dismissed. Faÿ was considered “completely loyal” by the German military administration, and he proved it by executing orders that the BN and other university libraries ban the circulation of anti-German publications.
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Another figure deserving mention in this regard was the classicist Jérôme Carcopino, who was first appointed director of the École Normale Supérieure, then rector of the Sorbonne, and finally Minister of Public Education in the Vichy regime. Siding with Knochen against the more cautious Karl Epting, Carcopino advocated a “cleansing” of the Paris teaching corps. Also, during what can only be described as an outburst of fanaticism in June 1941, he excoriated the “painful episodes,” “puerilism,” “infantilism,” and “naiveté” of French university students, a comportment that exceeded “all decent limits.” Hence his categorical statement: “I would approve of all sanctions, even the most severe.” Collaborationism had no more fervent advocate.
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Here it would be remiss to omit the special case of Frédéric Joliot. A world-renowned expert in radioactivity, a specialist in nuclear fission, and, incidentally, a son-in-law of Pierre and Marie Curie, Joliot was in the process of constructing a cyclotron in his laboratory at the Collège de France when the Germans entered Paris. As such an apparatus did not yet exist in the Third Reich, there could be no mystery why Berlin was interested in Joliot's project. Accordingly, in mid-August 1940, he received a visit from a German physicist, Dr. Erich Schumann, the personal science adviser of OKW Chief of Staff Wilhelm Keitel. Within a month, the Occupation's administrative staff—invoking the right of “an occupying power,” according to the Hague Convention—had installed Dr. Kurt Diebner and a few assistants in Joliot's lab with orders that “his instructions are to be followed in every regard.”
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Protracted and intricate negotiations ensued about the terms of cooperation. They sometimes involved hairsplitting over an issue, such as, for instance, whether Diebner's crew was working “beside” (
auprès
) or “with” (
avec
) Joliot. In vain, the French Ministry of Public Education tried to advance the legalistic argument that the Hague Convention “absolutely forbids” seizure of an instructional facility by a foreign power. But the Germans countered that the Paris lab, as well as its affiliate at Ivry-sur-Seine, had previously been used under two military contracts, for which the Hague Convention provided no defense. French objections were therefore “not free of doubt.”
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In short, Joliot was presented with a choice between cooperation and outright confiscation. The laboratories must in any event continue to function, as the German High Command freely stated, “because of their military importance.”
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Whether Joliot, who could not have been unaware of the military implications of atomic energy, deserves criticism as a collaborationist is of course debatable, and it has been debated. Yet a later German memorandum, dated 10 June 1941, affords a broader perspective. It contains an account of a German scientist who had traveled from Berlin to Paris and reported that any French researcher suspected of close collaboration with the Occupation would be boycotted by his colleagues. It would therefore be inadvisable to issue invitations to Paris for French participation in scientific congresses held in Germany. Herein, once more, one finds evidence that Occupation policy had its limits in practice.
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As always, in France education was closely tied to religion. Occupation authorities naturally had no interest in stirring enmity within the Catholic Church, but they were troubled, as the military staff commented, by “the international and Germanophobic stance” of the French clergy.
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At the same time, it was gratefully noted that the Church was adapting to the conditions of the Occupation and generally remained quiet and restrained in public. That impression was strengthened by friendly utterances from members of the higher clergy, including Cardinal Suhard of Paris and Archbishop Baudrillart, the elderly director of the Catholic Institute in the capital. Suhard even made a demonstrative visit to the German Embassy to declare his allegiance to Franco-German rapprochement. But informed and perceptive officers like Hans Speidel warned that the administration should not be deceived by Suhard's amenability because the Church was in fact divided in its feelings. Archbishop Gerlier of Lyon, for example, was notoriously anti-German, and so were many of the lower clergy. Even when Germanophobic tendencies were not openly expressed, they often remained “very deeply felt.”
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Moreover, as Otto von Stülpnagel remarked, Catholic youth groups were “an especially difficult problem.” With an estimated membership of 1,200,000, they were rather grudgingly tolerated by the Occupation, although several other youth organizations, including the Boy Scouts, had been officially proscribed. All youth activities in Paris would be closely watched and must be specifically authorized by the German bureaucracy.
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Meanwhile, daily religious practice went on as if nothing had changed. In the early days of the Occupation, services for both Catholic and Protestant military personnel were held in Notre Dame, but objections from the Church hierarchy soon put an end to that. Thereafter, Germans held separate services, and one church, Saint Joseph, was formally designated as a sanctuary for military worshipers (
Wehrmachtskirche
) in the Avenue Hoche close by the Arch of Triumph. This apparently harmonious scene was little disturbed by the spring of 1941, even though on one occasion ten priests were briefly detained by the police and a few bishops were reprimanded. Sermons were monitored for hints of anti-German rhetoric, some consistories were investigated, and priests—quarters were searched for weapons. Yet these measures yielded only a “minimal result,” as Best's staff confirmed, adding that collaboration had been accepted by the clergy as a practicality, despite the fact that the National Socialist ideology was rejected by them with near unanimity.
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A common denominator in the first phase of the Occupation was German restraint. That aspect can be further illustrated by turning to the luxury trades. Nazi Germany had an interest, as Abetz put it, in breaking France's “intellectual monopoly.”
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Certainly, a monopoly existed in fashion, if not in intellect. In late August 1940, Knochen noted fears in Paris that Germany would attempt to suppress the dominant French industry of
haute couture
in order to bolster its own. That was precisely the message brought back from Berlin by the head of the Propaganda Section, Major Schmidtke, who added that a similar policy was also being secretly discussed with regard to the French film industry. Confirmation came straight from Joseph Goebbels himself. Germany's objective, he said, would be to make Berlin “
the
fashion capital of Europe.” However, this never happened, as moving an entire industry a thousand kilometers eastward proved to be unfeasible. Runways and fashion houses in the Faubourg St. Honoré were not closed, and Berlin remained in this regard a cultural backwater.
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The same was true of the film industry. Apprehensions about German intentions to strangle production caused some French directors and actors—the most prominent including Jean Renoir, Michèle Morgan, and Jean Gabin—to flee from Paris to Hollywood. German Occupation officials soon regretted this and argued against such a policy. It would be better to engage French movie stars in film companies that were openly or covertly regulated by Germany rather than to expel them. Besides, as the special film group of the Propaganda Section observed, maintaining Paris in a pivotal role allowed films to appear on foreign screens without the stigma of being merely instruments of German propaganda. As a result, the French cinema remained a big business throughout most of the Occupation, and, arguably, being freed of Anglo-American competition, it thrived as never before.
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In Paris alone, by German count, over 300 movie houses operated daily in addition to 1,100 in the provinces. The German role was restricted mostly to censorship of such American confections as Darryl Zanuck's
Chante
,
bébé, chante
and to the removal of some Jewish-sounding names from theater marquees. With one noteworthy exception, simultaneous efforts to promote the popularity of German films fell flat. That exception was the infamous
Jud Süss
, which played in the French provinces during the spring of 1941 to spontaneous and strong applause and opened that May in 100 Paris cinemas. It was a good showing, no doubt, but hardly evidence that a German intellectual monopoly had displaced the French.
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One dog that scarcely barked during the initial phase of the Occupation was French politics. None too coherently, the Germans developed three lines of policy toward political activity in Paris. The first was to accept and indeed to encourage the formation of a single mass party that could be closely watched and tightly controlled. This role was initially assigned to Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Français, although its reliability was from the beginning in some doubt.
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The second was to extend a discreet toleration to other groups with fascist leanings. The problem there, obviously, was to arrive at an approved list, an exercise bound to promote internal altercations. A meeting at the German Embassy on 7 January 1941 identified those organizations, apart from Doriot's, with which the Occupation might cooperate without formally recognizing their statute. The proposed groups included Les Gardes Françaises, Les Francistes, La Cagoule (also known as the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire), and Le Feu. At that meeting, a third policy decision was unanimously reached: “No group will be allowed to call itself ‘party—or ‘National Socialist.—” It would therefore be “impossible” to permit any political agitation by the Parti Nationalsocialiste Français of Christian Message (“a permanent source of disorder”), the Parti National-Socialiste Français of Colonel François de la Rocque (“extremely anti-German”), or the all too traditionalist Action Française of Charles Maurras.
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Disputes arose over the evaluation and treatment of several individuals involved. Message, who was considered “highly undesirable” by the German military administration, was jailed in January 1941 and stayed in detention for ten weeks, during which time his followers slipped away to other rightist groups. Another controversy surrounded Marcel Déat, who was arrested on orders from Vichy but was promptly released in Paris by Stülpnagel. Eugène Deloncle, leader of the Cagoule, attempted to establish an anti-English political club, the Amicales des Combattants de Dunkerque. He found disfavor with the German Embassy when he proposed the release of French POWs who had been captured on Channel beaches in June 1940.
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Finally, placed in a special category, was the Groupe Collaboration, declared by German authorities to be a “movement” rather than a party. Its main function would be to arrange concerts and lectures, ostensibly under French sponsorship, and thereby to aid the Propaganda Section and the German Institute in their campaign of cultural events.
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An issue ancillary to that of political parties was the treatment of trade unions. A tradition of radical French syndicalism, with its repeated threats of a general strike, had been well established since the turn of the century. Consequently, one of the first acts of the German Occupation was to abolish the old unions and, in effect, to decentralize the structure of labor by restricting activity to individual enterprises or branches of industry. Ever at the ready to criticize the military administration's policies, however, the German Embassy gathered complaints about confusion and unrest in labor ranks, caused in large measure by the dissatisfaction of workers over inadequate wages and rations. At the insistence of Abetz, therefore, the matter was forced to a reconsideration, and a new umbrella organization, the Fédération des Travailleurs, was founded. Two difficulties were immediately detected. One, signaled by the Commandant of Greater Paris, was that orders were being circulated for Communists to join the new formation en masse. The other was that a rising pitch of rhetoric at labor gatherings threatened public tranquility, as when one orator exclaimed that worsening labor conditions might require French workers to resort to “their old methods.” In other words, as noted, the specter of a major strike now loomed not far away.
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In the meanwhile, the German propaganda war against Gaullism and Communism was unrelenting. Of the two, Gaullism was currently far less problematical for the Occupation, as it was mostly still confined to harmless graffiti and clandestine pamphlets. It was true, the Germans thought, that De Gaulle had more real support than Pétain, but his efforts to stir the populace had little effect. As a consequence, few arrests of Gaullists were deemed necessary.
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Communist agitation seemed more sinister, including minor acts of sabotage—such as cutting electric cables and phone lines, spreading glass and sharp metal objects near German installations, and sometimes causing the derailment of train cars—and occasional scuffles in the streets of Paris, especially in working-class districts. The result was irregular daily reporting by the SD of police actions: eleven arrests, ten arrests, twenty arrests, twenty-five arrests.
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Yet German records betrayed no sign of undue alarm. The Communists were thought incapable of mounting any serious resistance in Paris, and their propaganda was considered “confused,” particularly after the “failure” to carry out mass demonstrations announced for May Day 1941. Hence, Commandant Ernst Schaumburg felt safe in praising the “positive results” of repressive measures taken by the Occupation as that fateful summer came on.
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